Imagining future events changes brain to improve healthy decision-making, new study indicates

Learning to think more about specific events in the future appears to reduce impulsivity,  improve decision-making, and shows potential as a therapy for alcohol use disorder, a new Virginia Tech study found. 

The study, which involved 24 participants whose brains were scanned during both resting-state and task-based fMRI, showed brain connections were altered by future thinking.

The research, published recently in the journal Brain Connectivity, was among the last led by the late Warren Bickel, professor and director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC.

Bickel, who died of cancer in September, was a leading researcher in the field of using “episodic future thinking” – the capacity to vividly imagine events that might happen in your future – to address addiction.

“What we were trying to understand was how episodic future thinking works as a kind of therapeutic approach,” said Stephen LaConte, professor and corresponding author on the paper. “What we found is that training people to think more about their future changed the extent to which they value immediate rewards over those in the future, and we’re seeing related changes in connectivity in key regions of the brain along with that.”

The Fralin Biomedical Research Institute study is the first in which participants practiced imagining specific, personal future events in the lab before returning to those thoughts during an MRI brain scan to identify brain activity changes. 

For example, a subject might think, “In one year, I will be opening my first art gallery in Los Angeles,” along with details of the sights, sounds, and feelings of the gallery opening.

Alcohol use disorder is characterized in part by an impaired ability to think clearly about the future and a tendency toward impulsive decision making. The phenomenon is called delay discounting, or valuing delayed rewards less than immediate ones.

Previous studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of episodic future thinking in reducing delay discounting and promoting making healthier choices, and it’s emerging as a potential behavioral intervention for substance use disorders. 

Participants exhibited reduced impulsivity in their decision-making, and greater ease at more challenging tasks in deciding between immediate and delayed rewards. At the same time, the scientists noticed increased connection between multiple regions of the brain called the salience network.

“We found that in the delayed discounting tasks, people who had this higher functional connectivity actually were able to perform the hard tasks more quickly,” said LaConte, who is also interim co-director of the Addiction Recovery Research Center. “What that means is that either the episodic future thinking is making the tasks easier, or it’s freeing up some brain resources and temporarily changing their delay discounting. We don’t yet know which.”

The study provides a baseline for future research, said Jeremy Myslowski, the paper’s first author.

“We see this as a fruitful opportunity to examine potential changes in brain connectivity by collecting data both before and after the intervention,” said Myslowski, a doctoral candidate in LaConte’s lab when he worked on the study. He has since graduated. “And when we move into performing work with a real-world alcohol consumption component, we have something tangible in the brain data to point to.”

Further research is needed to determine how long-lasting the behavioral and connectivity changes are. 

LaConte noted that the results closely mirrored a 2020 study of brain connectivity in people receiving antidepressants for the first time, which bolstered the idea that episodic future thinking could be a valuable early intervention therapy, and the brain connectivity the study documented could be a useful marker for success in evaluating therapies for psychiatric diseases. 

LaConte and Bickel were longtime collaborators at the Fralin Biomedical Research Institute. Bickel was among the first to recognize the importance of episodic future thinking in understanding and treating substance use disorders.