This article delved into the findings of a recent study from the January issue of Psychological Science that may explain why we are all so optimistic about the future. The authors of the study reported that people tend to remember imagined future scenarios that are happy better than they recall the unhappy ones. First of all, this idea of “remembered futures” is a topic of great interest in the cognitive science world as of late. This seemingly contradictory phrase is basically referring to how we all imagine the future and then later recall those imagined scenarios—in a sense, remembering. Recent research has shown that the same brain areas are active when we remember past events and when we think about the future. This leads scientists to find that we use these memories all the time to prepare for what’s next: if we can remember the actions and reactions we thought about in the past, our future behavior will be more efficient. So, the team of scientists from Harvard came up with a way of generating authentic future simulations, of which the characteristics and staying power were then examined. They began by collecting a lot of biographical detail from volunteers’ actual memories. This information included people they had known, places they had been and the ordinary things surrounding them. A week later the researchers took each person’s “raw material” and mixed it all together. They presented the students with random combinations and instructed them to generate imaginary future scenarios for each one. Sometimes the volunteers were told to imagine a positive future, sometimes a negative one and others times neutral. Finally, afterwards, the researchers tested the volunteers’ memories of these future scenarios by giving them two of the three details and asking them to fill in the missing detail. The researchers found that after only a 10-minute delay, the volunteers could remember all types of scenarios equally well. One day later, however, the details of negative simulations were much more difficult to recall than the details of positive or neutral simulations. These findings support what is known about negative memories for actual past events, which also tend to fade more rapidly than positive ones. Szpunar and his colleagues hypothesize that the emotion associated with a future simulation is “the glue that binds together the details of the scenario in memory.”
This article is of importance because the study is one that is quite relevant to an everyday cognitive function of a neurotypical person. We all come up with scenarios of the future and recall these scenarios time and again. The fact that we all tend to remember positive scenarios more readily than negative ones is definitely a hopeful thing for humanity. This is relatable to the converse, how people suffering from depression often dwell on the negative parts of the past and also create negative futures. I find that this is one of those studies that you can’t help but be intrigued by because it digs into some utterly human behavior that we can all connect with and then tells us something more about why we are the way we are.
Nonetheless, if I were to offer one point of criticism for this article I would have to say that I would have liked for the author to describe more of the limitations of the study and the experiments performed by this team because, ironically, the set-up of this study had a rosy tint to it itself. The author does note that not much was known about this theory until recently, though he doesn’t go into what we don’t know or what we have to build on besides just this study.
Herbert, Wray.
"Imagining the Future Invokes Your Memory." Scientific American
Magazine. Scientific American Magazine, 12 May 2012. Web. 15 May 2012.
No comments:
Post a Comment