Fazor, you are right, this is fascinating stuff. If you think about it, your conscious mind is almost always operating in the future. It is predicting, planning, and preparing you for the next thing you voluntarily do. You usually think about doing something before you do it.

If someone throws a baseball to you, you smoothly and continuously predict where it will be when it is close enough to catch. The prediction is crude and general to start and is continually refined as the ball approaches until you with 100% accuracy predict where the ball will be as it smacks into your mit.

It is easy to see all the ways you perform predictions all day long as you plan your lunch, schedule meetings, gas up your car, say something pleasant to your wife, and so on.

We make long term goals, short term goals, plan our days, hours, minutes, and seconds continuously as we move forward in time. We use all that we have learned in the past to make predictions about the future. And like the approaching baseball, the closer in time the target is, current conditions cause us to refine our predictions so that we meet the target at the intended time.

My stomach is growling... I feel slightly weaker than normal... from past experience I know I must eat to make those problems go away. Now I have a world full of food selections to choose from and my current state of mind will dictate what I choose. I like Chinese food but if I've had it yesterday I may not feel as strongly about having it again. If you asked me a week ago if I'd like to have Chinese food for lunch today I most certainly would have said yes even if I knew I was going to have it the day before today. However, now that I have satisfied my craving for Chinese food by eating it yesterday, the appeal that having it today has is no longer as strong as I predicted it would be a week ago. I will refine the plan I've made, due to circumstances, and I currently predict I will have a couple hot dogs and fries because for some reason when I thought about having hot dogs I felt a stronger desire to eat them than I did when I thought about Chinese food. I may change my mind again if I see the drive-through line at my favorite hot dog joint is very long. In that case I may go get a burrito because, quite frankly, that doesn't sound too bad right now either.

By the way, animals are perfectly capable of this predictive behavior, so they too operate in the future. How far in the future is difficult to say, but if I toss a Frisbee to my dog, nine times out of ten she'll catch it. If I kick her food bowl she'll hear it and come around because she has predicted that I intend to put food in the bowl. Even my fish predict they will be fed when they see me in the morning, and fish are pretty stupid. So I believe that intelligence is involved, meaning my fish are pretty darned smart compared to any computer program I've ever written, but the degree and accuracy of planning is of a much higher order in humans.

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The Brain Science Podcast