The Secret Powers of Time

Professor Philip Zimbardo reveals how our individual perspective on time affects our work, health and well-being.

So what we have discovered in 30 years of research is there are six main time zones that people live in: two focus on the past, two on the present, and two on the future.

The people that focus on the past remember the good ole times, successes, happy birthdays, and nostalgia. These are the people who keep the family records, family books and have the family rituals.

There are other people who focus only on regret, only on failure, only on all the things that went wrong; so we call those focuses past positive or past negative.

There are two ways to be present-oriented: the obvious one is to be hedonistic, that you live for pleasure and avoid pain; you seek knowledge, you seek sensation.

There are other people who are present-oriented because the say it doesn’t pay to plan: my life is fated, fated by my religion, fated by my poverty, fated by the conditions that I’m living under.

Most of us are here because we are future-oriented; we have learned to work rather than play, to resist temptation.

But there is another way to be future-oriented. Depending on your religion, life begins after the death of the mortal body. To be future-oriented you have to trust that when you make a decision about the future it’s going to carry up. If you have inflation you don’t put money in the bank because you can’t trust the future.

If there is instability in your family, adults can’t keep their promises to you. The closer you are to the equator the more present orientated you are; the more you’re in an environment that doesn’t change it gives you a sense of sameness rather than change.

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wald0
Wow, I never had thought of it this way but it is apparent that i am present hedonistic. I have had many of the problems that he says people of this persuasion often have, but I won’t go there. Suffice to say I fit his definition of the common present minded hedonistic person like a glove. Question is what to do about it? I have known what was wrong with me for a long time but, that doesn’t mean I can change it. Its almost like its not up to me, like my mind sets it’s own priorities and I am just along for the ride. Most people can’t imagine what I mean by this but, if you have ever been addicted to a narcotic you know what I mean. You can know for a fact that the long term consequences of use are awful, so bad they can make you want to die in fact, but you still use. I’ve known people that killed themselves because they could not stop using. How can that be? That you could want so badly not to do something but be helpless almost to stop yourself from doing it. Addiction to this degree is rare but, it does exist. I don’t know, the human brain is a awesome and horrible thing really.
brianrose87
I highly recommend Daniel Kahneman’s book “Thinking, Fast and Slow” to anyone who finds this talk intriguing. The book is encyclopedic in the shear volume of information and studies, but also tells the underlying, and quite revealing, story of our minds in an lucid manner.
The message is that we have 2 brains (its a metaphor used to increase comprehension). A fast acting, intuitive, instinctive, and more evolutionary refined brain, and a slow acting, deliberative, calculating, and more recently evolved brain.
When we go with our gut or calculate the sum of 4 + 4 we use the ancient, intuitive brain, which unconsciously (but actively) formulates answers. We call it intuitive or instinctive because the “answers” come to us from emotion instead of explicit thought.
When we consciously and deliberately calculate the “answer” to something (like 788 + 167) we use our newer pre-frontal cortex. These calculations burn more glucose (cost more energy), and take significantly longer from calculation to action.
The intuitive brain does a fantastic job most of the time using heuristics (rules of thumb), but because it relies on heuristical biases and judgements it lacks precision. The deliberate brain is more accurate and can consider a wider range of variables (especially non-intuitive, hidden variables), but burns time and energy. Historically, burning more energy or taking more time to decide could be game breakers, so Homo sapiens now sits with 2 separate (again its a metaphor) systems of thought, each useful in its own way for certain situations.