Dr. Ethan Kross
speaker
968 appearances
6 recordings
6 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard May 2025
Dr. Ethan Kross’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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And that's where this zooming out, taking this broader view, whether you do that through visual modalities, imagination modalities like mental time travel. You could time travel into the future, like I've just described. You can also go back in time.
Like I do this quite a bit when I'm struggling with some kind of adversity, I will go back in time and think of another experience in my life or someone else's life that I know of when times were even worse and they got through it. And oh, if I got through that, well... sure as heck I can get through this.
And so that's expanding our perception of time, our looking at that bigger picture to work through something in the present moment.
Yeah, so people have looked at this, and my memory of this wonderful paper I think was published in Science. I think the title was A Wandering Mind is an Unhappy Mind. And basically the takeover from the article was that people spend between – well, if you look at this paper and lots of others like it, what we can deduce is that people spend between one-half and one-third of their waking hours –
not focused on the present. So between one half and one third of the time, we're drifting away and we're thinking about other things. And this one particular paper linked that process with thinking about things that cause you to feel worse. I think there's huge levels of variability there though. I think being lost in thought can be a wonderful experience. I love, love, love, love Mind wandering.
I think it's one of my strengths. It is the source of idea generation for me. It is also the source of emotion regulation. I will... One of, you know, my sleeping pill, metaphorically speaking, is... mental time travel. It's getting away from the present. It is fantasizing about the future, right?
Thinking about the good things that could happen, the potentialities, or going into the past and savoring some of the positive things that happen. I'm thinking about the soccer game where my kids scored goals or something good happened to someone I know or to me. And And that to me is a wonderful way of going to bed. That is mental time travel.
It is not being in the moment, which actually raises another really important point that I wanna get in there. And I'd love to get your take on this because in popular culture, we often hear that It's really important to be in the moment. This has emerged as a type of cultural maxim, like be in the now.
And this idea is often conveyed so strongly that if you're not in the moment, we sometimes think there's something wrong with us. Like, oh, we've got to train our attention to bring it back to the present. Being in the present can be very useful in many contexts.
And certainly when we experience chatter, we start worrying about the future or ruminating about the past, refocusing on the present, our breath, a mantra. Yes, lots of data support the utility of that. But I always like to remind people that the human mind evolved to be able to travel in time. And lots of amazing things accompany that process. If I can't go into the past...
Not only am I not savoring positive experiences which add joy and vitality to my life, I'm also not learning from my screw-ups, which sadly happened to me on a somewhat regular basis. I'm learning from my mistakes by revisiting the past. And if I'm not going into the future, then I'm not planning. I'm not simulating. I'm not fantasizing. So... We don't want to shut down mental time travel.
I think what we want to learn how to do is how to travel in time in our minds more effectively without that time travel machine breaking down in the past, which is what happens when we get stuck on an experience or in the future when we just find ourselves fixating on something that we're anxious about.
So being in the moment can be good, but it is not the end point I think we always want to strive for.
Well, it often isn't, but it can be harnessed. And here's the way I think about texting and really how social media and the opportunities it gives us to communicate with others whenever we want, how this has thrown a curveball into the way we manage our own emotions and sometimes inadvertently affect the emotions of not just other people, but groups of people, and societies.
So when we experience emotions, we are often intensely motivated to share those experiences with others. There's this wonderful research program by a Belgium psychologist by the name of Bernard Ramey, who spent his whole life looking at what do you do when you experience emotions? And he found over many decades of work that you're motivated to verbalize it, to get it out.
And there are a couple of reasons for that. We want to relate to other people, get their support, but we also want to usually process it. In the pre-social media era, two things had to happen typically to share our emotions. First, you had to find someone. to share them with. And typically in the process of looking for someone, either to find someone face to face or via phone, time would pass.
Now, what we know about time is that as time proceeds, our emotions in general tend to fade. So there's this wonderful work on the duration of emotional experiences and our emotional experiences all follow a common trajectory. So something happens in the world or in our mind. We imagine something that is provoking in some way. Our emotions get triggered.
And then as time goes on, they eventually peter out. And depending on who the person is and what they're dealing with, some people may peak more intensely than others and fade more quickly. Some maybe have shallower peaks and take longer to subside. But they all follow that basic trajectory over time. So let's go back to the pre-social media era, right? So you got to find someone to talk to.
And while you're trying to find someone to talk to, time is passing. That's acting to temper our emotions. Now, once you find someone to talk to, either face-to-face or via phone, the moment you start talking, you are now awash in all of this feedback happening. This emotional feedback, whether it's coming from your face, like you're giving me all sorts of information right now.
I would benefit from smiling if you could. There we go. Thank you. I'm just joking for those who are listening. But I'm getting information from you. And if I'm talking to someone on the phone, likewise, I'm getting their vocal tone is expressing to me how they feel. That is also working to constrain how we communicate with others.
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