“It takes so much cognitive effort to come up with detailed simulations,” Szpunar says. 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. Similarly, when you imagine something you might experience in the future, you are essentially “pre-living” that scene. You have a mental map of the space you can “hear” what’s being said and “smell” smells and “taste” flavors you can feel your emotions from that moment anew. You can remember facts, sure, and you can make purely informational predictions-“We will have jet packs by 2050”-but often, when you remember, you are reliving a scene from your memory. Researchers are still trying to pin down exactly how different brain regions are involved in these processes, but much of it has to do with the construction of scenes. They found that activity in many of these regions was “almost completely overlapping” when people remembered and imagined future events, Szpunar says. In a study Szpunar did, he and his colleagues looked at activity in the brain’s default network, which includes the hippocampus as well as regions that involve processing personal information, spatial navigation, and sensory information.
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. A researcher once asked H.M., “What do you think you’ll do tomorrow?” He replied, “Whatever is beneficial.” had severe amnesia, and also appeared to struggle with the future. had epilepsy, and to treat it, he received an experimental surgery in 1953 that removed several portions of his brain, including almost his entire hippocampus, which is a vital brain structure for memory. This was the case with the famous patient known by his initials, “H.M.” H.M. When they lost their pasts, it seemed, they lost their futures as well. The first clue that memory and imagining the future might go hand in hand came from amnesia patients. 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.” “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. The scene also relies on your memory of your friends and family. All of these details come from your memory-of weddings you’ve been to before, as well as weddings you’ve seen depicted in pop culture, or in photo albums.
You can envision the guests, how they might look, what your soon-to-be spouse is wearing, what look they have on their face. There are flowers, or twinkling lights, or mason jars everywhere. You probably see it as a scene-at a church, or on the beach, or under a wooded canopy in a forest with the bridal party all wearing elf ears. Say that you are imagining your future wedding (if you’ve never gotten married before). But memory also helps people predict what it will be like to do things they haven’t done before. For example, you know generally what your day will be like at the office tomorrow based on what your day at the office was like today, and all the other days you’ve spent there. This is how things you do over and over again become routine. Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia, because humans predict what the future will be like by using their memories. It’s pretty, and melancholy, and very popular on Tumblr.
“Imagining the future is a kind of nostalgia.” This is a line from John Green’s young-adult book Looking for Alaska.
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