ST. LOUIS, Jan. 2 (UPI) -- U.S. doctors say people use similar parts of the brain dedicated to memory in attempting the see what could happen in the future.
Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, in a paper published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques to capture patterns of brain activity as college students were given 10 seconds to develop a vivid mental image of themselves or a famous celebrity participating in a range of common life experiences.
"In our daily lives, we probably spend more time envisioning what we're going to do tomorrow or later on in the day than we do remembering, but not much is known about how we go about forming these mental images of the future," Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a psychology doctoral student at Washington University, said Tuesday.
"Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories."
The study demonstrates that the neural network underlying future thought is not isolated in the brain's frontal cortex, as some have speculated. Within this neural network, patterns of activity suggest that the visual and spatial context for imagined future often is pieced together using past experiences.
The findings support a recent theory of memory that suggests that remembering the past and envisioning the future draw upon many of the same neural mechanisms, said Kathleen McDermott, an associate professor of radiology in the School of Medicine at Washington University. Previous speculation has been based largely on the anecdotal observation of very young children, cases of severe depression and brain-damaged persons with amnesia.
"There's a little-known and not that well-investigated finding that if you have an amnesic person who can't remember the past, they're also not at all good about thinking about what they might be doing tomorrow or envisioning any kind of personal future," McDermott said.
