Is Memory a Pattern Reconstruction System?

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The brain stores a kind of recipe for an event and then it uses that recipe to reconstruct the neural activity that was, that did occur when the event was originally perceived and encoded. It's kind of like an index, which is used to retrieve the various details and combine them in the particular configuration or the particular pattern that they were in when they were first encoded. And so understanding memory as a kind of pattern reconstruction system actually makes sense of a lot of kind of how it works and then how it can be used to imagine the future.

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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