The direct link between Rememorating and Building the Future

                                 
One of the most remarkable and evolutionarily essential elements of experiencing time through human consciousness is something cognitive scientists and psychologists call mental time travel — a combination of episodic memory, which allows us to draw on our autobiographical experience and call up events, experiences, and emotions that occurred in the past, with the ability to imagine and anticipate future events, writes Maria Popova on Brain Pickings.

According to Dan Falk in “In Search of Time: The History, Physics, and Philosophy of Time”:

“The capacity for mental time travel gave our ancestors an invaluable edge in the struggle for survival. They believe there is a profound link between remembering the past and imagining the future. The very act of remembering, they argue, gives one the “raw material” needed to construct plausible scenarios of future events and act accordingly. Mental time travel “provides increased behavioral flexibility to act in the present to increase future survival chances.” If this argument is correct, then mental time travel into the past — remembering — “is subsidiary to our ability to imagine future scenarios.” Tulving agrees: “What is the benefit of knowing what has happened in the past? Why do you care? The importance is that you’ve learned a lesson,” he says. “Perhaps the evolutionary advantage has to do with the future rather than the past.”

Modern neuroscience appears to confirm that line of reasoning: as far as your brain is concerned, the act of remembering is indeed very similar to the act of imagining the future, according to Popova.