Our whole life revolves around completing tasks, almost every minute of our time is allocated, and how conscious we are of completing tasks may depend on our constitution or methods. We can write lists, set phone alerts, and use Google calendars, but we have to somehow organize when we have to do what, or else chaos can take over our lives. Especially if we are family members or multi-shift workers.
Do we weigh tasks?
Daily goals and priorities can change throughout the day, in fact, if we notice, on a day that is well planned, set and organized in advance, tasks are usually more easily flipped. Perhaps we should refer to Murphy’s Law here, but whatever the case, the point is that we have to achieve the most important goals, whether it is cooking, transporting the children, taking care of the parents, a deadline at work, or anything else. Not everything can be flipped, but some of the less important things can be postponed to the next day.
How does the brain store and update goals, and how does it decide which goals require immediate attention and which don’t? Brain researchers have focused on the hippocampus, because this area is responsible for encoding, consolidating, and retrieving memories and information about our lives. Emotional, spatial, and temporal context are also incorporated here.
Scientists from the University of Geneva, UNIGE and the Icahn School of Medicine in New York have shown how each region of our brain is activated during our planned activities, both immediate and distant. The brain researchers found that there are behavioral and brain differences in the way immediate and distant goals are processed. The study could be a milestone in understanding psychological disorders, especially depression, because it is difficult to formulate and achieve goals in the latter.
the To study In a related experiment, 31 people were asked to imagine themselves on a fictional 4-year mission to Mars, where they had to complete important tasks. The mission goals varied according to the time they had to achieve over the four years of the mission. As the participants progressed through the mission, the goals initially planned for the next year became the present, and the tasks of the present became the goals of the past. They therefore had to achieve multiple goals at different time points and update their priorities over time. When the reaction time for goals that were immediately achievable was examined, it was found that they could be recognized faster than those that would be achieved in the distant future.
Different processing of stored information shows that the needs of the present take priority over the needs of the future.
Brain researchers have also found that it takes extra time to mentally travel backward or forward in time and find past and future goals.
High-resolution MRI images showed that when retrieving information about the present, the hippocampus in the posterior region is activated, while when remembering past or future goals, the anterior region is activated.
Previous studies have shown that when we use our episodic memory (which is part of long-term memory responsible for learning new knowledge) or our spatial memory, the front part of the hippocampus is involved in retrieving general information, while the back part deals with details.
Therefore, the time scale plays a crucial role in setting goals. This new information may help treat depression because patients have serious problems setting goals and objectives. They perceive more obstacles than actually exist. Investigating whether people with depression view their goal dimension differently, making them more pessimistic, may lead to new treatments.
(Cover image: Solskin/Getty Images Hungary)
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