The Practice of Mental Time Travel

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When people imagine what they could do ten years from now, they tend to imagine things that are different in a couple of key ways. Rey: Our brains jas sort of experiences thiscreative freedom and the sense of hope like, you know, tenyers, that's a lot of time to get ready for things to change. And there's nothing on your coender for ten years from to day? No, it's a blank slate. You have no to do list for march thirti 20 32. So there's this freedom of imagination.

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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