Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-mwx4w Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-06-23T09:28:41.994Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

5 - Memory of the future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2014

Joaquín M. Fuster
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Get access

Summary

I dream my painting and then paint my dream.

Vincent van Gogh

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.

Søren Kierkegaard

Once, the late David Ingvar sent me an article with the title of this chapter for an issue of Human Neurobiology, which I was editing; the article was to be devoted to the prefrontal cortex. The flanking quotation marks barely mollified the brashness of the oxymoron. It took me some time to accept the title – and the article (Ingvar, 1985). Now, after more than two decades, I appreciate the profound wisdom of that expression, for it characterizes the most essential feature of the functions of the human prefrontal cortex: their future dimension. At the same time the expression alludes to the fact that the product of those functions consists of past memory transformed by imagination and projected to the future. Ingvar was a pioneer of functional neuroimaging in the human brain, one of the first to discover the activation of the prefrontal cortex in the mental planning of movements and language. Indeed, what he was trying to convey with his peculiar expression was the evidence that the prefrontal cortex is activated by the internal representation of prospective action. Surely, since the action was yet to occur, that representation could hardly be called “memory.” However, the insight of “future memory” becomes glaring when we consider that in our mind there is no planned or future action without the memory, by association, of similar actions in the past, by us or by others. Planning and decision-making consist in recreating old actions in new fashion.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity
Our Predictive Brain
, pp. 125 - 156
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Keegan, J., A History of Warfare, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1993Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

  • Memory of the future
  • Joaquín M. Fuster, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139226691.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

  • Memory of the future
  • Joaquín M. Fuster, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139226691.006
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Memory of the future
  • Joaquín M. Fuster, University of California, Los Angeles
  • Book: The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity
  • Online publication: 05 June 2014
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139226691.006
Available formats
×