Imagining the Future Is Just Another Form of Memory - The Atlantic - 0 views
www.theatlantic.com/...542832
memory future psychology brain science amnesia hippocampus evolutionary advantage bias
![](/images/link.gif)
-
humans predict what the future will be like by using their memories
-
“When somebody’s preparing for a date with someone they’ve never been on a date with before, or a job interview—these situations where we don’t have past experience, that’s where we think this ability to imagine the future really matters,” says Karl Szpunar, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. People “can take bits and pieces, like who’s going to be there, where it’s going to be, and try to put all that together into a novel simulation of events.”
-
The first clue that memory and imagining the future might go hand in hand came from amnesia patients. When they lost their pasts, it seemed, they lost their futures as well.
- ...4 more annotations...
-
Since then, functional MRI scans have allowed researchers to determine that many of the same brain structures are indeed involved in both remembering and forecasting
-
And just as memories are more detailed the more recent they are, imagined future scenes are more detailed the nearer in the future they are
-
It’s not hard to see how this ability to imagine the future gives humans an evolutionary advantage. If you can plan for the future, you’re more likely to survive it. But there’s are limitations as well. Your accumulated experiences—and your cultural life script—are the only building blocks you have to construct a vision of the future. This can make it hard to expect the unexpected, and it means people often expect the future to be more like the past, or the present, than it will be.
-
There’s also an “optimistic, extreme positivity bias toward the future,” Bohn says. To the point that people “always say future events are more important to their identity and life story than the past events.” Talk about being nostalgic for the future.