Foresight Is a Complex Multifaceted Topic

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The ability to imagine the think about the distant future and organize your behavior accordingly is what we have in mind here. We don't really think of foresight as just one thing, it's a suite of interacting capacities that kind of work together to enable complex, future-directed actions. And you see this ability to anticipate mutually exclusive possible future events simultaneously rather than cycling between them like rats might do while going through a maze.

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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