Mental Time Travel

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I was definitely struck in the book by your emphasis on the idea of mental time travel. Even though we can all do it, imagine different hypothetical futures, we still tend to react a little bit to the moment. And this kind of what you're suggesting is that it's not just a phenomenon, but a habit of mind that weant cultivate. So i give people this very practical exercise. A, so go ten years into the future and put thing on your calendar for ten years from to day that you would be excited about - ideally something you can't do to day.

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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