In psychology, it's called prospection. It's the other side of the coin from retrospection. Prospection is our incredible ability to use experience and pattern recognition to generate in imagination, plausible future scenarios based on material colled from retrospection so that we can plan accordingly. In many ways, consciousness is the creation of an avataur, the self. And with that avatar, we can move through virtual realities generated by the other portions of the brain. This, by the way, is how a baseball player is able to hit a baseball. Yes, human reaction times are far too slow to react quickly enough to win at a fighting game or a first person shooter.