Our ability to daydream about our future is closely related to our ability to recall our past, and may even depend on it, according to a study released on Monday which may explain a little-known quirk of the amnesiac’s condition.
The findings come from a small study in which researchers compared the brain activity of volunteers as they alternately reminisced about past personal events such as a birthday, or getting lost, and then conjured up images of similar scenarios in the future.
The brain scans of the 21 students who took part in the experiment revealed ”a surprisingly complete overlap” in the brain regions used for both processes, the researchers said.
”Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories,” said Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a doctoral student in psychology at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.
The phenomenon can be explained in part by the fact that the patterns of activity seen within those brain regions suggested that the visual and spatial context for the mental images of the future were borrowed from past experiences, especially memories of specific body movements, the researchers said.
Moreover, in post-testing questionnaires, the students said that they tended to place their ”future” images in the context of familiar places (home and school) and familiar people (friends and family) — something that would require the reactivation of those images from neural networks responsible for the storage and retrieval of autobiographical memories.
The finding may explain why people with amnesia, a condition involving various degrees of memory loss, cannot vividly envision themselves in any kind of personal future, even though they can consider the future in an abstract sense, said Kathleen McDermott, a co-author and professor of psychology in the School of Medicine at Washington University.
The study is published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. – Sapa-AFP