The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

The empathy effect, how befriending your future self can impact your health today.

You are not the person you were 15 years ago.

The cells that compose your tissues and deliver oxygen have been recycled many times over.

Your face has changed.

You move differently.

You're probably slower and weaker, or depending on your daily

habits, faster and stronger. As it becomes available, you incorporate new information into your

belief system. Even the neat narrative we imagine we're orchestrating unbroken in our heads

has nightly intermissions lasting hours during which we have

no real clue what happens. Is this all just philosophical navel-gazing better suited for 2 a.m. in a

dorm room covered with Bob Marley posters? Not exactly. Accepting the idea that past and future

selves are different people can have real

benefits today and tomorrow. A study from late last year found that disrupting the temporal

parietal junction, a part of the brain studies reveal is consistently involved in empathy

or our ability to overcome self-centeredness and put ourselves in another's

shoes led human subjects to choose smaller immediate rewards over larger long-term rewards.

It had no effect on people's ability to perceive time, space, or numbers.

They understood that the reward would be bigger if they just waited. They

just didn't care. In other words, when people were no longer able to empathize with their future

selves, they made choices that benefited their present selves while short-changing their future

ones. We already subconsciously envision our future selves as different people.

...