Science

Imagine sitting in a virtual room and coming face to face with yourself — 10 years older, slightly grayer, but unmistakably you. Not a fantasy. Not a filter. Just you, aged by a decade, staring back. That's the core of an experiment developed by Jean-Louis van Gelder, a criminologist and psychologist at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law in Freiburg, Germany. His team has just published findings showing that confronting people with a digitally aged version of themselves —their "future self" — can sharpen long-term thinking and help them act on their own goals. The science of the future self The setup is deceptively simple. Participants come into a lab, where they have their photo taken. After software has aged the respective face by 10 years, they enter a ...