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Remembering the past to imagine the future: the prospective brain
Daniel L. Schacter, Donna Rose Addis and Randy L. BucknerAbstract | A rapidly growing number of recent studies show that imagining the future depends on much of the same neural machinery that is needed for remembering the past. These findings have led to the concept of the prospective brain; an idea that a crucial function of the brain is to use stored information to imagine, simulate and predict possible future events. We suggest that processes such as memory can be productively re-conceptualized in light of this idea.
For more than a century, memory research has focused on the past. Psychologists have analysed the cognitive processes that allow individuals to retain past experiences, and neuroscientists have identified the brain structures, such as the hippocampus, that support this ability. A function of memory that has been largely overlooked until recently is its role in allowing individuals to imagine possible future events. In this article, we consider emerging evidence which indicates that memory especially episodic memory is crucially involved in our ability to imagine non-existent events and simulate future happenings. Indeed, brain regions that have traditionally been associated with memory appear to be similarly engaged when people imagine future experiences. We believe that such observations might have far-reaching implications for conceptions of memory and its functions.
Memory for the future: background
In 1985, D. H. Ingvar published a paper with the seemingly paradoxical title Memory for the future. According to Ingvar, concepts about the future, like memories of past events, can be remembered, often in great detail (Ref.1). Ingvar
summarized evidence which indicated that regions within the prefrontal cortex have a crucial role in the planning, foresight and programming of complex action sequences examples of memory for the future
(Refs26). At approximately the same time, E. Tulving argued that episodic memory,
which has traditionally been defined as a memory system that supports remembering personal experiences, allows individuals to engage in mental time travel into both the past and the future7,8. Tulving also claimed that the capacity for mental time travel is uniquely human9.
Perhaps as a result of this claim, much research has focused on whether non-human animals are capable of mental time travel (for reviews, see...