Harvard’s Dan Gilbert discussed a very new finding in the Memory and Imagination pres conference Saturday: The roads not taken don’t actually haunt us.

Gilbert is one of a number of neuro- and cognitive scientists studying the interplay of memory (of past events) and imagination (of future possibilities). It’s recently been discovered that these two processes use virtually the same brain circuits, as discussed at the press conference by Daniel Schacter of Harvard and Eleanor Maguire of University College, London. But Gilbert has been looking at the interplay from a slightly different angle. One of the things memory is for, he says, is to help us pick good futures and avoid the bad ones. Yet we’re remarkably poor at doing that. You think that winning the lottery will make you really, really happy for a really long time—and then it doesn’t. You think that going blind will make you really miserable—and then when that happens, you adapt and get on with life.

What Gilbert has found is a new mechanism for why our imaginations fail us this way: the alternatives to an event have a profound effect on how much you think you will enjoy it—but almost no effect on how much you actually do. In one experiment, for example, half the subjects were offered a potato chip while they were sitting in a room full of chocolate. Faced with a more desirable alternative, they said they felt so-so about eating the potato chip. But the other half of the subjects were offered the potato chip while surrounded with canned haggis and sardines. Not so attractive. They said the chip would taste great. But in both cases, once the chip was in their mouths—salty, greasy and crunchy—the alternatives faded away, and both groups said they enjoyed the potato chips equally. The sensory reality overwhelmed the imaginary one.

Harvard’s Dan Gilbert discussed a very new finding in the Memory and Imagination pres conference Saturday: The roads not taken don’t actually haunt us.

Gilbert is one of a number of neuro- and cognitive scientists studying the interplay of memory (of past events) and imagination (of future possibilities). It’s recently been discovered that these two processes use virtually the same brain circuits, as discussed at the press conference by Daniel Schacter of Harvard and Eleanor Maguire of University College, London. But Gilbert has been looking at the interplay from a slightly different angle. One of the things memory is for, he says, is to help us pick good futures and avoid the bad ones. Yet we’re remarkably poor at doing that. You think that winning the lottery will make you really, really happy for a really long time—and then it doesn’t. You think that going blind will make you really miserable—and then when that happens, you adapt and get on with life.

What Gilbert has found is a new mechanism for why our imaginations fail us this way: the alternatives to an event have a profound effect on how much you think you will enjoy it—but almost no effect on how much you actually do. In one experiment, for example, half the subjects were offered a potato chip while they were sitting in a room full of chocolate. Faced with a more desirable alternative, they said they felt so-so about eating the potato chip. But the other half of the subjects were offered the potato chip while surrounded with canned haggis and sardines. Not so attractive. They said the chip would taste great. But in both cases, once the chip was in their mouths—salty, greasy and crunchy—the alternatives faded away, and both groups said they enjoyed the potato chips equally. The sensory reality overwhelmed the imaginary one.