We use our memories to imagine the future

An evidence that memory and imagining the future might go hand in hand comes from research related to amnesia patients. Studies show that when they lose their pasts, it seems they lose their futures as well.

Functional MRI scans made possible for researchers to discove...

You can remember facts and you can make entirely informational forecasts, but most of the time, when you recall something, you are reliving a scene from your memory.

You have a mental map of the space (you are able to hear, smell and taste elements and you are also cap...

Just as memories are more accurate the more recent they are, imagined future scenes are more accurate the nearer in the future they are.

When we attempt to imagine the more distant future, we are inclined to rely massively o a cultural life script (i.e, in the West, t...

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 exp...

There’s an extreme positivity bias toward the future: we think that future events are more important to our identity than the past events.

But we have to temper our expectations and keep in mind that no matter the degree in which we can dream up detailed scenes of things yet to come,