Sunday, May 3, 2009

See the Future by Concentrating on the Past

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/DyeHard/story?id=2771475&page=1

In this article, they say that only the human is able to see themselves in the future. It is really 'remarkable human traid.' 
'The researchers found a "surprisingly complete overlap" among regions of the brain used for remembering the student's past and those used for envisioning the future. And every region involved in remembering was also used in anticipating the future.
In a nutshell, the researchers isolated the area of the brain that "lit up" when the students thought about an event in their own past. And more importantly, that same area lit up again when they thought about a similar event in their future. In fact, the researchers report, the brain activity was so similar in both cases that it was "indistinguishable." ' (by the article See the Future by Concentrating on the Past)  

3 comments:

Erin Krieger said...

This article kind of relates to the paper I wrote on daydreaming. I didn't know that only the human brain could picture the future though. In my paper I discussed how when we daydream we do not have the immediate present in mind, but we are often planning for the future. It makes me wonder if daydreaming is a specifically human trait as well.

In addition, when we daydream most of our brain activity is occurring in the hippocampus; where we store our long term memory. When we think about the future, we are taking information and references from our long term memory and reorganizing to imagine new scenarios in the future. If only the human mind is capable of doing this, I wonder what this might say about intelligence as well.

Danielle Heard said...

This article is basically saying that our memory can somewhat show the future. How can this be if our memory is not accurate in most cases. There is no way that you could come with a consistent memory s we have learned in the chapter in our books about our memory. Each time we try to remember something we add on false details or events unconsciously and believe that that is exactly ho it occurred.
I do however agree with this being a good example of daydreaming. Where we will take events that occurred in our lives and make up our own scenarios after.

David An said...

I agree with this article. Our future is composed of series of short futures that can be easily imagined and anticipated based on one's daily life. If one person has positive past memories and experiments, it will evoke his actions and thoughts proactively. Then he will expect positive short futures and series of them will cause his future life to be positive too.
Since, the memories affect one's mind and emotion, it is very hard to control his status of mind. Obviously the mind draws his action. I remember I posted the article talked about how stereotype can affect different race students' academic achievements. I think that phenomenon can also explained with this idea. That's why controling one's mind is very difficult and only succeeded people possess this special skill.