‘Imagining The Future Is Just Another Form Of Memory’

Facile dig at Swatch notwithstanding the actual important thing in that “forked memes” piece is its link to this Julie Beck article for The Atlantic from three years ago which further cements the case for me.

Say that you are imagining your future wedding (if you’ve never gotten married before). You probably see it as a scene—at a church, or on the beach, or under a wooded canopy in a forest with the bridal party all wearing elf ears. There are flowers, or twinkling lights, or mason jars everywhere. You can envision the guests, how they might look, what your soon-to-be spouse is wearing, what look they have on their face. All of these details come from your memory—of weddings you’ve been to before, as well as weddings you’ve seen depicted in pop culture, or in photo albums. The scene also relies on your memory of your friends and family.

“When somebody’s preparing for a date with someone they’ve never been on a date with before, or a job interview—these situations where we don’t have past experience, that’s where we think this ability to imagine the future really matters,” says Karl Szpunar, a professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. People “can take bits and pieces, like who’s going to be there, where it’s going to be, and try to put all that together into a novel simulation of events.”

I’m still waiting for someone to tell me if there’s a link between aphantasia and autobiographical memory deficits, but it’s pretty damned clear to me at this point that said deficits indeed likely must be prospective in addition to retrospective. Most recently I specifically was talking about this idea of simulating futures being something I simply cannot do, any more than I can relive the past.

You have a mental map of the space; you can “hear” what’s being said and “smell” smells and “taste” flavors; you can feel your emotions from that moment anew. Similarly, when you imagine something you might experience in the future, you are essentially “pre-living” that scene.

That’s not how my brain works. That’s not how any of my brain works. What’s especially fascinating to me is that fMRI studies indicate that areas of the brain which handle “processing personal information, spatial navigation, and sensory information” are implicated in both retrospective and prospective memory. These things, especially spatial and sensory issues, clearly are relevant also to my undiagnosed dyspraxia and my diagnosed autism.

(I’m actually really very interested in someone studying how deficiencies in sense memory on the one hand and sensory sensitivities on the other hand might correlate or confound each other.)

There’s no doubt. Whether or not there’s a confirmed correlation between aphantasia and autobiographical memory deficiencies (which, there has to be), these conditions unquestionably impact my ability to “pre-live” possible futures, which in turn impacts what I can and cannot do in the present, and the degrees to which I can or cannot do them.