Institute For The Future

The neuroscience of 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 (hat tip to Roland Piquepaille):

 

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."

 

Meanwhile, Harvard researchers Daniel L. Schacter and Donna Rose Addis are starting to think that the constructive nature of memory is useful both in storing past events more efficiently, and helps more effectively imagine the future.

For a long time, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists have argued that "episodic memory — the kind of memory that allows us to remember our personal experiences — is not a literal reproduction of the past, but is instead constructed by pulling together pieces of information from different sources." There are also some interesting studies that when you remember an action, imagine it, and do it, you brain is doing very similar things, and using essentially the same mechanisms in each case. (This is why visualization has a chance of working.) As they write in the latest issue of Nature:

 

Taken together, neurological and neuroimaging studies suggest that false-recognition errors reflect the healthy operation of adaptive, constructive processes supporting the ability to remember what actually happened in the past. Many researchers believe that remembering the gist of what happened is an economical way of storing the most important aspects of our experiences without cluttering memory with trivial details. We agree. But we also see another important function for constructive memory, one that emerges from an idea that a growing number of researchers are embracing — that memory is important for the future as well as the past.

[F]uture events are not exact replicas of past events, and a memory system that simply stored rote records would not be well-suited to simulating future events. A system built according to constructive principles may be a better tool for the job: it can draw on the elements and gist of the past, and extract, recombine and reassemble them into imaginary events that never occurred in that exact form. Such a system will occasionally produce memory errors, but it also provides considerable flexibility.

 

These studies suggest several big things.

First, we're now at the point where we can start to talk about how humans think about the future at a fairly profound, neurological level.

Second, we can begin to understand how those processes shape and limit the way we can conceive of the future. There may be limits to how far in the future most humans can think; or what kinds of things we can think clearly about.

Third, and I don't want to jump the shark here, but perhaps these studies can also be useful for the practice of futures. In particular, it might be that we can begin to incorporate these findings into the group processes that are so central to our work.