Pre-Experimentation Is a Good Idea, Right?

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Timberg: squirrels that hoard nuts in anticipation of future winter food shortages, they will do that even if they've never experienced a winter before. And so we know just simply from that that their behavior is actually driven by instincts. It's a response to particular kinds of cues in the environment that will trigger that behavior. They are not and they're not actually imagining themselves in a possible distant future situation where they don't have the food they need to sustain themselves.

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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