Remembering the Past and Envisioning the Future

Humans can envision scenarios that might play out in our personal future, and we do so with relative ease. Similarly, we can mentally traverse backward in time to recollect events from our past. We rarely confuse the two situations, yet studies using functional MRI reveal that remembering the past and envisioning the future invoke highly similar activity in the brain. This talk will explore how memory is used in constructing hypothetical future scenarios, which aid us in anticipating and planning for the future.