We have a large frontal lobe so that we can look into the future, we look into the future so that we can make predictions about it, we make predictions about it so that we can control it - but why do we want to control it at all? Why not jus tlet the future unfold as it will and experience it as it does? Why not be here now and there then? There are two answers.
One surprisingly right answer is that people find it gratifying to exercise control - not just for the futures it buys them, but for the exercise itself. Being effective - chaning things, influencing things, making things happen 0 is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seem to be naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control.
Our desire to control is powerful, and the feeling of being in conrol is so rewaring, that people often act as though they can control the uncontrollable.
We are the apes that learned to look forward because doing so enables us to shop among the many fates that might befall us and select the best one. Other animals must experience an event in order to learn about its pleasures and pains, but our pwoers of foresight allow us to imagine that hwich has not yet happned and hence spare ourselves the hard lessons of experience. 引自第20页