The Evolution of Language and Foresight

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Tool use and language probably co-evolve in some very fundamental ways. As you become increasingly reliant on tools, it also becomes important to be able to pass those tools to other people. And so teaching is actually really fundamentally reliant on foresight as well. It just seems like there's a very natural opportunity at least for co-evolution between language and foresight.

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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