Can We Foresee the Future?

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

The ability to imagine the future as a world of possibilities is really fundamental to what makes foresight so powerful and effective. If you only had the ability to represent it as a single outcome, it wouldn't be anywhere near as useful. Human beings are not very good at remembering things but that doesn't mean we don't make use of this feature in imagining 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).

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

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.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.