Phew!
Future dread and hindsight relief. Why do we experience dread and relief for some events?
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Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast produced by me, Fraser McGruer, for Aleph Insights. In this series of podcasts we take a look at interesting topics and discuss what we think they tell us about analysis and decision making. I'm here with Nick Hare and Peter Coghill of Aleph Insights and this week we're discussing Nick's burgeoning career as a public speaker and all-round thought leader. Nick, tell us about this new direction
Speaker B:in your career. Well, I think I was thinking about a recent talk that I gave at a meeting in the city which was lots of sort of trendy, startup-y, hipster-y type people there. A bit like yourself? A bit like me. So, you know, I was among friends. But I was, even though I give, I speak in public a lot, I do lots of talk standing up in front of people whether they want me to or not. And, you know, by this time I'm really not nervous. I'm not nervous about public speaking, like I was when I was, you know, when I think back to when I was sort of 25 and I'd hardly done it. But it still preys on my mind, you know. I can tell that I'm kind of getting a bit nervous a week or two before and you start rehearsing things in your head and it doesn't matter how much you've rehearsed it in your head, there's still a certain sense of dread there, you know, which certainly doesn't deter me from doing it, but it's enough to sort of, you know, to be a noticeable relief when it's over. And I think I was sort of realising once it was finished how relieved I felt. And I think I was thinking to myself, well, why do we dread? And this may sound like a ridiculous question. I mean, intuitively, people will think, why are you even asking this? But why do we sort of, why do emotions have a direction like that? Like, you know, we don't dread things that have happened in the past, you know, we're kind of relieved they're over, but we dread things that are in the future. And the question is, why? Because logically, Right, logically,
Speaker A:having, I mean, everything you said, I think I agree with, because logically, once we've become experienced enough, we know that we're how we're going to feel afterwards. Yeah, but why then don't we just sort of feel that excited and happy?
Speaker B:Right, right. So why don't I, why don't I get excited about the thought of it being over? Why instead do I dread the completely made up imagined things that might go wrong?
Speaker A:Well, fortunately, we have a fellow thought leader with us here today. So Peter, what do you reckon?
Speaker C:Well, another interesting, I'm not going to comment directly on that. But another interesting thing is the retrospective enjoyment. So the relief that Nick felt, and the kind of having got over this thing, which was a bit difficult, or a bit scary, he felt happy. And there's this retrospective enjoyment thing that happened. And this, I mean, this, this, you see this everywhere. And I'm just reading around, it's well understood in all the outdoor sports and things that, you know, you had a hard walk or a hard, a hard hike or a hard climb or something, there's this elation once it's over. Which is, which is strange, because it's, it's, it's, it's sort of, you didn't enjoy, you definitely didn't enjoy it at the time. But you enjoy the memory of it, once you're finished. So you rather, it would be more, if you didn't enjoy the time to play, because you would, it was dangerous, or, or particularly, particularly sort of life threatening. So you should really not enjoy the memory, you should really think, I'm never going to do that again, because I was in danger.
Speaker A:But it also makes me want to, you know, invert it. So, you know, if there's something you're really looking forward to, is it always the case that you, you look back and go, I didn't enjoy that. It's a bit like New Year's Eve or something, I don't know.
Speaker B:Well, but do you regret, do we feel negative emotions about things that are over? I mean, I think we sort of do it to an extent, don't we? Because they obviously, you know, when a holiday is finished, you know, you look back with fondness on the holiday, but you're sad that it's finished. Sad that it's over.
Speaker C:Well, I think you're sad about going back to work.
Speaker B:Maybe it's so maybe it's preemptive dread. Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah. But, but look, isn't this about risk taking and adrenaline and all that side of things? It's just a kind of natural human behaviour.
Speaker B:Well, I mean, yeah, they say the obvious sort of beginning of an explanation, or at least some that sort of the direction you might want to start going in is to say, you know, we haven't, we have obviously evolved to have emotions about the future, which are different to emotions about the past, because we can affect the future. Now, without wishing to get too philosophical about why that is, let's just accept that we can affect the future, we can't affect the past, right? You look like that's a controversial statement. You're pulling a face as though that's a preposterous thing to say.
Speaker A:No, it's the bit that we've evolved to be like that.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah. So, so the point is that, you know, we've evolved, we've evolved to make decisions about the future. We haven't evolved to make decisions about the past because we can't, right? We can't do anything about that.
Speaker C:Don't worry, Fraser, we've written off all of the creationists already. Several, you know, at the beginning of the podcast series. They've all gone. They're not listening anymore.
Speaker B:You know, so it makes sense.
Speaker A:I don't have a problem with evolution.
Speaker B:So it makes sense that we, that our emotions are sort of, at least, well, let's start by saying, you know, are kind of, let's say, decision affecting emotions, which so it might be, for example, if I'm dreading this talk, I'm going to put more effort into making sure I get it right. It feels like that's incentivizing me to try and do a good job. I mean, presumably everyone's had anxiety dreams about having to stand up on stage and, you know, perform to play a piano concerto or something, you know, where you sort of in your dream, you haven't done enough work. And those sorts of feelings, I feel like they are pushing you to make sure you do as good a job as you can. And that's good, right? So it makes sense that we would have emotions about the future that are different to the emotions we have about the past. But once you've, once you've started to pick that apart, the question is, why do we have emotions about the past at all? Like, why do we feel emotionally affected by things that have gone? What's the point of that? You know, so, so for example, if you take something like, you know, shame or grief, they're things that are only about the past. I mean, we must all have had experiences where, you know, your toes still curl when you think about that thing you did. Now, why? What's the point? How does that benefit us evolutionarily?
Speaker A:No, no. I think you're analysing this in the wrong way, because you're analysing this in a linear way, okay?
Speaker B:Whereas time is a circle.
Speaker A:No, but the whole point of emotions is, I think, it's probably to do with interaction with other humans, right? And so I just think it's asking the wrong question about whether it's talking about the past or the future. It's because whether it's the past or the future, that's still, that's, it's still, it doesn't matter because it's still within the same axis, which is to do with other people, right? So that's why it's still useful, because you can bond with other people about the past, or you can, you can feel remorse about your behaviour, how that affects someone in the past. So that's the point. No, I mean, what are you talking about?
Speaker B:Emotion like fear isn't about people. It might be about spiders. Okay, so... Dread isn't necessarily about people. It might be about an asteroid. Okay. I think you're, I don't know, people seem to be contingently involved in a lot of our emotions, but it's not, it doesn't seem to be intrinsic to the concept of an emotion.
Speaker C:It's broader. I think the emotions are there to guide your behaviour in a particular way, which is advantageous
Speaker A:to survival or to reproduction. Exactly. So some emotions are to do with other people, but some in terms of, you know, it's important to have an emotion about the past, because then you remember it for the future, like avoiding snakes, for example.
Speaker B:Right. So this is possibly one of the reasons why you might think we experience emotions about the past, is that it deters us from experience. So negative emotions about the past might deter us from putting ourselves in a situation where that could happen again. And positive emotions about the past might push us towards that.
Speaker A:It would seem to be the case, except we do chase risks as well, though.
Speaker C:Well, that doesn't really explain grief, though. So grief of a lost one.
Speaker A:But I think that is where it is a human one, where it's a human to human one.
Speaker C:I agree. The human thing is a part of the survival thing. So grief. Why do you grieve for lost ones? Because it doesn't do you any favours immediately.
Speaker B: lbert called it in a paper in: Speaker A:Yeah. I mean, I think I'm, I have a suggestion, but I don't want to sort of monopolize this.
Speaker C:I think that effect, maybe it's just that we are quite macroscopic in our thinking. Sorry, myopic in our thinking. We can't imagine really a world in sufficient detail beyond like a week or two. And that effect, so we were always planning and thinking about the short term.
Speaker B:Yeah. And that, in fact, that ties into some of the things that, you know, the ways that people respond to the, in these kinds of surveys is people will sort of, they'll correctly anticipate what they will feel about something that's happening tomorrow. But when they're thinking about something that might be happening in a month, people are much more, it's not so much optimistic, but they view it from a different mode, from a far mode, where they see themselves in a kind of idealized way. So, for example, you might say, look, I'm in a real work rush at the moment. There's no way I'm going to be able to give up smoking this week because I've got these deadlines on, right. But in a month's time, I know I'll find it much easier to give up smoking and I'll feel very positive and I'll go for long walks and everything's going to be fine. And you know that that hasn't happened in the past, even when you haven't had deadlines on, you know, and yet we don't seem capable of learning that. It seems to be, and I, yeah, sorry.
Speaker A:Well, is it a survival mechanism to do with immediate danger? Is it that, you know, that we overemphasize dangers, whether it be the danger of that rustling bush over there?
Speaker C:Well, I think it's simpler than that. I think that we've just, because the way, the environment in which we evolve, we live very much kind of hand to mouth, one hour, one day to the next, hunting and gathering. So we didn't need to develop complex cognitive machinery for planning in detail way out in advance. But we should, if we were going to survive, it would be because we'd find a meal within the next couple of days.
Speaker B:Yeah, but presumably it would have suited us to do that though. If we could have said, well, you know what, we shouldn't eat all this grain. We should save some. You know, that would be, that would be good, right? I mean, if we could think long-term, if we'd evolved to have long, proper long-term emotions.
Speaker C:Yeah, well, I suppose maybe there wasn't a feature of the environment which causes to develop something like that. We reached a plateau that was high enough to survive.
Speaker B:So I have my own theory. We're really venturing into the realm of speculation here, which is that it's evolutionary advantageous to deceive yourself about the future. To think that things will make you happier than they do and that bad things will make you less happy than they do. So, you know, if you think about, imagine there's two species. One species sort of has accurate beliefs and knows that, well, even if we move to that next valley, which will be a pain in the bum, it won't make us that much happy. Yeah, there's more fruit, but we'll just find new things to be upset about. You know, we know that wherever we go, there we are, right? And, you know, we should just sit in our valley and be happy. Sounds like my family. Compared to another species, you go, right, well, I know this valley turned out to be not all that, but the next one. That's where that's where that's really going to make things kick off for us. You know, those ones are going to be the ones taking over the world, right? The ones who are perpetually too optimistic about the things that are going to be good and unsatisfied with what they've got. So, I just think that self-deceit, it's almost like, you know, our emotions, which have evolved to guide behavior before our higher functions have evolved. It makes sense that our higher functions shouldn't be able to sublimate that, that even though I've done talks like this hundreds of times on the reptilian level, I'm still scared of it. And my reptile brain hasn't learned that these things are fine. And, you know, and in a way, that's good.
Speaker A:Yeah. So, sorry, were you saying that it's an evolutionary advantage to over-emphasize both the positive and negatives?
Speaker B:This is my theory here. Yeah. Yes, yes, is that if we had evolved to form accurate beliefs about our future emotions, then we would actually be kind of worse off in some ways. We, oh, let's, no, let me rephrase that. We as a species would be worse off, but as individuals would be happier. So, the point is that being perpetually unhappy is good for the genome, but bad for the individual, right? So, you know, your genes are pushing you to do stupid things, basically, things that you're pushing you to go further than is justified by the reward you'll get, because it's good for them. But it's, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah, which is not particularly controversial. That last point you said, I think, you know, that our genes aren't always good for us as individuals. Yeah, I'm glad.
Speaker C:I think Rich Dawking would be glad that you agree with that. Yeah, I'm sure.
Speaker B:You've been converted from your previously creationist stance.
Speaker A:There's something I want to say. So, look, there's a couple of things I want to ask about. But one is, so that was one example. Can we think of anything exciting? Anything interesting that was the thing that you have dreaded most and then turned out to be okay? Or the thing that you dreaded most and actually turned out to be bloody awful afterwards?
Speaker C:Well, not, I mean, it's not dread. I mean, for me, for me, it's the retrospective enjoyment thing, which is definitely I've got lots of experience in and that's the kind of the looking at it from the other thing. So something that you thought was going to be good turned out to be rubbish when you were doing it and then afterwards turned out to be okay when you remember it. And there's a couple of times when I've probably nearly died on a mountain climbing and hiking due to bad weather that we didn't predict. But when I look back, I think, actually, that was quite fun, which would make me, which drives me want to go and do it again. Yeah. And why that is, I don't know, complicated, but I found a quite a fun taxonomy of enjoyment by Leper and Malone. And they suggest there's different sort of classes of sources of enjoyment. They were thinking about computer games, but I think it could be applied to other things. And the things like the facts such as when I challenged myself, I was recognized for having done something clever or difficult. And it was done in cooperation. Those are all kind of the factors which make that memory enjoyable.
Speaker B:It sounds like a description of a Stone Age hunting party. Yeah.
Speaker C: ion I wanted to pop in there.: Speaker B:Yeah. I mean, there is this big distinction, isn't there, between, which I think we've touched on before, between the experiencing self and the remembering self, which I know Daniel Kahneman's done work on, about looking at people's recollection of traumatic events or positive events. And it turns out that what we experience and what we remember are totally different. And when you're responding to surveys and things about what's happened, it's your remembering self which takes control. Your experiencing self is kind of pushed to one side. So we are what we remember. And when we're talking about things, we are talking about what we remember. And that's only loosely connected to what we've actually experienced, which is really, really strange, but makes perfect sense. If you think about those two selves as different, as quite distinct, then what Peter's talking about makes perfect sense. It's the remembering self who signs up for that gruelling mountain hike, and the experiencing self who has to go through it. Yeah. The poor old experiencing self, constantly being pushed into stupid things by remembering self. I'm doing this for future me down here.
Speaker A:I mean, just very briefly, there's something I want to discuss in a moment. But before I do, I just remember, OK, it's not quite the opposite, but an experience that I was dreading that was awful and then scarred me for life afterwards is, and this happened repeatedly. When I was a kid from about the age, between the ages of eight and 10, about once every three months, I played the piano. And on a Sunday, they used to put on these mini recitals that we had to go and play our instruments. Recite. And I just always dreaded it. I hated playing in front of people. I was a bag of nerves. I always felt a bit, messed up the piece, then afterwards felt humiliated and probably got shouted at by my mum on the way home, you know. Actually, no, she didn't do that. But she was definitely disappointed. And every single time I dreaded it, every single time it went wrong. And even now, I mean, I just, oh, it's just.
Speaker B:Oh, I thought it was going to be a day where everything went wrong. And then someone came up to you and said, that was the best experimental jazz piece I've ever heard. Here's £50,000 and an invitation to Carnegie Hall.
Speaker A:Yeah, still waiting for the moment. But listen, before we do, I don't know.
Speaker B:So I just need to chip in with my dreading. Oh, go on then, go on. It's worth mentioning because I'm not sure anyone else, I've never heard anyone else talk about this particularly. But my first talk, sort of stand up in front of important people at work talk, which was about 17 years ago. It was about something that was happening in Chechnya. And there was all kinds of, you know, senior military people there. And as I was sitting there waiting to go on stage, I got cold feet. Now you're thinking, Nick means he bolted and said he wasn't going to do it. No, no, I actually got cold feet. It was the first time in my life I realised where that expression must have come from. That when you're really, really nervous about something, your feet go cold. But I didn't have metaphorical cold feet. I did get up and do it. That's what I did. But yeah, cold feet. Who knew? Okay, look, we'll wrap up there. Yeah, basically, look, it's not going to be that bad, guys. I mean, you know, that's what people should read. The hedonic treadmill goes backwards as well as forwards. You know, things you're dreading, it won't be that bad. Don't worry about it. Okay, you'll be fine. Whatever happens, you'll be fine. That's what I want our listeners to take away. Well, I was dreading it. I know they won't believe me, but it's true.
Speaker A:Unless you're on death row and you're dreading your execution, then it might be all right afterwards. But I might look back and go there. That was quite fun. It was electrifying. Um, it's so I was dreading this podcast and it's, you know, turned out all right so far. So, so yeah. Um, thank you for listening. I'm dreading the response to that joke. I liked it. Um, thank you for listening. Until next time. Goodbye.
