Imagination

When you apply possibility thinkingin your daily life, it can give you a powerful sense of agency. It can help you find innovative solutions to actually do what you want to do, in one form or another.

While most people tend to be optimistic, those suffering from depression and anxiety have a bleak view of the future — and that in fact seems to be the chief cause of their problems, not their past traumas nor their view of the present. While traumas do have a lasting impact, most people actually emerge stronger afterward. Others continue strugglin... See more

There is a peculiar attitude, here at the beginning of the 21st century. On the one hand, we agree things aren’t fine. On the other hand, there’s a widespread feeling that there’s nothing to be done .

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

a particularly vivid form of future thinking: the imaginative construction or simulation of scenarios that might occur in one’s future. We hypothesized that the flexible use of episodic details from memory during imaginative simulations of the future can help to understand constructive aspects of memory, such as its susceptibility to distortion (se... See more

Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions — by their very existence as ideas — function causally to bring about their own reality.

It took me a while, but I eventually figured out what he meant. Sometimes the task of rebuilding—of accepting what has been broken and making things anew—is so daunting that it can almost feel easier to believe it can’t be done.

But it can.

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 intent... See more