POSSIBILISTICS
Has it ever struck you, perhaps in the quiet hum of a Tuesday afternoon or in that strange, luminous clarity just before sleep, that the human mind is a profoundly unlikely entity? You might be contemplating the tax return or the leaky tap, when suddenly, out of the blue, comes a fully-formed, technicolour notion of starting a new life as a luthier in Lisbon, or a fleeting but perfectly detailed plan for a novel about a time-travelling Roman legionary. These mental gate-crashers, these glorious oddities, arrive unbidden, suggesting a capacity for spontaneous invention that seems to sit rather awkwardly with the story science has long been telling us. For much of my own wanderings through the labyrinth of the human psyche, I felt this same dissonance. The official portrait of the brain was of a magnificent, whirring contraption for calculating probabilities, a kind of hyper-efficient bookmaker constantly taking bets on what would happen next. It was, and is, a beautiful theory, explaining so much about how we navigate the world without bumping into the furniture. And yet, it always seemed to be missing the main event, the sparkle, the sheer, breathtaking madness of our own creativity. It described a brain built to reduce surprise, yet here we are, a species whose entire history is a chronicle of creating one astonishing surprise after another. How does a bodily organ, evolved to predict the mundane, give birth to the Mozart symphony, the theory of relativity, or even the humble, world-altering paperclip?
This question became the constant, charming companion to my professional life. It nudged me away from the well-trodden paths of psychology and into the thrilling wilderness where neuroscience, memory studies, and the fledgling science of imagination all converge. And there, in that tangled and beautiful thicket, a new picture began to emerge. It wasn’t that the old idea of the predictive brain was wrong; it was simply incomplete, like a biography of Casanova that leaves out all the interesting bits. What I began to see was not a contradiction to the predictive brain, but an evolution beyond it – a brain that had harnessed its predictive machinery for an even grander purpose: to simulate possibilities. The brain, it turns out, had taken its remarkable gift for prediction and pointed it inward, using its power not just to anticipate reality, but to generate countless alternatives to it. It had built a world simulator, a holodeck of the mind. This, I realised, was the engine of all our what-ifs, our might-have-beens, and our could-still-bes. This realization was the seed from which Possibilistics grew.
This book, then, is how I might share the keys to that holodeck with you. It is built on the rather thrilling understanding that becoming aware of your own mind as a possibilistic simulator is to fundamentally upgrade your relationship with yourself. It shifts you from being a mere spectator in the grand theatre of your own consciousness to becoming the writer, director, and lead actor all at once. It proposes that our most cherished human abilities, from planning a holiday to composing a sonnet, from feeling empathy for a friend to forging a new path for our lives, are all rooted in this stupendous talent for building and exploring worlds inside our own heads. Possibilistics is my invitation for you to join me on a guided tour of this inner landscape. It is not, I must hasten to add, a dusty academic tome destined to prop up a wobbly table, though every word is anchored in the bedrock of serious science. Nor is it a fizzy cocktail of inspirational slogans with little substance. Think of it, rather, as a well-lit bridge, designed to carry the most profound insights from the laboratories of cognitive science into the heart of your daily life, making them not just understandable, but useful.
Together, we will pull back the curtain on the machinery of your inner simulator. We will see how it is ingeniously constructed from the raw material of your senses and the vast, shimmering archive of your memories. We shall meet the key neural networks, the unsung heroes of the cerebral cortex, that act as the grand orchestra for this internal opera, bringing forth symphonies of possibility from the silence. But knowing how the engine works is only half the fun; the real joy lies in learning to drive. Therefore, a great deal of our journey will be devoted to practical magic, to offering you a toolkit of techniques, all thoroughly vetted by science, for consciously engaging with and fine-tuning your brain’s simulative prowess. We will learn how to point the searchlight of your attention, how to use structured daydreams to unknot tricky problems, how to rehearse future successes until they feel inevitable, and how to finally close that chasm that so often separates the glorious vision in our minds from the reality we can hold in our hands. You will discover that regulating your emotions is less about suppression and more about simulating a calmer, more resourceful version of yourself into being.
This book is for anyone who has ever felt that tell-tale flicker of a larger self waiting in the wings. It is for the incurably curious who delight in the sheer mechanics of the mind, for the artist or entrepreneur desperate to uncork a fresh stream of innovation, for the student of the brain seeking a new lens through which to view their subject. It is for the therapist or coach who knows that true change begins with a change of mind, and most of all, it is for every single person who has looked at the well-worn grooves of their habits and yearned to step onto a different path, to consciously script a life of greater purpose and delight. My fondest hope is that, by the time you reach the final page, the word “imagination” will have shed its whimsical, rather lightweight reputation and taken on its true weight and significance in your mind. You will see it not as a frivolous escape, but as the central, trainable, and titanically powerful cognitive faculty that it is. It is the engine of all human progress and the architect of every truly examined life. More than that, you will, I hope, feel the exhilarating call to become what I often describe as a Possibilinaut: a deliberate, joyful, and courageous explorer of the boundless territories of the possible. This capacity is our species greatest heirloom. It is high time we learned to appreciate it, to cultivate it, and to wield it with the wisdom it deserves. Welcome, fellow traveller, to the expedition.