Summary: Scientists have discovered how the brain prioritizes immediate and distant goals. Their study found that the hippocampus processes immediate goals faster and differently than future goals.
This insight could help understand psychiatric disorders, such as depression, that affect goal-setting abilities. The findings reveal fundamental differences in brain activity and behavior related to goal preference.
Key facts:
- Hippocampal activity: Immediate goals activate the posterior hippocampus, while future goals engage the anterior region.
- Reaction times: Targets to be reached immediately are recognized faster than distant ones.
- Implications for disorders: The insights could help understand and treat psychiatric disorders like depression.
Source: University of Geneva
How does our brain distinguish between urgent and less urgent goals?
Scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Icahn School of Medicine in New York investigated how our brain remembers and adjusts the goals we set daily.
Their study reveals differences in the way we process immediate and distant goals, both at the behavioral and brain levels.
These discoveries, described in the journal The nature of communicationcould have significant implications for understanding psychiatric disorders, particularly depression, which may impede the formulation of clear goals.
During the day, we set goals to achieve: pick up the kids from school in an hour, make dinner in three hours, make a doctor’s appointment in five days, or mow the lawn in a week. These goals, both urgent and less urgent, are constantly being redefined according to the events that happen during the day.
Researchers from UNIGE and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mont Sinai Hospital in New York studied how the brain remembers and updates goals to be achieved. More specifically, how the brain sorts which goals require immediate attention and which do not.
Their study focused on a specific brain region, the hippocampus, because of its established role in episodic memory. It is responsible for encoding, consolidating and retrieving personally experienced information, integrating their emotional, spatial and temporal context.
An imaginary mission to Mars, at the time of the magnetic resonance examination
Neuroscientists asked 31 people to project themselves into an imaginary 4-year space mission to Mars, which required them to achieve a series of goals essential to their survival (space helmet care, exercise, eating certain foods, etc.). Mission objectives varied by when they were to be achieved, with different tasks for each of the four years of the journey.
As participants progressed through the missions, they were presented with the same objectives. They were then asked to indicate whether these were past, present, or future goals.
As participants progressed through time, the meaning of these goals changed: goals originally planned for the future became current needs, while current needs became past goals. In this way, participants had to drive multiple targets at different distances over time and update their priorities as their mission progressed.
Prioritizing immediate goals
The team tracked each individual’s reaction times to determine whether the task was to be completed in the present, past, or future.
“Goals to be achieved immediately are recognized more quickly than goals to be achieved in the distant future. This different processing of stored information reveals the priority that is given to needs in the present over needs in the distant future.
“It takes more time to mentally travel back in time to retrieve past and future goals,” explains Alison Montagrin, research and teaching fellow at UNIGE’s Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Basic Neuroscience, a former postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School. of Medicine and first author of the study.
The researchers also investigated whether the differences were also evident at the brain level. Very high-resolution MRI images have revealed that the posterior region of the hippocampus is activated when presence information is acquired. On the other hand, when recalling past goals or goals to be achieved in the future, the anterior region is activated.
”These results are particularly interesting because previous studies have shown that when we use our episodic memory or our spatial memory, the anterior hippocampus is involved in retrieving general information, while the posterior part deals with details.
“It will therefore be interesting to investigate whether – unlike immediate goals – projections into the future or recall of a past goal do not require specific details, but a general representation will suffice,” concludes the researcher.
This research shows that the time scale plays a crucial role in how people set personal goals. This could have important implications for understanding psychiatric disorders such as depression.
Indeed, people suffering from depression may have difficulty creating specific goals and foresee more obstacles to achieving their goals. Investigating whether these people perceive the distance to their goals differently—which might lead them to be pessimistic about their chances of success—could open a therapeutic avenue.
About this news from neuroscience research
Author: Antoine Guenot
Source: University of Geneva
Contact: Antoine Guenot – University of Geneva
Picture: Image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“The hippocampus separates the present from past and future goals” Alison Montagrin et al. The nature of communication
Abstract
The hippocampus separates the present from past and future goals
Our brains adeptly navigate goals in different time frames, distinguishing between immediate needs and needs from the past or future.
The hippocampus is a region known for supporting mental time travel and organizing information along its longitudinal axis, moving from detailed posterior representations to generalized anterior ones.
This study investigates the role of the hippocampus in target discrimination over time: whether the hippocampus encodes time regardless of detail or abstraction, and whether the hippocampus preferentially activates its anterior region for temporally distant targets (past and future) and its posterior region for immediate targets. .
We use a space-based 7T functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment in 31 participants to investigate how the hippocampus encodes the temporal distance of targets.
During a simulated mission to Mars, we find that the hippocampus tracks targets only by temporal proximity. We show that past and future goals activate the left anterior hippocampus, whereas present goals engage the left posterior hippocampus.
This suggests that the hippocampus maps targets using time stamps and extends its long axis system to include the organization of temporal targets.