Futures thinking

I want to defend and buoy hope – it’s a fragile, quirky thing, but it has the power to help us act in the face of finitude

Hope is vitalising. When it pulses, we aspire toward better futures and conspire with what we have and have been. In its absence, we often grow listless, even court despair. I thus want to defend hope, underscore what we gain... See more

You can’t really be in favour of both democracy and billionaires, because democracy requires equal opportunity in order to participate, and extreme wealth gives its holders unfathomable advantages with little accountability.

A related line of enquiry is to determine not only whether the hippocampus is active during future simulation but whether it makes a critical and necessary contribution. While it has been long established that a functioning hippocampus is necessary for the retrieval of detailed autobiographical memories (for a review, see Moscovitch et al., 2005),... See more

According to the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis, extracted episodic details must also be recombined into a coherent event simulation. This recombinatory ability is thought to be central to flexibly imagining the future – to construct as well as disassemble and rework the components of scenarios to create different outcomes to enhance... See more

The hippocampus has been a focus in the study of recombination during simulation – perhaps unsurprising given the established role of this structure in relational processing, including the binding together of disparate elements during working memory as well as episodic encoding and retrieval (Axmacher et al., 2010; Eichenbaum, 2001; Hannula &... See more

We do things to change the future, not the past

The present findings also show that it is possible to develop systems that can instantly interpret emotional cues to provide immediate and intuitive feedback in a wide range of situations. This could lead to scalable, cost-efficient applications in various domains where understanding emotional context is crucial, such as therapy and interpersonal... 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