Unreliable Frontal Lobe?

This weekend I started to read Daniel Gilbert’s ”Stumbling on Happiness” that is about our brains and how much the activity of our brain can distort our perception of the world. Therefore it can make us believe that the things want write now, will not be the same by the time we manage to get them. In other words Gilbert talks about future thinking from the perspective of a human brain, which I found very interesting.

As Gilbert states in his book human beings are the only kind of being on earth who can think of the future. Magnus has mentioned this in one of the lectures as well; animals can predict the very immediate future, they put together previous and present events and figure out that a sound of a rifle that almost killed them last time is a good sign to start running away. This kind of activity doesn’t even require complete thoughts and by sending the signals in the system can cause an immediate reaction.

This immediate forecast of the future can be done by any simple brain (read even computers and simple animals with no “real” brain) through consideration and recollection. But what differs us most from the animals is our ability to imagine things. Not only that we can imagine our future, we find it hard not to think about it since our brain has been “programmed” to do so! According to a study presented in Gilbert’s book, people spend 1/8 of their time thinking of the future. This activity is located in our frontal lobe, a part of our brains that started to develop fairly late comparing to the other parts of our brain (3 million years ago vs 500 million years ago). This part of our brain has many different functions such as critical thinking, long-term memories, to choose between good or bad, to see the differences and the similarities between things or events and of course future thinking.

Humans spend a ridiculous amount of time on planning and thinking forward, no doubt about that. Just think about how many books, films and songs there have been created about the future. But even though we spend so much time on future thinking, we somehow find the future intangible and unpredictable. And how qualitative is this forecasting that our frontal lobe allows us to imagine? For every film or song about the future, there is a painting or a book showing the opposite. It seems that there are as many different visualizations of the future as there are people in the world. Or is there even more? Do we think of the future differently, depending on what has happened in the past, a little like the “Sliding Doors” or “The Butterfly Effect”? For those of you who haven’t seen these two films, they both are about how very small things can cause major changes in the future. “Sliding Doors” is two different versions of a woman’s life created by a simple insignificant action in the beginning of the film; by catching or missing a train. “The Butterfly Effect” is about the butterfly effect itself, the theory where the flapping wing of a butterfly represents a small change in the initial condition of the system, which causes a chain of events leading to large-scale alterations of events in a long term. The producer uses this theory in terms of past and future thinking, showing how a small change in the past can generate different versions of your future.

So even though the prime function of the frontal lobe is to think about the future and plan for it, how much can it really predict, taking into consideration the fact that even small insignificant things can have such a major impact on the real future. Can the frontal lobe manage to imagine this? And can we rely on its forecasts?