Is There a Continuum, It Wasn't Magic?

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There's a big difference in this particular capacity between a modern day human and our closest competition here on earth. The ability to make contingency plans is probably one of the key defining things that makes it unique. In humans, we use that same basic capacity for contingency planning in a huge variety of different important ways. This underpins the entire insurance industry, because this and the fundamental cognitive insight that the future might not turn out as anticipated drives us to do something about it.

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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