See the Future by Concentrating on the Past

Jan. 5, 2007 — -- The ability to "see" oneself in the future is a remarkable human trait -- some would say unique -- that is not well understood. That's despite the fact that we probably spend as much time thinking about the future as we do thinking about the present.

Now new research from Washington University in St. Louis suggests that it's precisely because we can remember the past that we can visualize the future.

"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," says doctoral candidate Karl Szpunar, lead author of a report on the research in the Jan. 1 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The findings are consistent with other research showing that persons with little memory of the past, such as young children or individuals suffering from amnesia, are less able to see themselves in the future.

"Specifically, individuals, be they depressive patients, young children, or amnesiacs, who are unable to vividly recollect their past also seem to be unable to form specific mental images of the future," the researchers say in their report.

"If you have an amnesic person who can't remember the past, they're also not at all good about thinking about what they might be doing tomorrow or envisioning any kind of personal future," adds Kathleen McDermott, principal investigator for the university's memory and cognition lab and a co-author of the report.

The researchers base their conclusions on brain scans of 21 college students who were cued to think about something in their past, and anticipate the same event in the future, like a birthday or getting lost. The experiment was carried out as each student lay prone in a magnetic resonance imaging machine, a dreadful but very useful contraption that can show which areas of the brain are stimulated during specific thought processes.