Imagining the future
The new speciality of neuroeconomics is generating lots of interesting results for economists; I've sometimes wondered if we might one day get a much better understanding of how we think about the future at a basic neurological level. Some Washington University scientists have been looking at exactly this question.
Imaging pinpoints brain regions that 'see the future'
Memory and future thought go 'hand-in-hand'
Human memory, the ability to recall vivid mental images of past experiences, has been studied extensively for more than a hundred years. But until recently, there's been surprisingly little research into cognitive processes underlying another form of mental time travel -- the ability to clearly imagine or "see" oneself participating in a future event.
Now, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have used advanced brain imaging techniques to show that remembering the past and envisioning the future may go hand-in-hand, with each process sparking strikingly similar patterns of activity within precisely the same broad network of brain regions.
"In our daily lives, we probably spend more time envisioning what we're going to do tomorrow or later on in the day than we do remembering, but not much is known about how we go about forming these mental images of the future," says Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.
"Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories."
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