Some of our best episodes begin with our listeners, including this one from last May. It starts with the story of a woman who found herself stuck in a mental loop of regret after a disaster. Compelting personal stories like this one are often the starting point for us to explore interesting research into human behavior. If you have a personal experience that has a hidden brain angle to it and you're willing to share your story with others, we'd love to hear it.
Record a short voice memo on your phone and email it to us at hiddenbrain at npr.org with a subject line personal story. Again, that's hiddenbrain at npr.org. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta.
All of us are time travelers. We go back in history to turning points in our lives and imagine how things could have turned out differently. What would have happened if we had chosen different paths, swiped right instead of left, moved abroad, or quit smoking. This week on Hidden Brain, we go back to an episode from May 2018.
We'll tell you a story that shows when our minds reach for these alternate realities. I'm responsible because I didn't listen to him and what he was saying. And we'll also look at other scenarios where we're less likely to ask, what if? It turns out that the psychological forces that lead us to dream of alternate lives have profound effects on us and the planet.
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Vodafone. Together we can. Laura Ogden has spent years imagining how things could have turned out differently. At the very start is a pair of skis.
She and her friends would go out to the mountains in Washington state. Going as fast as we can and going as steep as we can. Starting to jump off rocks and challenge ourselves with our peer. I think that became something I was drawn to and I guess addicted to as time went on.
When she got to college, the whole ski culture opened up to me. So it's snowballed. No pun intended from there. She moved from skiing resorts to wild slopes where it was just her, some friends and the elements.
They hauled themselves to the top of mountains with skis on their backs. No ski lifts, no ski patrol, no cozy lodge with hot chocolate. Laura began to enter skiing competitions. She met a professional skier named Jack Hannon.
Laura says skiing with someone can lead to a deep connection. It's like a landscape that can really conjure up a magic to it awe-inspiring scenery. You get up into these mountains and to be sharing that with somebody. It just hits you deeply and then sometimes it can be quite arduous like getting up to the top of the big peak.
So you go through that suffering together for lack of a better word and then get this massive reward of skiing. It is almost like an out of body experience in a way. Like this smooth ease of flow going down and you know that that person is having their own yet similar experience to you and can understand that and that having that shared excitement together, I mean the rest is history. Laura and Jack got married in 2008.
They bought a house on a big swath of land in the remote mountains of Canada. They planned to be homesteaders and of course they would ski. Life was good. Going from day to day and not having too much to worry about besides where you're gonna go skiing and is are you gonna have spaghetti for dinner or burritos because it's a simple life.
One day in March 2010 their friends Dave and Tessa Treadway invited them to go skiing on Mount Curry. Dave and Tessa were also professional skiers. Dave had been out that week and found that conditions were good. So Laura and Jack said yes.
The friends loaded their gear onto a helicopter that would drop them off at the top of the mountain. The pilot flew them to the top of Mount Curry. They got in a late start. Instead of the usual 6 or 7 a.m.
they made it to the top of the mountain around 11. The four friends tested the conditions by pushing a giant block of snow down the mountain. You're basically creating an avalanche ahead of you. So once you get on the snow to ski it's much less likely that any avalanche underneath is gonna happen again because all that snow underneath you is consolidated.
One by one the friends began skiing. Tessa and I worked together and then Jack had skied down to us and then we were waiting for Dave to come down. We were kind of feeling like we were at the end of the more intense part and we're feeling pretty good and we're feeling like now it was time to go home basically. I know it was about 2.30 in the afternoon and I was kind of on the top of this shoulder and I heard something I heard Dave yelling avalanche.
One thing I think is hard to imagine is just how heavy and forceful a whole bunch of snow can actually be. When it's coming down at 60 miles an hour it's like a freight train. I just stood there frozen. I didn't have anywhere safe that I could hunker down like a rock or a tree to hide behind so I knew that there was nothing that I could do.
Laura was not in the direct path of the avalanche. When it passed she was still standing. They were clouds of fog around her. I yelled Jack and didn't hear anything and then I yelled Tessa and she yelled back.
Dave called out that he was okay but Jack, Laura and her friends took out their avalanche beacons. They knew that Jack's beacon would be broadcasting his location. If they picked up his signal their devices would ping. Avalanche beacons are designed to ping faster if rescuers get closer to a missing skier.
They let metal detectors. Laura stared down the path of the avalanche. She and Dave took off down the mountain to find Jack leaving Tessa as a lookout. The avalanche was so big that it had taken most of the snow pack away and suddenly we were forced to ski down this terrain that was gnarly.
I'm going to hop over this rock and I'm going to slide down this ice. Crazy how it was inconsequential. It wasn't a big deal for me. It was way more focused on we got to go get Jack so let's do what needs to be done.
The avalanche beacon was telling me that I was basically a meter away from Jack's avalanche translator. But when she got to the spot she could see nothing besides snow and ice and debris. She dropped to her knees. She got out her shovel and started to dig.
The snow was so frozen and packed together that it couldn't really move the snow that way so I had my ice axe. She hacked away at the snow pack and I quickly discovered Jack's like the jacket he was wearing his shoulder so he wasn't very deep under the snow and I found him. She used her hands to claw away the snow. She needed to get to his face to get him air.
When I dug enough around his upper body and face it started to dawn on me that he wasn't alive. What do you do in the minutes after you come to such a realization? What had just happened was not hitting me at all. I remember Tessa trying to talk to me was still on this version of autopilot.
There was work to be done. They dug out a flat platform for a rescue helicopter to land. When they made it back down the mountain Laura gave a statement to a police officer. I remember sitting in this little room with the RCMP officer and giving him details of what had happened kind of like dead pan in a way just stating the facts and somehow I was able to describe to him how my husband had just been killed by a Navilanche.
She kept it together until her best friend arrived. That's just when I lost it. I think I finally knew or I don't really know. I just I let it all go.
But right as she started to break down a voice in the back of her head reminded her of something that Jack had said that morning before they boarded the helicopter. They'd been sitting in their truck and Jack and I were by herself and looking at Mount Curry and Jack said to me you know I have a I have a bad feeling about today. This was unusual. Jack was not a warrior and when he didn't feel safe he was an ambivalent.
Jack's definitely been the one to say I'm not in two going out I'm going to pull the plug and he's adamant. Laura asked him well if you have a bad feeling do you think we should not go? And I don't think he wanted to be the one to say no let's not go. What did he say in response to you?
He he was slow to respond. I remember and said well no we can still go. Laura couldn't bear to tell her friend about it. I felt really guilty and you know I even have a little bit of of shamefulness now admitting it that I'm responsible because I didn't listen to him and what he was saying.
You know it almost adds to the tragedy of it like Jack had this feeling and we went anyway. Over and over she replied what happened and imagined how things could have turned out differently. Laura's regret and pain are completely understandable. Her reaction also reveals something important about how the mind works how we process the past and how we think about the future.
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Interfactual thoughts are generally useful for us in terms of providing a set of options that we might act upon in the future and this can lead to improvement it can lead to learning from experience. When we go back and revisit a decision that turned out poorly when we imagine how we could have made a different decision it can be painful but it can also be very useful it can help us see how if the same kind of situation rolls around again we could do something different next time there's a second reason counterfactuals are psychologically useful. When something bad happens kind of shakes your confidence that you understand the world and you can predict what's going to happen and so when people engage in counterfactuals and they simulate other alternate pathways this if I'd done this differently than this negative thing may not have occurred gives them some sense of control that they kind of understand the world more and that can help in a psychological sense be a very adaptive pattern. This is all healthy we turn bad things that happen into lessons for the future and by imagining how we could have changed what happened we get a feeling of control and agency.
Counterfactuals become a driver of change of action. Of course this leads to the question what happens when events do not set off counterfactual thinking as new shows there are specific features in a story that cause our minds to come up with alternate versions without those triggers we don't engage in counterfactuals and without counterfactuals we're often not inclined to change our behavior. This relationship between counterfactuals and behavior made me think about a conversation I had a few years back and it brings us to a second scenario we want to explore today. I was visiting the Mendenhall Glacier in Alaska we did an episode about it some time ago the glacier is a dazzling sight but it's also a bleak lesson in climate change it's receded dramatically in a matter of decades.
As I was standing at a viewing point Terri Lambert visiting from Southern California came up beside me we both stared at the wall device in the distance. I introduced myself. I'm wondering if I might talk with you for a moment I'm a journalist I work for NPR in Washington and ask him what he made with Glacier's retreat. The glaciers a lot of it gets replaced every year when it snows it might be receding in but we're still gonna have snow we're still gonna get some replaced so I just think it's I mean as old as they are it's they can't last forever yeah it's receding faster but what are you gonna do what are you gonna do I thought back to that conversation with Terri in the context of Laura's story unlike Laura Terri was embodied by counterfactual thoughts he didn't say if only humans hadn't burned so much fossil fuel maybe the glacier wouldn't have receded he didn't say what could I have done to head off climate change.
Surveys have found that about half of all Americans don't worry that much about a warming planet psychologists Neil Rose and Kathleen Woz think that our responses to challenges like climate change might be very different from our responses to a skiing accident because climate change doesn't have the four triggers that set off counterfactual thinking. Take what Terri told me for instance he didn't see what was happening to the glacier as something negative even if it all melts it's not going to be the end of the world. They could be changes species could some species could be advantage some species could be disadvantaged the ecosystem is changing you're gonna have flooding you could have weather events right they could be consequences that affect you and I yes but like I say it's so far in the future I'm not worried about it. Two counterfactuals are triggered when you can see something happen that's out of the ordinary.
Terri doesn't see anything unusual about the receding glacier you know everything goes around in circles I guess so you know it starts at one place and goes back to the beginning at some point so not my lifetime but I'm sure at some point we're probably having another ice age. Three counterfactual spring to mind when you can see how you yourself or some other person played a central role in what happened in Terri's case I personally don't think it's something that man's doing that's making that melt. And four seeing a direct connection between an outcome and what someone did or didn't do tends to produce counterfactuals cause and effect need to be side by side. In the case of climate change the causes are diffused and distant and the worst effects have not yet happened obviously even if you accept the reality of climate change you can't lay the responsibility for it at the feet of any one person.
The key difference between these two different stories is the immediacy of the negative outcome. It's something either very abrupt and very very severe that happens to you at a particular moment versus something that unfolds more generally more slowly and is not that much of a direct impact on your life. And so the difference between these two is that the first one will activate a lot of counterfactual thoughts focusing on your own action. The second one is just more diffuse and perhaps is going to be involved with a bit more fatalism just feeling like well this is the way things are and there's not much I can do.
If counterfactual thinking tends to lead us to act an absence of counterfactual thinking can keep us from seeing what we can do. Well it's just like earthquakes and floods and hurricanes there are just all part of what's going on. You can't control it you can't change it. The retreat of the Mendenhall Glacier is not in itself proof of climate change but when scientists zoom out and look at all the data their consensus is that climate changes happening and that its consequences are all around us.
Human actions are tied to the problems that have already struck. Human inaction is directly implicated in the disasters that are to come. Kathleen Woe says from a psychological perspective the difficulty in coming up with counterfactuals for climate change can easily produce apathy. We don't really know what kind of a role each and every one of us plays in all of that and so it makes her just psychologically very kind of messy understanding of who's responsible what should we do and it's very hard to understand the results or even know when they may come about they may not even come about in our lifetimes which makes it even more psychologically remote.
In Laura's case she can see the one specific thing she could have done to prevent Jack's death but it's very hard to see a cause and effect relationship to you know throwing another soda can and recycling bin and seeing the temperature of the oceans not rise nearly as fast. Not all environmental problems are like climate change. Some do trigger counterfactual thinking and these lead us to act. Terry Lambert wasn't worried about climate change but when there was an environmental problem close to home one that was wiping out a species of mollusks he literally came to the rescue.
He used to dive off the Anacapa Islands in California. They were having a problem with the black abalone being extinct and some of it and I did several dives and helped replace the abalone. We built habitat for them and put them in there. So the local environment yeah I've had my hands on it and you know you do what you can do.
You do what you can do. That's pretty much the opposite of what he said about the Shrinkin Glacier. Yeah it's receding faster but what are you going to do? It's telling that Terry felt compelled to do something about the local issue.
He could see his role in the solution. This might be a hint at a way around the kings and our counterfactual thinking. If unconscious rules keep us from thinking about counterfactuals when they could be useful we might have to consciously choose to open the door to these thoughts. I think it's just a simple conversational style where you could just directly ask what could you personally have done differently.
How could you have made things better? How could you have performed a more positive action? And so I think it is a reasonable thing to bring up on a conversation. Other times we may need to talk ourselves out of engaging in counterfactuals.
For Laura it does make a great deal of sense that she's doing that although of course there's there's really no way that she has culpability or responsibility here. My journey definitely continues. I definitely was taking less risk and skiing much more conservatively but I still had such powerful connections with the mountains because that's where I connected with Jack. Like every useful feature in the brain, counterfactuals don't always bring to mind when they're needed.
Sometimes they show up when they're not useful and they produce unnecessary pain. Other times they fail to appear, fostering apathy. Sometimes the path you wish you'd pursued is just to mirage. Other times there was a turn you needed to take.
All you had to do was see it. This week's show was produced by Raina Cohen and Path Shaw. It was edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Thomas Liu and Laura Corral.
We also bid a foreign goodbye this week to our incredible intern, Camilla Vargas Restrepo. Camilla is one of those rare people whose talent and drive are coupled with a truly kind and caring nature. Thank you Camilla for all that you brought to Hit&Brain and thanks also for those amazing little coconut treats you brought us from Bogota. We're gonna miss you.
Our unsung hero this week is Carlos Chavez on NPR's IT App Steam. A few weeks ago we were trying to publish our podcast and the computer we were using crashed. Rebooting it didn't help. The software simply wouldn't mix down our episode.
Carlos spent hours on the phone with us troubleshooting the problem and brainstorming solutions. With an animated computer programs inexplicably stopped working, having a human around to lend a sympathetic ear can make everything a lot easier. Thank you Carlos. I'm Shankar Vietanton and this is NPR.
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