People like Darlene who are particularly good at managing their attention tend to share certain characteristics. One is a propensity to create pictures in their minds of what they expect to see. These people tell themselves stories about what’s going on as it occurs. They narrate their own experiences within their heads. They are more likely to answer questions with anecdotes rather than simple responses. They say when they daydream, they’re often imagining future conversations. They visualize their days with more specificity than the rest of us do. Psychologists have a phrase for this kind of habitual forecasting: “ creating mental models.” Understanding how people build mental models has become one of the most important topics in cognitive psychology. All people rely on mental models to some degree. We all tell ourselves stories about how the world works, whether we realize we’re doing it or not. But some of us build more robust models than others. We envision the conversations we’re going to have with more specificity, and imagine what we are going to do later that day in greater detail. As a result, we’re better at choosing where to focus and what to ignore. The secret of people like Darlene is that they are in the habit of telling themselves stories all the time. They engage in constant forecasting. They daydream about the future and then, when life clashes with their imagination, their attention gets snagged. That helps explain why Darlene noticed the sick baby. She was in the habit of imagining what the babies in her unit ought to look like. Then, when she glanced over and the bloody Band-Aid, distended belly, and mottled skin didn’t match the image in her mind, the spotlight in her head swung toward the child’s bassinet.
Building mental models, envisioning the future and visualizing how things connect to each other are things that we should be doing to improve the way we do things.
In some sense, daydreaming about the future might feel like a unproductive thing to do. However, what Duhigg mentions is that your ability to visualize more specifics and scenarios in your “daydreams” would better prepare you to face unknown situations and react accordingly.
Its good to occasionally live in our own heads, absorbing information and testing it with our theory of how things work. A world with increasing external stimuli in the form of mobile devices and computers makes it difficult to daydream in more details. Nevertheless, we need to create that mental space for ourselves if we intend to visualize and build our robust mental models.
