Does the E. Coli Have a Memory Correspondingly?

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The ability to imagine the future as humans do it was actually something that gave Darwin pause. He said at one point in his autobiography that he was most inclined to believe in God when contemplating how such a capacity to traverse time could have possibly evolved through blind chance or necessity. But if it's true that over the course of evolutionary history, there are all sorts of these capacities that develop in animals or even pre animals to do something to prepare for the future. Did our imaginative capacities latch on to them and take advantage of them once they did spring up in this more human visualizable way? Yeah, I think it's an extremely gradual process.

One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember the past, but also conjure up possible futures that haven’t yet happened. This simple ability underlies our capability to organize socially and make contracts with other people. Today’s guest, psychologist Adam Bulley, argues that it’s the primary feature that makes us recognizably human, as he argues in the new book The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight (with Thomas Suddendorf and Jonathan Redshaw).

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Adam Bulley received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Queensland. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre and School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, and the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

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