Our brain is awesome, but sometimes it puzzles us in everyday life. For example, why do we feel joy when a toothpaste tube or a cream is empty? The neurobiologist Professor Doctor Martin Korte explained it to us.
Summer or winter, autumn or spring. Whether in difficult times or in easy ones, in profound phases or in shallow ones. Can small joys and mood boosters ever come inconvenient in everyday life? Sunshine that gives us a pleasantly warm feeling on our skin. A smile in passing that signals silent understanding. A 50 cent coin on the sidewalk that twenty years ago could have bought us a scoop of ice cream. An empty tube of toothpaste or hand cream or hair shampoo or coffee can that we can finally dispose of or refill with grateful satisfaction. Sometimes it really is the little things that make life sweeter. But wait a minute? What is it about an empty tube of toothpaste that gives cause for joy? We asked the neurobiologist Professor Doctor Martin Korte if he happened to have an idea.
Almost empty toothpaste occupies our prospective memory
“In fact, I’m very familiar with this phenomenon myself,” says the professor. He suspects that it may be particularly familiar to a certain group of people or character type: those who tend to like to be prepared and prefer to plan their future moves well in advance. “My idea would be that that sense of joy or relief might come from the fact that the moment something runs out, we can put a tick under it for now and free up planning capacity.”
According to Martin Korte, we or our brains are constantly busy planning ahead and managing our future – sometimes without us even realizing it. A region responsible for this is located at the very front of our brain, in our frontal lobe, and it is called prospective memory. “Most people usually think of the memory that is directed to the past and in which our memories are stored when they hear the term memory,” says the neurobiologist, “however, the primary and much more important task of our memory is to organize our future. Through visions or plans or, quite trivially, by resolving to call our girlfriend back in ten minutes or turn off the garden water.” In fact, even our past-oriented – our retrograde – memory serves primarily to enable us to plan and think ahead: after all, our experiences and memories are valuable data and references from which we can generate predictions and assumptions about the future.
The advantages and uses of our retrospective memory, i.e. our well-developed ability to organize for the future, are somewhat obvious: it enables us to take precautions and act with foresight. For example, instead of overeating on strawberries in summer, we can use some of them to make jam and thus bridge the strawberry-free winter. Or we can switch to water after the second glass of wine because we have an appointment to do sports the next morning. We can split our money to last until the end of the month. And we can buy a new tube of toothpaste when the one we’re using already feels alarmingly light.
Planning costs energy
However, even coming up with such ideas and actually taking appropriate measures costs us energy. Our prospective memory takes up a lot of capacity because managing the future is exhausting. Even when we’re not doing it on purpose, as in the case of the running out of toothpaste tube. “Our brain makes notes on its mental notepad in the frontal lobe, usually without us noticing directly that something will soon be over and that we will then have to organize supplies or have them already in the house,” says the neurobiologist. And knowing this alone consumes energy and storage space – given that we are the type of people who like to be well organized and for whom it is important to brush our teeth several times a day and with toothpaste. If we’re already comfortable improvising and experimenting, a running out tube of toothpaste may bother us less. And correspondingly less relieve or delight a tube that has run out.
Of course, if we know how happy we are with empty toothpaste, creams, shampoos and the like, other individual factors can also contribute to this feeling. For example the fact that this annoying squeezing out of the almost empty tube has finally come to an end. Or that we can replace something old and used with something new and unopened. However, according to Martin Korte’s theory, the capacity in our memory that is freed up should play a role in most of the people affected.
A healthy balance between planning and spontaneity
As ingenious and beneficial as our prospective memory is—and as important as it contributes to the fact that we still populate this planet and there are now several billion of us—if we give too much of our brain capacity to it, it can backfire . Because the cognitive energy that we use to plan and manage the future is then lacking in our working memory, which we need, for example, to concentrate and focus on a moment. “Typically, the people who have lots of plans and ideas for the future are particularly at risk of being the ones who ultimately hardly implement any of them because they are unable to organize the present,” says the brain researcher. In addition, excessive planning can make us inflexible to the point of being unable to deviate from our plans when the situation calls for it. “It is fundamentally important that we balance our lives between openness to spontaneity, living in the moment and planning for the future,” says Martin Korte. But if we usually have fresh breath when trying, we are probably already on the right track.
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Professor Doctor Martin Korte is a neurobiologist and head of the department “Cellular Neurobiology” at the Technical University of Braunschweig. His research focuses include the cellular basis of learning and memory and the interaction between the immune system and the brain in the development of Alzheimer’s disease. In his books “Hirngeflüster”, “We are memory” and “Jung im Kopf” he prepares findings from brain research that are relevant to everyday life and for a wide audience. TV viewers may know Martin Korte from the RTL quiz show with Günther Jauch “Bin ich smarter than…”, for which he developed the questions.
For our “thought out” column, the neurobiologist will from now on regularly address phenomena that puzzle us in our everyday life and make us wonder about ourselves. Would you like an explanation of such a phenomenon? Then you are very welcome to send our author your suggested topic by email ([email protected]).