Making Hope Happen: Create the Future You Want for Yourself and Others by Shane J. Lopez Read Free Book Online Page A

on what is going on inside our skulls. Using technologies like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), they monitor blood flow, oxygen consumption, and electrical activity in precise areas of the brain. With that information, they can track a hopeful thought, such as landing a good job in the next year, along what I like to call the prospection pipeline . This is the path we take from thinking about the future to developing and executing the plans that make that future a reality. It’s a trip through the unique and shared functions of relatively old and relatively new parts of our brains, all working together in incredibly complex ways.
    Prospection Pipeline
Remembering the Past, Simulating the Future
    As I discussed previously, we build our hopes from memories. To imagine a good job in the future, we can use a past job for contrast. For example, when I conducted my own “dream job” thought experiment, I didn’t have to go in on Saturdays and Sundays, because I drew on the seven years of my high school and college life when I worked almost every weekend. I had a flash memory of driving to my old job on a quiet Saturday morning and used that to prospect a different future.
    This work is done in a brain area called the hippocampus, two tiny seahorse-shaped structures that face each other between your temples. We take snapshots of our experiences and then move them around as needed.The most meaningful episodes, both good and bad, tend to be the ones that stick, and we gradually tie them together into an ongoing story of our lives called “autobiographical memory.”
    But these memories are not only our personal résumé—they also help to create the next story. You could not have formed the detailed images of your dream job or felt the emotions connected with it without images from your past. Your ability to imagine depends on your ability to remember. In some cases, we can also remember things we imagined in the past as vividly as actual events.
    This “prospecting” function of the hippocampus is so important that some researchers now think its primary evolutionary role may have been to anticipate the future by creating simulations of what an animal might encounter. For prehistoric humans, a good memory for past dangers increased their chances of surviving similar situations in the future—and getting enough to eat by remembering where the sweetest fruits grew.
    In a typical study using brain scans, research participants are asked to either recall a past event or imagine an event to occur in the next year. Once they have this image vividly in mind, they alert the researcher by pressing a button. Whether they are remembering the past or preliving the future, the hippocampus lights up.When we anticipate a new situationor are faced with a challenge, we automatically scan our memory for guidelines, and then we mentally practice how we would deal with the threats and challenges.Training in our brain’s simulator is less risky than going into novel situations unprepared.
Sorting Through Images and Emotions
    Okay, the dream job exercise activated your hippocampus (meaning that blood surged to bring it more oxygen and its electrical charge increased). The image of your new job expanded and became more vivid, and you essentially created a new memory, one of the future.Now the prospection pipeline leads to another brain structure, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (or rACC). The rACC sits about an inch behind the center of your forehead, and it works with the amygdala, one of the oldest parts of the brain, a center that triggers reactions to emotions. The amygdala is best known for spurring us to act when we are threatened, but it also triggers us to act on the feelings and drives that energize our vision.
    Your rACC tracks how important and meaningful each of your mental images and goals are—how much they matter to you at the moment. It helps you let go of goals that don’t matter