Frontiers | The Hippocampus and Imagining the Future: Where Do We Stand?

In 2007, Maguire and her colleagues reported that five people with amnesia caused by damage to the hippocampus were less able to imagine future events. Memory, they found, serves many functions – and one of them is to allow us to simulate the future.

Thinking about the future is remembering the future, putting memories together in a creative way to imagine a possible way things might turn out. Those brain pathways include the hippocampus (a key structure for memory) and the prefrontal cortex, which controls System 2, deliberative decision-making. It is our cognitive control center.* By engaging

Memory can be thought of as a tool used by the prospective brain to generate simulations of possible future events.” Remembering the past helps us imagine the future, as it’s impossible to piece together ideas and information we haven’t paid attention to in the first place.

Whenever the waking brain doesn’t have to focus on some specific task, it activates the default mode network, identifies ongoing, incomplete mental processes—those needing further attention—and tries to imagine ways to complete them. Sometimes it completes the process shortly after the problem arises, making decisions without our ever realizing it.

Scientists call this form of imagination episodic future thinking, or EFT. It’s the mental ability to transport yourself forward in time and pre-experience a future event. EFT is often described as a kind of “mental time travel” because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there. Bu

Beyond the bodily and survival concerns of the brainstem, beyond the evaluative and emotional limbic functions, beyond even the perceptual processes of the posterior cortex and the motor functions of the posterior portion of the frontal lobe, we come upon the more abstract and symbolic forms of information flow that seem to set us apart as a specie