How does the brain tag an imagined episode as being fictional or a memory? That's one of the kind of key questions in the scientific study of memory and imagination. For example, if I imagine the same event, for example, myself eating a slice of pie, I can also reflect on the fact that that imagined episode in my mind's eye, it either was a memory that happened to me. And so that metacognitive capacity is actually a very essential part of the puzzle.
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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