How does our brain differentiate between what needs immediate attention and what can wait? Researchers have delved into how our brain retains and adjusts the goals we set on a daily basis. Their study sheds light on the variations in processing immediate versus distant goals, both in behavior and brain function. These findings, published in the journal Nature Communications, may offer insights into psychiatric conditions, especially depression, which can hinder goal-setting abilities.
Throughout the day, we establish various goals: picking up the kids from school in an hour, preparing dinner in three hours, scheduling a doctor’s appointment in five days, or tending to the lawn in a week. These goals, ranging from urgent to less pressing, are continuously reevaluated based on daily events.
Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Icahn School of Medicine in New York have investigated how the brain stores and updates these goals. They focused on the hippocampus, a brain region crucial for episodic memory, responsible for encoding and recalling personal experiences within their emotional, spatial, and temporal contexts.
Imagining a Mission to Mars Inside an MRI Scanner
To explore this, neuroscientists involved 31 participants in a hypothetical 4-year space mission to Mars, where they had to complete survival tasks like caring for their space helmet, exercising, and consuming specific foods at different points during the journey.
As participants progressed through the mission, they were repeatedly given the same tasks and asked to place them as past, present, or future goals. People had to balance tasks of varying timeframes and adjust their priorities as the mission unfolded.
Highlighting Immediate Goals
The researchers analyzed each individual’s response times to identify tasks set in the past, present, or future. It was observed that tasks requiring immediate attention were recognized faster compared to those for the distant future. This indicates a bias towards addressing current needs promptly over future requirements, with a delay in recalling past or future goals.
The study also explored brain activity using high-resolution MRI scans. When retrieving present-related information, the posterior hippocampus was active, while recalling past or future goals activated the anterior region.
These findings are compelling as they suggest that while dealing with current goals, our brain focuses on specifics, whereas for future projections or past memories, a more general representation suffices.
This research emphasizes the critical role of timeframes in personal goal-setting and offers implications for understanding psychiatric conditions like depression. Individuals with depression may struggle with defining precise goals and perceive more barriers to achieving them. Exploring how their perception of goal distance influences their optimism about success could offer new therapeutic approaches.
