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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

shared by knudsenlu on 24 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • 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.
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  • 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.
knudsenlu

Mishearings - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...oliver-sacks-mishearings.html

Hearing sense perception brain sacks

shared by knudsenlu on 22 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Lack of clear enunciation, unusual accents or poor electronic transmission can all serve to mislead one’s own perceptions. Most mishearings substitute one real word for another, however absurd or out of context, but sometimes the brain comes up with a neologism.
  • If a mishearing seems plausible, one may not think that one has misheard; it is only if the mishearing is sufficiently implausible, or entirely out of context, that one thinks, “This can’t be right,” and (perhaps with some embarrassment) asks the speaker to repeat himself, as I often do, or even to spell out the misheard words or phrases.
  • While mishearings may seem to be of little special interest, they can cast an unexpected light on the nature of perception — the perception of speech, in particular. What is extraordinary, first, is that they present themselves as clearly articulated words or phrases, not as jumbles of sound. One mishears rather than just fails to hear.
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  • Mishearings are not hallucinations, but like hallucinations they utilize the usual pathways of perception and pose as reality — it does not occur to one to question them. But since all of our perceptions must be constructed by the brain, from often meager and ambiguous sensory data, the possibility of error or deception is always present.
  • Was Freud entirely wrong then about slips and mishearings? Of course not. He advanced fundamental considerations about wishes, fears, motives and conflicts not present in consciousness, or thrust out of consciousness, which could color slips of the tongue, mishearings or misreadings. But he was, perhaps, too insistent that misperceptions are wholly a result of unconscious motivation
knudsenlu

Oliver Sacks's New Book Asks: What Is the Mind? - 0 views

www.thecut.com/...ook-asks-what-is-the-mind.html

mind philosophy questioning

shared by knudsenlu on 22 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • If people perceive time in varying ways, for instance, what does that say about time itself? If we misremember the past, he wonders, what else might we be wrong about? If creativity is largely a subconscious phenomenon, what else might be happening to us without our knowing?
  • he posits that “minds” might not belong solely to humans and animals. “Plants ‘know’ what to do, and they ‘remember,’” he writes, while “the tiny, stalked, trumpet-shaped unicellular organism Stentor employs a repertoire of at least five different responses to being touched.” Is the ability to respond to stimuli, he wonders, a sign of a mind?
  • “When I am writing, thoughts seem to organize themselves in spontaneous succession and to clothe themselves instantly in appropriate words. I feel I can bypass or transcend much of my own personality, my neuroses. It is at once not me and the innermost part of me.”
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  • Sacks is, at heart, a philosopher. But he is a philosopher looking not for answers but for increasingly grander questions.
  • It is only the wisest among us who search not only for answers but also for questions.
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