How the brain prioritizes urgent goals over non-urgent ones

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How does our brain distinguish between urgent and less urgent goals? Researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) and the Icahn School of Medicine in New York have studied how our brain remembers and adapts the goals we set for ourselves every day. Their study shows differences in the way we process immediate and distant goals, both at the behavioral and brain level. These discoveries, described in the journal Nature Communications, could have significant implications for understanding psychiatric disorders, particularly depression, which can make it difficult to formulate clear goals.

Throughout the day, we set goals that we want to achieve: pick up the kids from school in an hour, make dinner in three hours, make a doctor’s appointment in five days, or mow the lawn in a week. These goals, whether urgent or less urgent, are constantly redefined depending on the events that occur throughout the day.

Researchers from UNIGE and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mont Sinai Hospital in New York have studied how the brain stores and updates goals to be achieved. More specifically, how the brain distinguishes which goals require immediate attention and which do not. Their study focused on a specific region of the brain, the hippocampus, because of its established role in episodic memory. This is responsible for encoding, consolidating and retrieving personally experienced information, integrating its emotional, spatial and temporal context.

An imaginary mission to Mars in the time of an MRI scan

Neuroscientists asked 31 people to imagine themselves on a fictional four-year space mission to Mars, during which they must complete a series of goals essential to survival (take care of their space helmet, exercise, eat certain foods, etc.). The mission goals varied depending on when they had to be accomplished, and there were different tasks for each of the four years of the journey.

Over the course of the mission, participants were presented with the same goals over and over again. They were then asked to indicate whether these were past, present, or future goals. As time progressed, the relevance of these goals changed: goals originally planned for the future became current needs, while current needs became past goals. In this way, participants had to tackle multiple goals at different time intervals and update their priorities as their mission progressed.

Prioritizing immediate goals

The team observed each individual’s reaction times to determine whether the task was to be completed in the present, past or future. “Goals that must be achieved immediately are recognized more quickly than those that are to be achieved in the distant future. This difference in the processing of stored information shows that needs in the present are given priority over needs in the distant future. It takes additional time to mentally travel back in time and recall past and future goals,” explains Alison Montagrin, research associate and lecturer in the Department of Neuroscience at UNIGE’s Faculty of Medicine, former postdoctoral fellow at the Icahn School of Medicine and first author of the study.

The scientists also investigated whether differences were also apparent at the brain level. Images obtained using very high-resolution MRI scans showed that the rear area of ​​the hippocampus is activated when recalling information about the present. However, when remembering past goals or goals to be achieved in the future, the front area is activated.

“These results are particularly interesting because previous studies have shown that when we use our episodic memory or our spatial memory, the front part of the hippocampus is involved in retrieving general information, while the back part deals with details. It will therefore be interesting to investigate whether – unlike immediate goals – projection into the future or remembering a past goal does not require specific details, but a general representation is sufficient,” concludes the researcher.

This research shows that time frame plays a crucial role in how people set personal goals. This could have important implications for understanding psychiatric disorders such as depression. In fact, people suffering from depression may have difficulty formulating concrete goals and imagine more obstacles to achieving their goals. Investigating whether these people perceive the distance to their goals differently – which could make them pessimistic about their chances of success – could open up a therapeutic approach.

Reference: Montagrin A, Croote DE, Preti MG, Lerman L, Baxter MG, Schiller D. The hippocampus separates present from past and future goals. Nat-Kommun. 2024;15(1):4815. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-48648-9

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