Hidden Brain - Rewinding & Rewriting

Episode Date: January 29, 2019

All of us think back to turning points in our lives, and imagine how things could have unfolded differently. Why do we so often ask ourselves, "What if?"

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vidhantham. All of us are time travelers. We go back in history to turning points in our lives and imagine how things could have turned out differently. What would have happened if we had chosen different paths, swiped right instead of left, moved abroad or quit smoking. This week on Hidden Brain, we'll tell you a story that shows when our minds reach for these alternate realities.

I am responsible because I didn't listen to him and what he was saying. And we'll also look at other scenarios where we're less likely to ask, what if? It turns out that the psychological forces that lead us to dream of alternate lives have profound effects on us and the planet. Laura Ogden has spent years imagining how things could have turned out differently. At the very start, she and her friends would go out to the mountains in Washington State. Going as fast as we can and going as steep as we can, starting to jump off rocks and challenge ourselves with our fear, I think that we came something I was drawn to and I guess addicted to as time went on.

When she got to college, the whole ski culture opened up to me, so it snowballed. No pun intended from there. She moved from skiing resorts to wild slopes, where it was just her, some friends, and the elements. They'd hauled themselves to the top of mountains with skis on their backs, no ski lifts, no ski patrol, no cozy large with hot chocolate. Laura began to enter skiing competitions.

She met a professional skier named Jack Hannan. Laura says skiing with someone can lead to a deep connection. It's like a landscape that can really conjure up a magic to it, awe-inspiring scenery. can really conjure up a magic to it, awe-inspiring scenery. You get up into these mountains and to be sharing that with somebody, it just hits you deeply

and then sometimes it can be quite arduous like getting up to the top of a big peak. So you go through that suffering together for lack of a better word and then get this massive reward of skiing. It is almost like out of, it's an out of body experience in a way. Like this, this smooth ease of flow going down and you know that that person is having their own yet similar experience to you and that and that having that shared excitement together.

I mean, the rest is history. Laura and Jack got married in 2008. They bought a house on a big swath of land in the remote mountains of Canada. They planned to be home stethers and of course they would ski. Life was good. Going from day to day and not having too much to worry about besides where you're going to go skiing and is there you're going to have spaghetti for dinner or burritos because simple life. One day in March 2010, their friends Dave and Tessa treadway invited them to go skiing on Mount Curry.

Dave and Tessa were also professional skiers. Dave had been out that week and found that conditions were good. So Laura and Jack said yes. The friends loaded their gear onto a helicopter that would drop them off at the top of the mountain. The pilot flew them to the top of Mount Curry, they got an old late start, instead of the usual 6 or 7 am, they made it to the top of the mountain around 11. The four friends tested the conditions by pushing a giant block of snow down the mountain. You're basically creating an avalanche ahead of you.

So once you get on the snow to ski, it's much less likely that any avalanche underneath is going to happen again, because all that snow underneath you is consolidated. One by one, the friends began skiing. Tessa and I worked together, and then Jack had skied down to to us and then we were waiting for Dave to come down. We were kind of feeling like we were at the end of the more intense part and we're feeling pretty good and we're feeling like now it was time to go home basically. I know it was about 2.30 in the afternoon and I was kind of on the top of this this shoulder and I heard suddenly I heard Dave yelling at lunch.

One thing I think is hard to imagine is just how heavy and forceful a whole bunch of snow can actually be. When it's coming down at 60 miles an hour, it's like a freight train. I just stood there, frozen. I didn't have anywhere safe that I could hunker down like a rock or a tree to hide behind, so I knew that there was nothing that I could do. Laura was not in the direct path of the avalanche. When it passed, she was still standing. There were clouds of fog around her. My yelled, Jack, and didn't hear anything. And then I yelled, Tessa, and she yelled back.

Dave called out that he was okay. But Jack? Laura and her friends took out their avalanche beacons. They knew that Jack's beacon would be broadcasting his location. If they picked up his signal, their devices would ping. Avalanche beacons are designed to ping faster. if rescuers get closer to a missing skier, they let metal detectors. Laura stared down the path of the Avalanche.

She and Dave took off down the mountain to find Jack, leaving Tessa as a lookout. side to look out. The avalanche was so big that it had taken most of the snow pack away and suddenly we were forced to ski down this terrain that was morally like alright I'm gonna hop over this rock and I'm gonna slide down this ice. Crazy how it was inconsequential like it wasn't a big deal for me. It was way more focused on we gotta go get Jack. So let's do what needs to be done. The avalanche beacon was telling me that I was basically a meter away from Jack's Evalanche Transceiver. But when she got to the spot, she could see nothing besides snow and ice and debris.

She dropped her knees. She got out her shovel and started to dig. The snow was so frozen and packed together that I couldn't really move the snow that way, so I had my ice axe. She hacked away at the snow back and I quickly discovered Jack's like the jacket he was wearing his shoulder so he wasn't very deep under the snow and I found him. She used her hands to claw away the snow. She needed to get to his face, to get him air. When I dug enough around his upper body and face,

it started to dawn on me that he wasn't alive. What do you do in the minutes after you come to such a realization? What had just happened was not hitting me at all. I remember Tessa trying to talk to me was still on this version of autopilot. There was work to be done. They dug out a flat platform for a rescue helicopter to land. When they made it back down the mountain, Laura gave a statement to a police officer. I remember sitting in this little room with the RCMP officer and giving him details of what had happened, kind of like deadpan in a way, just stating the facts. And somehow I was able to describe to him

how my husband had just been killed by an avalanche. She kept it together until her best friend arrived. That's just when I lost it. I think I finally knew, or I don't really know. I just, I let it all go. But right as she started to break down, a voice in the back of her head reminded her of something that Jack had said that morning before they'd boarded the helicopter.

They'd been sitting in that truck. And Jack and I were by ourselves and looking at Mount Curry and Jack said to me, you know, I have a bad feeling about today. This was unusual. Jack was not a warrior. And when he didn't feel safe, he was an ambivalent. Jack's definitely been the one to say I'm not in two going out I'm going to pull the plug and he's adamant Laura asked him well if you have a bad feeling Do you think we should not go?

And I I don't think he wanted to Be the one to say no, let's not go What did he say in response to you? He was slow to respond. I remember and said, well, no. We can still go. Laura couldn't bear to tell her friend about it.

I felt really guilty. And I even have a little bit of shamefulness now admitting it that I'm responsible because I didn't listen to him and what he was saying. You know, it almost adds to the tragedy of it. Like, Jack had this feeling and we went anyway. Over and over, she replayed what had happened and imagined how things could have turned out differently. Laura's regret and pain are completely understandable.

Laura's regret and pain are completely understandable. Her reaction also reveals something important about how the mind works, how we process the past, and how we think about the future. When we think back on our lives, our minds tend to focus on specific events. We might imagine how things could have unfolded differently. We don't realize it, but there are psychological triggers that bring about these fantasies. Jack said to me. Years after Jack died, Laura still thinks about that day on Mount Curry. It's a video that plays on endless loop in her mind.

She keeps rewinding, pressing play. I have a bad feeling about today. I have a bad feeling about today. And then her mind changes the narrative, so Jack doesn't die. There's a technical name for this type of alternate reality, Account of Factual. Kathleen Rose studies how and why our minds produce these fantasies. She's a psychologist at the University of Minnesota. Account of Factual is a mental simulation where you think about what did happen, so some

event led to another event. And then you think about what did happen. So some event led to another event. And then you think of an alternate ending. For example, if you drive home from work today and you get into a car accident, that would be terrible. And you may start thinking about why that happened. If you took a new route home from work, one of the counterfactuals may be, now if only I had stuck to my usual way of going home, maybe this wouldn't have happened. Laura's counterfactual looks like this. She and Jack sit in that truck looking up at Mount Curry.

Jack says, You know, I have a bad feeling about today. And Laura says, Well then I think we should listen to your bad feeling and trust that intuition and not go Jack lives Laura's world remains intact The reason Laura comes up with this alternate ending is because she wants it to be true At the same time she knows these thoughts aren't very useful. She can't bring her husband back

So why does her mind keep producing these thoughts? It turns out there are specific elements to the story that invite counterfactual thinking. To understand what they are, meet Neil Rose. I'm a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Neil has found four triggers for counterfactual thinking. One, a clearly bad outcome. When I dug enough around his upper body and face, it started to dawn on me that he wasn't alive. Just seeing something negative or something that falls short of expectations, that tends to bring counterfactuals to mind. Two, something happened that was out of the ordinary.

I'd never heard Jack say this before, that he was like, you know, I have a bad feeling about today. The husband's saying that he has a bad feeling about it. Presumably, that's a rare occurrence, but it was significant on that moment. It becomes more significant after the fact, of course, but it's unusual. And so our thoughts very naturally gravitate toward that unusual aspect. Three, you can see how you yourself or some other person played a central role in what happened.

I'm responsible because I didn't listen to him and what he was saying. Four, you can draw a direct connection between what someone did or didn't do and the negative thing that happened. Cause and effect are close together. We look at actions that are relatively close to a key outcome. In other words, maybe a few minutes before or even a few hours before, but not years in the past. So Laura doesn't rewind the tape so far back that she questions why she became a skier.

As Kathleen Vose points out, she rewinds the story to the conversation in the truck. There is a moment where they discuss doing something different. The counterfactual is just so salient for her story and she along with Jack made a different decision and then here we are. Counterfactuals don't exist just to drive us crazy. We engage in this kind of thinking for a reason. Interfactual thoughts are generally useful for us in terms of providing a set of options that

we might act upon in the future. And this can lead to improvement, it can lead to learning from experience. When we go back and revisit a decision that turned out poorly, when we imagine how we could have made a different decision, it can be painful. But it can also be very useful. It can help us see how, if the same kind of situation rolls around again, we could do something different next time. There's a second reason counterfactuals are psychologically useful. When something bad happens, kind of shakes your confidence that you understand the world

and you can predict what's going to happen. And so when people engage in counterfactuals and they simulate other alternate pathways, if I've done this differently, then this negative thing may not have occurred, gives them some sense of control that they understand the world more, and that can help in a psychological sense be a very adaptive pattern. This is all healthy. We turn bad things that happen into lessons for the future. And by imagining how we could have changed what happened,

we get a feeling of control and agency. Counterfactuals become a driver of change, of action. Of course, this leads to the question, what happens when events do not set off counterfactual thinking? As Neil shows, there are specific features in a story that cause our minds to come up with alternate versions. Without those triggers, we don't engage in counterfactuals. And without counterfactuals, we're often not inclined to change our behavior. This relationship between counterfactuals and behavior made me think about a conversation I had a few years back, and it brings us to a second scenario we want to explore today.

I was visiting the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska. We did an episode about it some time ago. The glacier is a dazzling sight, but it's also a bleak lesson in climate change. It's receded dramatically in a matter of decades. As I was telling it a viewing point, Terry Lambert, visiting from Southern California, came up beside me. We both stared at the wall of ice in the distance.

I introduced myself. I'm wondering if I might talk with ice in the distance. I introduce myself. I'm wondering if I might talk with you for a moment. I'm a journalist. I work for NPR in Washington. And ask him what he made of the Glacier's retreat. The Glacier's a lot of it gets replaced every year when it snows. It might be receding in, but we're still going to have snow. We're still going to get some replaced. So I just think it's, I mean, as old as they are, it's, they can't last forever.

Yeah, it's receding faster, but what are you going to do? What are you going to do? I thought back to that conversation with Terry in the context of Laura's story. Unlike Laura, Terry wasn't bothered by counterfactual thoughts. He didn't say, if only humans hadn't burned so much fossil fuel, maybe the glacier wouldn't have receded. He didn't say, what could I have done to head off climate change? Surveys have found that about half of all Americans don't worry that much about a warming planet. Psychologists Neil Rose and Kathleen Rose think that our responses to challenges like climate change might be very different

from our responses to a skiing accident because climate change doesn't have the four triggers that set off counterfactual thinking. Take what Terry told me, for instance, he didn't see what was happening to the glacier as something negative. Even if it all melts, it's not going to be the end of the world. There could be changes, some species could be advantage, some species could be

disadvantage, the ecosystem is changing, you're going to have flooding, you could have weather events, right? There could be consequences that affect you and I? Yes, but like I say, it's so far in the future, I'm not worried about it. Two, counterfactuals are triggered when you can see something happen that's out of the ordinary. Terry doesn't see anything unusual about the receding glacier. You know, everything goes around in circles, I guess.

So, you know, it starts at one place and goes back to the beginning and at some point. So not in my lifetime, but I'm sure at some point we'll probably have another ice age. Three, counterfactual spring to mind when you can see how you yourself or some other person played a central role in what happened. In Terry's case, I personally don't think it's something that man's doing to make in that melt. And four, seeing a direct connection between an outcome and what someone did or didn't do tends to produce counterfactuals.

Causing effect need to be side by side. In the case of climate change, the causes are diffused and distant and the worst effects have not yet happened. Obviously, even if you accept the reality of climate change, you can't lay the responsibility for it at the feet of any one person. The key difference between these two different stories is the immediacy of the negative outcome. It's something either very abrupt and very, very severe that happens to you at a particular moment versus something that unfolds more generally, more slowly and is not that much of a direct

impact on your life. So the difference between these two is that the first one will activate a lot of counterfactual thoughts focusing on your own action. The second one is just more diffuse and perhaps is going to be involved with a bit more fatalism, just feeling like, well, this is the way things are and there's not much I can do. If counterfactual thinking tends to lead us to act, an absence of counterfactual thinking can keep us from seeing what we can do. While it's just like earthquakes and floods and hurricanes,

there are just all part of what's going on. You can't control it, you can't change it. The retreat of the Mendenhall Glacier is not in itself proof of climate change. But when scientists zoom out and look at all the data, their consensus is that climate change is happening and that its consequences are all around us. Human actions are tied to the problems that have already struck. Human inaction is directly implicated in the disasters that are to come. Kathleen Rose says, from a psychological perspective, the difficulty in coming up with counterfactuals for climate change

can easily produce apathy. I don't really know what kind of a role each and every one of us plays and all of that. And so it makes her just a psychologically very kind of messy understanding of who's responsible, what should we do? And it's very hard to understand the results or even know when they may come about. They may not even come about in our lifetimes, which makes it even more psychologically remote. In Laura's case, she can see the one specific thing

she could have done to prevent Jack's death. But... It's very hard to see a cause and effect relationship to, you know, throwing another soda can in the recycling bin and seeing the temperature of the oceans not rise nearly as fast. Not all environmental problems are like climate change. Some do trigger counterfactual thinking, and these lead us to act. Terry Lambert wasn't worried about climate change, but when there was an environmental problem close to home, one that was wiping out a species of mollusks, he literally came to the rescue. He used to dive off the Anacapa Islands in California.

They were having a problem with the black avaloni being extinct and some of it. And I did several dives and helped replace the avaloni. We built habitat form and put them in there. So the local environment, yeah, I've had my hands on it. You know, you do what you can do. You do what you can do. That's pretty much the opposite of what he said about the shrinking glacier. Yeah, it's receding faster, but what are you going to do?

It's telling that Terry felt compelled to do something about the local issue. He could see his role in the solution. This might be a hint at a way around the kings and our counterfactual thinking. If unconscious rules keep us from thinking about counterfactuals when they could be useful, we might have to consciously choose to open the door to these thoughts. I think it's just a simple conversational style where you could just directly ask, what could you personally have done differently? How could you have made things better? How could you have made things better?

How could you have performed a more positive action? And so I think it is a reasonable thing to bring up on a conversation. Other times, we may need to talk ourselves out of engaging in counterfactuals. For Laura, it does make a great deal of sense that she's doing that, although, of there's there's really no way that she has culpability or responsibility here.

My journey definitely continues. I definitely was taking less risk and skiing much more conservatively, but I still had such powerful connections with the mountains because that's where I connected the jack. Like every useful feature in the brain, counterfactuals don't always bring to mind when they're needed. Sometimes they show up when they're not useful, and they produce unnecessary pain. Other times, they fail to appear, fostering apathy. Sometimes, the path you wish you'd pursued

is just a mirage. Other times, there was a turn you needed to take, all you had to do was see it. This week's show was produced by Raina Cohen and Path Shah. It was edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Thomas Liu and Laura Quarral. We also bid a fawn goodbye this week to our incredible intern, Camilla Vargas Restrepo. Camilla is one of those rare people whose talent and drive are coupled with a truly kind and caring nature. Thank you, Kimmelah, for all that you brought to Hidden Brain.

And thanks also for those amazing little coconut treats you brought us from Bogota. We're gonna miss you. Our unsung hero this week is Carlos Chavez on NPR's IT AppStame. A few weeks ago, we were trying to publish our podcast and the computer we were using crashed. Rebooting it didn't help. The software simply wouldn't mix down our episode. Carlos spent hours on the phone with us, troubleshooting the problem and brainstorming solutions.

When inanimate computer programs inexplicably stop working, having a human around to lend a sympathetic ear can make everything a lot easier. Thank you Carlos. I'm Shankar Vedantum, and this is NPR. Thank you. you