STUDY GUIDE Introduction 00 Journey to Elsewhen 01 The View from in Here 02 Outside Looking In 03 In the Blindspot of the Mind's Eye 04 The Hound of Silence 05 The Future is Now 06 Time Bombs 07 Paradise Glossed 08 Immune to Reality 09 Once Bitten 10 Reporting Live from Tomorrow 11 Afterword 12 Printable Version	The Future is Now In Chapter 6, I describe the second mistake we make when we try to estimate our future happiness. People gauge how happy a particular future will make them by imagining it, and then asking themselves how they feel when they do. The problem is that people get their current feelings and their future feelings all mixed up. We buy too much when we shop on an empty stomach because we can't separate how much we want the potato chips right now from how much we will want them tomorrow. Psychologist Leaf van Boven and decision-scientist George Loewenstein explain how and why this happens. We gauge the goodness of the future (and hence the wisdom of our decision) by asking how we feel when we imagine it, and the neurologist Antonio Damasio describes a case of a brain-damaged man who has no feelings when he imagines the future, which makes it nearly impossible for him to decide what to do next. Question We apparently can't do without our prefeelings, and yet, using them leaves us susceptible to a variety of errors. Is there a way to use them more wisely? Readings "A modern Phineas Gage" in Descartes' Error, Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, A.R. Damasio, (New York: Avon Books, 1994) 34-51. "Cross-Situational Projection," L. Van Boven, and G. Loewenstein in The Self in Social Perception, ed. M. Alicke, D. Dunning, and J. Krueger (New York: Psychology Press, in press).
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