Is the Brain a Prediction Machine?

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The fundamental purpose of the brain in some very simplistic sense is to predict the future. Even Pavlov's dog, when he salivates, it's in anticipation of the coming food. And so you have these finely tuned systems in the brain that many animals have and that humans have taken to a really just an outrageously developed degree.

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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