How Your Brain Connects the Future to the Past

8:56 AM Tuesday September 21, 2010
by Jeff Brown and Mark Fenske  | Comments (15View)

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We tend to think of memory as a way to revisit past experiences: a vacation in the tropics, a bad business decision, or where you might have put those elusive car keys. Neuroscientists have long believed that the brain's so-called episodic memory circuits are largely involved in remembering past events or occurrences. Neuroimaging studies had even identified parts of the brain that are specifically activated when retrieving information from prior life experiences. These include regions in the prefrontal and medial temporal lobes, as well as more posterior regions such as the retrosplenial cortex. But recent studies (pdf)have found a striking overlap between these areas and brain regions that are activated when you think about the future.
The overlap is so impressive that some brain researchers (pdf) are calling for a substantial revision (pdf) of how we think about memory. According to scientists, the brain's memory circuits are not merely for reflecting on the past but are also vital mechanisms for imagining, anticipating, and preparing for the future. In this new view, your brain is a proactive system that integrates past experience to help you navigate the future.
In the business world, it's a distinct advantage to have a brain that anticipates future demands and negotiates them well. Accurate predictions typically translate to success. Being able to envision future scenarios helps foster strategic planning and resist immediate rewards in favor of longer-term gains. The proactive brain flexibly recombines details from past experiences that, by analogy with your current surroundings, help you make sense of where you are, anticipate what will come next, and successfully navigate the transition.
Although each of us is born with proactive brain, it's possible to enhance its performance. Here are some tips:

• Give your brain a rich bank of life experiences. Expose it to diverse environments and situations. Increasing the breadth of your experiences provides richer information for your brain to draw on as it helps you anticipate new situations.
• Let it borrow from the experiences of others by communicating, reading, or interacting with or about others.
• Think about what you want from the future. Take time to reflect on individual and team values and goals, both immediate and down the road. These will help guide your brain as it envisions future scenarios that may best help you achieve your objectives.
• Actively ponder future rewards or accomplishments. Emphasize rich, detailed thinking about long-term outcomes. This reduces the lure (and the danger) of instant gratification.
• Give yourself periods of relatively uninterrupted thought during which you let your mind wander. Doing this gives the brain's memory system extra time to recombine your prior experiences in ways that can help you envision future possibilities.

These tips won't help you find those pesky car keys, but they could help you shape the future of your work life.

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