The more vivid, specific detail that you bring to imagin on, the more a the more that this imagination or memory of the future can change how you feel and act to day. So for example, f youre trying to overcome normalcy by is so that, if you know, the next pandemic, maybe it's a tick born pandemic instead of a viral contagious disease,. tit's spread from ticks. If you have vividly imagined yourself pulling your socks up over your jeans, that's the new fashion, because everybody's afraid of getting the, you know, these tick bites. You're goin to get the dopamin hit from the next headline that you see.
The future grows out of the present, but it manages to consistently surprise us. How can we get better at anticipating and preparing for what the future can be like? Jane McGonigal started out as a game designer, working on the kinds of games that represent miniature worlds with their own rules. This paradigm provides a useful way of thinking about predicting the future: imagining changes in the current world, then gaming out the consequence, allowing real people to produce unexpected emergent outcomes. We talk about the lessons learned that anyone can use to better prepare their brain for the future to come.
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Jane McGonigal received her Ph.D. in performance studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently a writer and Director of Games Research and Development at the Institute for the Future. She teaches a course at Stanford on How to Think Like a Futurist. She has developed several games, including SuperBetter, a game she designed to improve health and resilience after suffering from a concussion. Her recent book is Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything–Even Things That Seem Impossible Today.
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