As futurists, which your becoming one of by taking this course, we spend a lot of time thinking about what the world might be like 10 years in the future. Today we're going to start by imagining what we personally might be like but 10 years in the future. So it's time for another little thought experiment. I want you to imagine who you might be 10 years from now. So, take your age add 10 years, I'm 41 so I'm imagining 51 year old version of myself, and I want you to try to think of three ways that this 10 year old version of yourself might be different from who you are today, and I will walk you through this. So, for the first way that you might be different 10 years in the future, I want you to think of a way you might be physically different. Okay. So one change in your body 10 years from now, maybe it's a change you feel good about, maybe it's a change you're not looking forward to. Whatever it is, just to try to sit with that possible reality for a moment, and remember it's a future, you can always change it if you don't like it. Okay. Do you have one physical difference in mind? Okay. For the second difference, I want you to try to imagine a difference in your home life. Maybe it's a difference in who you live with, maybe you have kids who you think 10 years from now won't be living at home, or maybe you think you might live in a different city or part of the world 10 years in the future. Maybe you plan to move in with someone. Can you picture one possible plausible change for your whole life 10 years in the future? I have one in mind. Okay. For the third difference I would like you to try to imagine one way this future version of you might be better, or stronger, or smarter in some way. Maybe you've taken a bunch of classes on Coursera and you are an expert in something that you aren't an expert in today, maybe you've adopted a new hobby and you've gotten really good at something. Maybe you've gone through an experience that you wouldn't have wished for, but it made you a survivor and stronger in some way. So can you think of one way that future you is stronger smarter better, and be specific. Okay. So, whoever this version of yourself that you just imagined, I can tell you with near certainty one thing about this person, unless your brain works differently from 99.99999 per cent of human beings, this person who you just imagined is a stranger to you. This is not just some kind of poetic metaphor, this is a neurological fact. When you think about yourself 10 years in the future, your brain treats a person that you're thinking about as someone you've never met, and maybe someone that you think you would really not like. Let me explain how this works. Usually when you think about yourself, a part of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex fires up, and this part of the brain is really important to how you tell the story of who you are, and how you know who you are when you wake up every morning and you know you are that person, every morning I wake up, I'm Jane McGonigal, I know my life story, I know my goals for the future. This coherent sense of yourself, it's really tied into the medial prefrontal cortex. When you encounter information that seems like it's really important to that sense of self and to your goals for the future, this part of the brain fires up it's like, "that's related to me, I really care." You pay more attention to it and you really care about it. When you are talking to or thinking about people that you don't know very well, maybe it's the first time you're meeting someone, this part of the brain powers down it says, "I don't know this person. This person is not relevant to my life, not important," turns it off. When you are interacting with or thinking about somebody that you believe is very different from yourself, someone with different values, or different experiences, or different interests that they're pursuing, this part of the brain powers down even more. When you think about your far future itself and this part of the brain starts to power down, and it actually powers down to the same level of people you've never met or people you feel like you have nothing in common with. What this crates is the situation where your brain essentially has no empathy for your future self. This has all kinds of consequences, because when we make decisions, we tend to favor our present self over our future self. That's why we tend to get into these ridiculous battles with ourselves, future self wants to be really fit, but present self wants to sit on the couch and watch Netflix. Who am I going to make a decision in favor of? Well, if I don't relate to my future self, if I feel like that person is a stranger, then I'm going to make the decision that makes my present self happy instead of my feature self. Or if I'm trying to save money for the future, putting money away for retirement because retirement is so far off for most people, that feels like we're handing money over to a stranger on the street, who would want to hand money over to a stranger on the street? Retirement doesn't feel like it's saving for ourselves it feels like it's saving for someone we've never met and don't care about at all. So, this weird glitch in the brain has all meaningful consequences for our real lives, and it has consequences for society too. Because if we think about our future selves as people we don't like and don't know, we might make decisions as companies or organizations that benefit our present selves at the cost of the future, whether that's not acting on issues like climate change or building technologies that actually have terrible consequences and we scale them to a billion people without thinking about how they might affect the future. We all know the famous Facebook mantra, move fast and break things. Well, who's going to have to clean up the things that we break? Our future selves, but we don't know them and we don't like them. So we make the decisions that improve our companies today. Now what's interesting is that the medial prefrontal cortex, it does operate a little differently depending on your orientation towards the future. There are some people when they think about next weekend, it seems really far away. If I were to ask you, "What are you doing next weekend?" They'd say, "my gosh it's like a million years away. Who knows." When they try to picture themselves next weekend, the medial prefrontal cortex powers down to that person, their future self next weekend is already a stranger. That's a bit of an extreme example. For most people, you could imagine a few weeks, a few months, even a year out and we could say how me this time next year, I still relate to that person, I understand and know that person. Actually for most people, the medial prefrontal cortex will stay engaged for one, two or even three years. Most people, it starts to power down at five. It's only an extreme future-oriented percentage of the public that can really stay connected and empathetic with a future self 10 years out or longer. But it turns out there are techniques you can use to change how the medial prefrontal cortex responds to images of the future and to thinking about yourself in the future. That's what the rest of this course is about. How do you improve your brain's ability when it thinks about the future to say that future affects me and I can relate to it? So not only do you build empathy for your future self, but you actually start to make better predictions about who you will be in that future, what problems you can solve and what actions you can take. So it prepares you to be somebody who can be successful when that future rolls around. In the next video, we are going to start practicing one of those techniques for building empathy for your future self.
