The hippocampus is a brain structure in the medial temporal lobes. It's also the structure that if it's destroyed by some kind of injury or insult to the brain, will leave you unable to imagine yourself in the future and remember specific past events as well. If these traces are to be found, that's a good place to look for them.
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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