Why We’re So Preoccupied by the Past

Why are we so preoccupied with the past?

Who Jeremy R. Manning edited by Daisy Yuhas

The arrival of a new year tends to stir emotions. For some of us, the change in calendar gives us an opportunity to reflect on the good and bad things that happened in the previous 12 months. For others, it’s a chance to start with a fresh outlook on the future. As a scientist, I have long been fascinated by people’s incredible ability to go beyond the present moment. Our physical self seems forever chained as it is at every moment, but ours the mind revisits imagines past experiences and future experiences at will.

Much of what scientists know about how people remember past events and infer future ones comes from studies based on the experiences of a particular person. The basic idea is simple: whatever you do or intend to do is somehow written into the complex networks of your memory systems. Researchers can study what your brain is doing create new memories, bring back those memoriesguess about the future make plansetc.

In recent research, one of my graduate students at Dartmouth College, Xinming Xu, put a brilliant spin on these phenomena. He asked how we mentally visit the past and future of other people’s lives. Let’s say you meet a complete stranger for the first time. Figuring out that person’s past and future is key to connecting with them. These guesses help us decide whether we like someone, whether we see them as a potential romantic partner or a threat, and so on. But which track could we take it out on? Our team’s research into that question led to some surprising insights into how we are consider the time and how this affects our interaction.

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Our team began to think about some basic features of what a snapshot in time might tell people about the moments before and after. In the branch of physics known as classical mechanics, what is happening now tells us the same about the past and the future: if someone knows the current position and speed of a ball flying through the air, he can guess where it was a moment ago and where it was a moment ago. it will be in the future. Can the same principles apply to subjective experiences such as social interactions and mental processes? If so, we would be as good at making inferences about a stranger’s past as we are about his future.

Our team put this idea to the test by asking 36 participants to watch selected segments from a TV show and make guesses about what happened before or after each scene. We found that our participants were almost always better at guessing the events that followed before A fraction of the events that followed. But how could this be?

When we dug deeper, we found a simple explanation, tied to a remarkable pattern. People’s guesses about the past and future of TV characters seem to be largely driven by the content of the characters’ conversations. Because the characters in that TV show talked about the past 1.7 times more than the future, the participants tended to learn more about the earlier events of the story.

This finding may reflect the television program people watched, so we repeated our study using a different show. We were surprised to see these new characters also he used to talk about the past more often than the future. But maybe it was just a coincidence? We then conducted a large-scale analysis of tens of millions of real and fictional conversations, books, movies, TV shows, and spoken and written interactions in the real world. Incredibly, we found that both the fictional and the real showed the same trend on average. From what we can tell, this asymmetry seems to be a fundamental aspect of how humans communicate.

Why linger more in the past than in the future in conversation? People certainly know more about their past than they do about the unknown future, so perhaps we humans tend to cling to what we know. One consequence is that biases in what people know and think show up in their communication with others, and as a result the information people take away from the conversations they observe and participate in is inherently biased towards the past.

After all, people are much better at inferring past events than predicting the future. Our findings fit into a much broader body of research that examines how and why people visit the past and the future. For example, a main principle mindfulness training it’s about trying to focus on the moment, which can help people feel grounded and appreciate where they are, who they’re with, and what they have. But intelligence sometimes seems to elude people, anchoring them in time. This can be a distraction—someone paying less attention to, say, an ongoing conversation—or part of a harmful pattern. for example, reflectionwhich is associated with depression.

But these acts of mentally distancing yourself from the present can serve a practical purpose. When something people experience in the present shares some aspect of their past, it can cause those earlier moments to spontaneously rekindle. For example, the smell that wafts through the door of a bakery as you walk down the street may trigger a childhood memory of your grandmother’s cooking. Then you can look for baked goods in hopes of bringing back some of those warm, cozy feelings. These reminders of past times influence behavior and help people navigate complex situations or environments using cues that were useful in the past. The reason we have memories in the first place is because they help us predict what might happen in the future—albeit imperfectly.

While our conversations favor the past, I fall into the camp of seeing the new year as an opportunity for a fresh and exciting start. If something didn’t go as planned in the past year, our memories allow us to learn and grow from our mistakes and not make the same mistakes in the future. And for those he did last year went well, we can get out of our memories to be happier now.

Are you a scientist specializing in neuroscience, cognitive science or psychology? And have you read any peer reviews recently that you’d like to write for Mind Matters? Please submit suggestions here American scientific‘s Mind Matters editor at Daisy Yuhas dyuhas@sciam.com.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific