Jane McGonigal - Imaginable

Notes on Jane McGonigal's Imaginable.

I first learned of her on "Cool Tools" podcast.  Then I ordered her book from the library.

Book Notes

your brain is literally processing [past emotionally charged moments] from a more insightful vantage point...  taking a mental time trip ten years to the future can help you feel "unstuck" emotionally. You momentarily get a break from your normal mode of thinking and feeling and get to float above it all, like a satellite looking down from space. (15) [from Chapter "Take a Ten-Year Trip" which is about the benefits of thinkin

a major benefit of switching from first person to third person is that it's a huge empathy booster. In scientific language, we "reduce our egocentric biases" and become "less ego-identified" -- which means we get our of own own heads and can start to see things the way someone else might. We're better able to consider that others might have different wants, needs, values, or ideas than we do. (15) [In the context of the benefit of 

I'd invite them them to take a quick mental time trip with me, so they could imagine their fvery first time riding in a completley autonomou vehicle.  "Imagine it as vividly as you can," i say o them. "What color is the car?" Where are you going? How comfortable is the seat? Is anyone with you?" ... "In one word, how would you describe the emotion you're feeling during this first ride?"... People predict they would feel excited, nervous, awed, terrified, curious, nauseated, grateful, thrilled, confused, vigilant, asleep, free.  The words they share run the full gamut of positive and negative emotions, with no consensus whatsoever.... With this kind of insight into other people's imagined futures, it becomes much hard to hold any strong opinion about self-driving cars too tightly. [19]

Lots of young people aren't so exited about getting their driver's license.  "What do I take from this data? Freedom clearly has a wider range of meaning young people today when it comes to cars -- not just personal mobility or control over a machine but also freedom from debt, freedom from feeling guilty about the environmental impacts, freedom from anxiety about risky activities." (21)

Rule #1: Take a Ten-Year Trip.  When you think about the future, focus your imagination ten years out.  A ten-year timeline will lift the ceiling on your imagination. . .  increase your empathy, set more optimisitic goals... [G]ive yourself a ten-year deadline, make a ten-year resolution, create an even on your calendar for ten year from now, or talk to others about how the world might be dfferent ten years from now.  It will change how you think and feel today.

Chapter 2: Learn to Time Travel

For the next thirty seconds, I want you to imagine yourself waking up tomorrow morning. Try to picture it in your mind or describe it to yourself as clearly as possible.   What room or space are you in? What wakes you up -- is it an alarm, the sunlight, someone nudging you or calling you? Is it light out or still dark? Is there anyone with you? Which side of the bed are you on?  What kind of mood are you in? What the very first thing you do, now that you're awake?  Now do it one year from now.  Is there something different with your room? Are you physically changed in some way? Would you like to imagine waking up in a complegely different mood than you expect to wake up in tomorrow? What might put you in this mood? Now ten years.  Where are you ten years from today? What's around you? What do you see, hear, smell, and feel?  Whoe else is here? What's the first thing on your mind as you wake up?  What do you have planned for the day?  How are you physically different in this future?  Try not to make this future scene a total fantasy. Stay grounded in what you feel is genuinely realistic and possible for you. (this is EFT - episoidc future thinking. it's a decision-making, planning, and motivational tool).  Is this a world I want to wake up in? What do I need to be ready for it? Should I try to change what I'm doing today to make this future more or less likely? (Scene construction involves "semantics" - the rules of the future.. "In a world where... In a land where... In a time when...  (college is free, cars are banned). 

EFT: 1. [Build the scene] Where exactly am I in my future -- who else is here, and what's around me? 2. [Make the rules] what's true in this version of reality that isn't true today? 3. [Detect opportunity] What do I really want in this future moment, and how will I get it? 4. [Pre-feel the future] How do I feel, now that I'm here?

EFT linked with mental well-being... you learn to control your imagination.  People with depression tend to imagine future with vague details.  They can't can't vividly anticipate pleasure. They don't feel motivated by possible future events.  They can't envision their future as being different from today.  Imagination gets stuck and leaves them literally with nothing to look forward to.

EFT helps creativity significantly (when people are asked "imagine yourself meeting a friend for breakfast a year form today or imagine yourself taking a walk ten years from today. (35)

Episodic memory - construct 10 years ago scene.  How has your life changed in the past decade? Is there anything that's true about your life today that would have surprised the past you? 

Chapter 3: Play with Future Scenarios

Future Scenario #1: Thank You Day.  Everyone gets $2000 to spend.  $1000 must be gifted to essential and frontline workers.  Moment of choice: do you choose to participate? who will you send thank you dollars to, and why? (decision points are engaging to participants and provide quick moment of agency)

Futur Scenario #2: Have You Checked Your Asteroid Forecast? 5% chance that asteroid will fall in your path 5 years from now.  (ring of impact). Moment of choice: Who do you want to talk to? What thoughts would you share? what options would you discuss?  (This scenario sounds like a Hollywood blockbuster... which is intentional... "To convince our brains to do the hard work of imagining hard-to-imagine futures, we have to moe our of a state of boredom, distraction, or indifference and into a mindset of high interest, curiosity, and attention."   But this is akin to climate change disaster... sea-level rising (something we should be tackling!)

Chapter 4: Be Ridiculous, at First

Dator's law: any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.  We can suspend disbelief if we are willing to take in information that challenges our assumptions about what can and cannot change.  

Game:  Stump the futurist.  "What is one thing you are nearly 100 percent confident will be pretty much exactly the  same ten years from now?" The futurist finds "clues/signs" that something along these lines could happen.

Future Scenario #5: The Global Emergency Sperm Drive.  Birthrate is down 30%.  Moment of Choice: do you donate your genetic material to the GESB? why or why not?  IF you are not able to, what do you encourage others to do?  Whose input would you need tohelp you make your decision?

Angus Fletcher.  The God's-Eye vantage reduces actiivty in our brain's deep emotional zones, acting as a neural shock absorber against the traumatic events before us.  Fletcher is interest in how novels, plays, and movies can give readers and audiences that same beneficial feeling of foreknowledge... It shifts our tragic feelings of helplessness into a psychological senseation of helpfulness.  Book Title: Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature. 2021.

"Imagine the world is dealing with a dangerous respiratory pandemic, with no vaccine or cure. How do you use your unique skills and personal strengths to help?" (from Superstruct simulation) (my emphasis)

Chapter 5: Turn the World Upside Down

One Hundre Ways Anything Can be Different in the Future.  Pick a topic, like work, or food, or leanring.  Then you list one hundred things that are true about it today.  The simpler or more obvious the fact, the better.  Next, you rewrite each fact, one by one, so that ten years from now the opposite it true -- no matter how ridiculous at first the new ideas sound.  Finally, you look for clues, or evidence of change already happening today, that these ideas are plausible and realistic. (88) (author does "shoes")

Free shoes, shoe shaming, post-traumatic shoe sleeping... any of these ridiculous, at first, ideas could inspire a mental time trip.  In one word, how would you feel in that future? What are the risks? What are the opportunities? What actions could you take to make this world better?  This is the final challenge of the OHWACBDitF.

Questions: Which fact about today do you think is most important to challenge going forward? Which of the possible upsdie-down world futures would you most want to wake up in? Ten years from now, what actions would you be proud to hae taken today to make this future more likely? Which of the possible upside-down futures would you most want to avoid?  Ten years from now, what actions would you be proud to have taken today to make this future less likely?

Make a list of at least five things that are true about your life today. Then rewrite them so that the opposite is now true. Whatever alternative pops into your mind first, go for it.  For example, I wrote "I'm an American citizen," "I have two daughters," I'm a writer," I sleep at night," and I had flying," and then I flipped those facts... "I'm a British citizen," "I have three daughters," "I manage a doughnut shop," "I sleep during the day," and "I love flying"...  whatever you imagine, just by taking these alternative possibilities about your life seriously enough to simulatie them in your ind, you're improving your ability to take in new ideas.  You're getting better at examining ridiculous, at first, ideas for plausibility and potential benefits. And you may find, as I do, that taking a few minutes to freely imagine waking up in a completely diffeernt life gives you a subtle, but noticeable, sensation of freedom and creativity today. (99)

Future Scenario #4: Medicine Bag.  Free fresh food.Moment of Choice: What do you fill your bag with?How do you feel about this future?   (this is an example of a better world)

Chapter 6: Look for Clues

Every form of creativity has its own raw material. For futurists the raw material is clues. We collect, combine, and build future scenarios out of clues to how the future might be different.

To find future clues, you need to develop a new way of looking at the world around you, a way to spot weird stuff that others overlook. You have to be constantly honing in on things you haven't previously encountered, things that make you say, "Huh, that's strange," and "Hmmm... I. wonder why that's happening," and "Wow, this is weird, and I want to understand it better."  

A signal of change is a concrete example of how the world could one day be different.  It might be a tiny change happening in just one town, or just one school, or just one company, or just one person's life.  William Gibson famously stated, "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed."  

"Mindar" Buddhist robotic priest.

Philosopher Sam Keen: "To be on a quest is nothing more or less than to ecome an asker of questions."  Investigating a signal of change is like being on a quest. The purpose of the quest is not to predict what the future will be; it's to ask question after question about what the future could be. (112)

"constellation collective"... along with fifty thousand other people, you pay a monthly fee to share in the costs of maintaining and lfying a fleet of illuminating drones, Once a month, you get thirty seconds of "airtime" to spell out any message or create any image you want in you local sky.  What do you do with your airtime? What message or image are you putting in the sky? What time do you schedule it for, and where will it appear? In one word, how do you feel when the drone creates your constellation?

Find signals can be as simple as doing a quick news or social media search.  "future of prison reform, future of pets.  Throw in terms like innovation experiment, trend, weird, strange, creative idea, scientific study.  Or, ask people: what new things they're seeing in the world that excite or worry them.  What's happening in the world that you wish more people were paying attention to? (ask: what's driving the change?)

Chapter 7: Choose Your Future Forces

Let's start by acknowledging that there's no "back to normal" future now. Kathi Vian

A future force is a Megatrend..  extreme heat from climate change, post-pandemic trauma, radicalization of young people via social media, facial recognition technology, cyberattacks, infectitious diseases, WMD, social unrest due to lack of economic opportunity

When you think of a worrisome thing to come... don't worry.  worry later. Instead, "use this time now to identify one thing you could do to help one person affected by this force, now or in the future.  Keep it small.  

Pema Chodron.  "Depsite what we might think much of the time and what the news programs imply, we all wish to be sane and openhearted people We could take our wish to be more sane and kind and put it in a very large contesxt. We could expand it into a dsesire to help all other people, to help the whole world. But we need a place to start. We can't simply begin with the whole world. We need to begin by reaching out tot the people who come into our own lives -- our family members, our neighbors, our coworkers."

from "Smile at Fear" the best Buddhist Writing of 2012.

Johns HOpkins Univesity first aid course taught online.  (mental health support skills)

Scenario #5: Don't Face Search Me (151)

Future Force Friday. picking a few future forces to track of the next few your years.  Do it once a month.  Search: "facial recognition" and any of these words: advances, breakthroughs, ethics, regulation, dilemma, challenges, risks, opportunities, benefits, new study, new app, innovation, unexpected, unintended, forecast, prediction

World Economic Forum: Global Risks Report

Future Scenario #6: Have You Declared Your Challenge Yet?  Students and lifelong learners are getting ready to "declare their challenge" like they used to declare their major.  Here's were most popular challenges: climate change, good health and well-being, sustainable cities, gender equality, no poverty, racial justice and equity, ethical technology and innovation, peace, justice, and strong institutions, zero hunger, responsible consumption and production.  Moment of choice: what cahllenge are you going to declare? Why? Whom do you talk to, oto help you amke your decision?  (if you work at a college... MOC: what new challenge did you help design? why did you feel it was important? can you imagine what types of classes might be offered, what skills would be taught, and what projects would be completed by students in this challenge?

Chapter 8: Practice Hard Empathy

example of men encircling/protecting woman.  What would it be if in your own life you were expected to live by this custom? Can you imagine being considered so in need of protection that you relatives created a human chain around you whenever you went somewhere you might encounter strangers? what if you were expected to be a protector? To be clear: do not try to imagine that you are one of those two young women in that rural village in India. Don't put yourself in their shoes, so to speak. Stay exactly who you are and exactly where you are. What you're changing in your mental simulation are the facts of your own life. If you live in NYC, then you're imaging that a human chain of protection around young, unmarried women is something you commonly see in NYC.  Who is protecting you? who are you protecting? whose hands are you holding? where are you going? how do you feel?

(why do this hard empathy? when we try to imagine what it would be like to be someone else, and we have no direct experience of that person's circumstances, we're not very good at it... we often get it wrong.  (this is also called "blended empathy") Far future training and hard empathy are mutually reinforcing. They are a kind of cross-training for your imagination.  

Two questions: 1. What keeps you up at night when you think about the future? 2. what makes you leap out of bed with excitement in the morning when you think about the futre?  (she has database with 9681 answers) (176)

Scenario: Day Zero (based on water shortage in Cape Town... 50 liters of water per day.  toilet = 10 liters

freewriting and writing is important in thinking about the future. Here she suggests that writing is an improvement over thinking only about it (from mental simulation to social simulation). Part III of the book, she promises, she'll invite us to "Spend Ten Days in the Future" or to write ten different journal entries from the future in response to some very suprising scenarios.  You'll be able to add you own stories online to a large-scale social simulaiton.... This kind of first-person storytelling is the "core mechanic" of all social simulations that we run at the Institute of the Future.

Future Scenario #7: The Great Disconnection.  All internet is ended in ten minutes. Journal Prompts: 1. Set the scene.  Where are you when you receive the emergency alert? If with someone, what do you say? Descirbe the moment in detail.  2. Feel the moment. What emotions? What physical sensations? What thoughts? 3. Try to make sense of it. What possible explanations do you come up with? 4. Name your worries. What problems might you have adapting to at least two weeks -- without internet? 5. Take action. What immediate action do you take after receving the alert? what plans do you start to make?

McGonigal goes on to "Could a future like the great disconnection really happen?" Let's take a look at the signals...

Scenario #8: Double Your Money (digibucks) (2 weeks of trading your cash for digibucks) (185)

Chapter 9: Heal the Deeper Disease

Future Scenario #9: The Howl

Part III - Imagine the Unimaginable

Chapter 10: Answer the Call to Adventure

242 - references that gamers feel more agency, set higher goals for themselves, less likely to ui in the face of real-world setbacks... more likely to ask for help and offer real-world assistance to family and friends... etc.

244 - Joseph Campbell's call to adventure "it's a challenge to embark on a journey to 'a zone unkown,' a 'fateful region of both treasure and danger,' somewhere that 'the familiar life horizon has been outgrown; the old concepts, ideals, and emotional patterns no longer fit.'   Sometimes there's a "refusal of the call"... Campbell: "In actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered." Refusal may occur when the potential hero is "wall in boredom, hard work, or 'culture'" - that is mentally stuk in the trappings of the status quo by the desire for the "present system... to be fixed and made secure."    McGonigal connects this to people who she works with in her business who refuse the urgent call to the future through distancing, denial, fatigue, or surrender.  (to me denial sounds like "minimizing")

What are you good at? What do you know a lot about? Wha communties are you a part of? What's something you're more passionate about than most. people? (skills and abilities, deep knowledge and passions, communities, values

Treat every future scenario as an invitation to imagine yourself doing something important Ask yourself three questions to better understand the opportunities for action: What will people want and need in the future? What kinds of people will be particularly helpful in this future? How will you use your uniques strengths to help others in this future? Consider how your values might motivate you todo hard things. Think of how you might serve or mobilize the communities you belong to.

Chapter 11: Simulate any Future you Want

274 artifacts from the future (to keep around your house during the simulation)

typically, during simulations, you post short narratives on an online discussion board ot "in the wild" (on currently existing social media with hashtags #AlphaGalCrisis

Much of what we encounter will be possibilities that our own brains would never conjure up.  Think of it as an exponential "noise injection" for our waking imagination, with data collected from many other brains and many other lived experiences. (277)

simulation called Feel the Future made for students and teachers.... videos. teacher instructions on 282.  the institute published a summary 22-pages of the most interesting themes and ideas.  www.facinghistory.org/face-future-game-videos 

How do you "play" a simulation game? "I mean actively think about the scenario at least once during the day, tell a quick story or capture an idea about how they might personally be affected by the scenario, and then share it with the group."  Best is 10 days.

I always encourage the host to do some curation and spotlighting of their favorite ideas and stories through the simulation, so that the most interesting stories and most surprising ideas get seen by all.  Simplest way is nto pick one "moment from the future" each day or each week to share with all the participants by pinned post or email. This helps create a common narrative and a universal experience.  

During Feel the Future, we posted a new guiding question on the online discussion forum to keep the conversation moving in different directions.  How might families and parents use FEel That? How might it be used in education? How might it be used in policing and criminal justice system? in art? storytelling? entertainment? romantic relationships? We shared this list of nearly 50 dif questions with teachers in advance.  

You can ask groups to collaborate together: What are 100 thing people will need help with in this future? What are 100 ways people will help each other in this future?

Why do it? (long list on 291) including "To create an opportunity for collective collaborative creativity, a way for many different people to tell a story together and share a vision of the future as a kind of public art."  or "To 'stress test' an idea that I think coujld create change for the beter: could it really work? whihch groups and communities am I leaving out?

Chapter 12

journal #1: write your bio/profile as the first entry in your journal (how old are you? where do you live? whom do you live with? how do you spend your days? what are your passions and interests?

journal #2: list your skills and abilities, deep knowledge and passions, communitiies, values

other journaling ideas: Your goal is to create a total of ten journal entries about daily life in this future. Try to imagine it in as much vivid and specific detail as you can: How is your life changing? What are you doing differently? What good things are happening? What problems have come up? Be sure to write from your own unique point of view -- about the places you know, the people you spend time with, the work and activities do, the causes you care about, the communities you belong to.

Be a journalist and report on what's going on....  sit in a park, a school, a workplace, a place of wor=ship, public transport, a sotore, a gym, restaurant, coffe shop, how do the scenario show up in this pace? what do you see, hear, feel

Find a small moment in your daily life where the scenario could show up -- something that's routine today

Imagine what's happening on social media

Think of special days you look forward to: holiday, tradition, vacation, party, etc.  how might the rules affect this occassion

To ask yourself ten years from now:  What's one "surprising" thing you saw coming and felt ready for? What's one important change you made, or helped make -- in your life, or in your community, or in the world? (357)