[MUSIC] The great error of psychology is usual. Was to be bias toward bad stuff. The omission was, what makes life worth living? Of what the good life consist in. And after about a decade of working on positive psychology and thinking about the negativity error, it occurred to me there was a much deeper error, underneath the negativity error. And it has to do with the tyranny of the past and of the present. So what psychology believed for the last 120 years was that we should study the past and the present and if we really understood the past and the present, then we could predict what people would do in the future, we could talk about the future. So, the study of the past is memory. The study of the present is motivation, and the thoughts that are going through your head about the present right now. So, motivation and perception were about the present. And the hope was that if we knew everything about memory and everything about perception and motivation, then I could predict what you were going to do next Saturday night. But strangely enough, if I ask you what you did last Saturday night. That predicts what you're going to do this Saturday night, sort of, but what really predicts it, if I ask you, what do you intend to do next Saturday night? because if I ask about you about the future, that does better than knowing about the past and the present Our species is allegedly Homo sapiens. Where sapiens means knowledge and wisdom. Well, I think that's aspirational. I don't think we've shown ourselves to be particularly wise or knowledgeable. But there is something I'm certain that we are, and we do better than any other species. And it's what you're doing right now. And what you're doing right now mentally, is you're taking what I'm thinking and you're projecting it into how you might use it on a paper you're writing. Or telling it to a friend and the like. That is phenomenologically, if you ask people, what are you doing right now? It turns out more than 50% of the time you're thinking about scenarios about the future. Phenomenologically, we are creatures who live in the future. We're always conjuring up possible futures and evaluating them. And in many ways, that seems to be instrumental to what your decision is about what you're going to do next Saturday night, not about what you did last Saturday night. It's about the scenarios you create about possible things to do next Saturday night, and how good or bad you think they'll be. It's not just the phenomenology that tells me that we're Homo prospectus and not Homo sapiens, but the biology tells me that as well. So, there is a thousand study literature on asking what parts of the brain light up when you're doing anagrams or mental arithmetic. And the way you examine that is you put people in an FMRI machine in the doughnut, you start measuring their brain and you give them mental arithmetic to do, and you see what part of the brain lights up. With me so far? But you always have to have a control group. So, you always have a rest period in which you're just lying there to contrast that with mental arithmetic. Or you have a group that's not doing anything. And basically, during a rest period or in a control group, you say, well just lie there, and don't do anything. And then you contrast what lights up when you're doing anagrams or mental arithmetic with doing with what lights up when you just lie there. Well, it turns out the results are shocking and remarkable. The brain is very noisy at mental arithmetic and anagrams. You can get results but they're difficult. But what you're doing when you're asked to just lie there, same thing lights up all the time. It's called the default circuit, and it's the same circuit that lights up if I ask you to imagine the future. To think about what you're going to do next Saturday night, to think about stuff that's persona and about the future. Or to take stuff about the past. So, an event that didn't work out well, someone who turns you down for a date. And I ask you well, what might you have said differently to have gotten her to take the date. Then the circuit lights up. It's the, what we call, the imagination circuit. It's the circuit that imagines the future. So, the fact that you're imagining the future right now phenomenologically, and in fact, when you're in machines that measure what you're doing, a great deal of the time, you're essentially daydreaming about the future. So, that's the kind of thing that leads us to believe that psychology should be about the future. And that the role of the past and the present in psychology, is that we metabolize the past and the present to create futures. And that's the heart of psychology for us. So, this is a proposal that derives from positive psychology because If you're working on bad stuff, trauma, you can get away with the psychology of the past and the present. I mean, this brick wall fell on you, this trauma occurred, it's in the past or it's in the present and that's all you need. So, when you think about bad events, you can get away with the past and the present. But if you think about what you want about approach, about what to find positive psychology, is what people choose. And that's about the future. Choice is about what's going to happen. So, positive psychology says, let's take perspection and the way in which we metabolize the past and the present, to come up with future's very seriously. So, I've come to believe that psychology needs to start with the cognition and neurobiology about how we do futures and deduce the present and the past from it. The present and the past are not all they're cracked up to be. Let me say two things about that. So, memory turns out to be remarkably shoddy. And so Dick Neisser had people, his students right after the Challenger explosion, write down where they were when they heard about it and who told them about it. And then came along 10 years later and wrote them and asked them where were you, who told you about it, and how confident were you about it? 50% of the people had complete mismemories of where they were and who told them. But they were just as confident that they were true as the people who had true memories. So, in general, in the memory literature about the past, it turns out memory is not about what happened in the past. It seems to be something about the last story you told about the memory, or preparing for the next story you tell. So, memory seems to be in service of the future, it's not a photographic image of the past. And perception is even worse than that. Perception seems to be a hallucination about the future.
