Futures thinking

a polyvagal futures literacy offers foresight practitioners and learners a powerful framework for meeting the future with agency, hope, and inner resourcefulness in the face of its complexity.

Individuals can exert influence over the future but they exist in larger fields that condition their choices: epistemological, ontological, economic and cultural or class, gender, varna, civilization type, dynasty, cultural personality or ways of knowing the real. Futurists, in general, tend to focus on the individual’s ability to create the future... See more

We can use the shadow imagination as a mechanism for uncovering our future power. When we’re introduced to how bad things could get, we’re at a choice point. We can turn away, we can dive into the waters of the worst-case scenario and allow them to drown us, or we can touch the suffering that’s possible and remind ourselves of our own abilities. We... See more

Thus, it remains an open question as to whether the hippocampus is necessary for future simulation.

There is indirect evidence to support this idea. For instance, individuals tend to act in a way that is consistent with or constrained by how they have imagined themselves in those situations (Johnson and Sherman, 1990), implying that some record of that simulation influences later behavior. There is typically a high correspondence of stated... See more

Participants said the workshop helped them notice they were not considering certain groups in their future thinking. Socially oppressed groups are left outside their typical future imagination. This was one of the aspects that participants considered central learning, the necessity to think about others.

Another learning that participants identified... See more

The home of the Utopian impulse was architecture rather than painting or sculpture. Painting can make us happy, but building is the art we live in; it is the social art par excellence, the carapace of political fantasy, the exoskeleton of one’s economic dreams. It is also the one art nobody can escape.

Research has shown a staggering number of health benefits associated with dispositional optimism, from improvements in cardiovascular health, to how quickly wounds heal, to slower disease progression.