A brain scan finding that explains a habit almost everyone has
Your Brain Treats the Person You'll Become Like a Complete Stranger
In 2009, researchers scanned people's brains while they thought about themselves ten years in the future. The pattern looked less like the person thinking, and more like a stranger.
In 2009, a research team led by Hal Ersner-Hershfield at Stanford put people into an fMRI scanner and asked them to think about three things: themselves right now, themselves ten years from now, and a stranger. They expected the future-self scans to look like the present-self scans, just a little different. **They did not.** The future-self activity looked far more like the stranger.
The region most affected, the rostral anterior cingulate cortex, normally lights up more for yourself than for other people. In this study, for many participants it barely lit up more for future-you than it did for someone they had never met.
The people with the biggest gap between present-self and future-self activity were also the least patient in a separate money task, the ones least willing to wait for a bigger reward later. Your brain's confidence that future-you is really you, it turned out, predicts how well you plan for that person.
1. The scan that found a stranger where your future self should be
Ersner-Hershfield's team, publishing in the journal Judgment and Decision Making, used the scans to test something psychologists had long suspected: that people do not automatically treat their future self as, well, themselves. **The brain has to be convinced.**
For some participants that conviction was strong. For others, thinking about the person they would become in a decade produced almost the same neural signature as thinking about a celebrity or an acquaintance. Same brain, same person, and still, a stranger.
Your brain does not treat 'future you' as a fact. It treats it as a guess, and for some people that guess never quite feels true.
2. Seeing the stranger's face changed what people did
Two years later, Hershfield and colleagues Daniel Goldstein and William Sharpe published a follow-up in the Journal of Marketing Research. They used age-progression software to show college-age participants a rendered image of their own face at around 70 years old, then asked them to allocate a hypothetical paycheck between spending and retirement savings.
People who saw their own aged face put roughly **twice as much toward retirement** as people who only saw their current face or a stranger's aged face. Nothing about their finances changed. Only one thing changed: future-them stopped being a hypothetical and started having a face.
The fix was not a lecture about saving money. It was making a hypothetical person real enough to plan for.
3. The same gap explains why the stories keep waiting
Most people are not putting off a phone call because they do not care. They are putting it off because their 90-year-old self, and the grandchild who will wish they had asked one more question, still feel like strangers: real in theory, not yet real enough to act for today.
**This is the same gap the age-progression study closed, just pointed at a different decision.** A voice on a recording does for your family's memory of you what an aged photo did for a retirement account: it turns a someday into a someone. And it does not take a lab, a scan, or special software. It takes a call you already have planned this week, with Ari asking the questions that make it count.
You do not need to picture the stranger you might become. You can let Ari record the version of you that is real right now, before it has to be imagined at all.
I read about the retirement study and it clicked for me, I had been putting off recording anything because it felt like it was for some future version of my kids, not the ones I have now. We used our Sunday call with Ari instead of waiting for that to feel urgent.Marcus, 61, recording his story with his daughter on their weekly call
What you get with LifeScribe
- No lab, no scan, no special software: just a call you already have planned.
- Ari asks the questions that make the person you are right now real to the people who come after you.
- Grounded in decades of research on how we plan, or fail to plan, for our future selves.
- The recordings become a keepsake in your own voice, not a hypothetical someday.
Start free, with nothing to lose
Try it on your very next call this week, free. Nothing to install, nothing to learn. If it does not make the future feel a little more real, you have lost nothing but a few minutes.
**The researchers found that people who feel the least connected to their future self are also the ones least likely to plan for that person.** The pull to wait for someday is not a character flaw, it is a predictable brain quirk, and it does not fix itself. The next ordinary phone call is where you can act on it anyway.
Make the future less of a stranger, starting with your own voice.
Pick a call you already have planned this week. Let Ari help you ask the questions that make it count.
Questions grandparents ask us
What did the 2009 brain scan study actually find?
Researchers led by Hal Ersner-Hershfield scanned people's brains while they thought about their current self, their future self ten years out, and a stranger. For many participants, the future-self activity pattern looked more like the stranger pattern than the present-self pattern, in a brain region that usually favors thinking about yourself.
Is this the same study as the age-progression retirement research?
No, it is the study that motivated it. The brain scan finding came first, in 2009. The age-progression study, published in 2011 in the Journal of Marketing Research, tested a fix: showing people an aged rendering of their own face.
Did showing people their older face really change their behavior?
Yes. Participants who viewed an age-progressed image of themselves allocated roughly twice as much of a hypothetical paycheck to retirement savings as those who saw their current face or someone else's aged face.
What does this have to do with recording family stories?
The same psychological gap, a future self or a future listener who does not feel fully real yet, is part of why people put off recording their voice and stories. Making that future person concrete, a real grandchild, a real 90-year-old you, is what closes the gap.
How does LifeScribe fit into this?
Ari asks the questions that turn someday I should record something into an actual recording, on a call you already have planned, so the future does not have to stay hypothetical.
https://getlifescribeapp.com/blog/your-brain-treats-future-you-like-a-stranger