Is It All Hunky-Doring?

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We're kind of taking this mental time machine for a spin into an alternative reality and thinking how much better it could have been if I just said something slightly better or reacted in a, in a more cooler headed way to some problem. And the downside of this is that we can have regret, right? We can imagine, oh, I could have done something differently and that would have been better. This seems like, is that a uniquely human capacity also? Probably. It's one of those, it's another one of those difficult ones where you obviously can't read their mind.

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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