What will you have for dinner tonight? What will you do next Saturday? Where do you see yourself in five years?
We spend quite some time everyday to think about the future. We set goals such as throwing a birthday party, planning who to invite and which cake to bake, predicting how the wheather might be that day, and imagining dancing late at night with our best friends.
Being able to think about the future might seem mundane.
We think about the future multiple times a day and it is crucial for our everyday life. Future thoughts are at the heart of making decisions, planning, and regulating emotions. What is it that comes up in our mind? We know that lots of our thoughts about the future are prompted by more general knowledge. For example, goals play a crucial role for which thoughts are coming to mind. While some thoughts about the future pop randomly up in our mind, we can think about the future more intentionally.
Being able to think about the future might be one of the most useful tools we have to create a world we want to live in.
Mental Time Travel
Travelling physically in time is not possible – except for in science fiction movies. However, time travel is possible in one’s mind. We can travel in our mind forward in time, thinking about what might happen tomorrow. Or, we think backwards in time when remembering yesterday. In scientific terms, Mental Time Travel describes our ability to mentally re-rexperience what has happened in the past and pre-experience what might happen in the future. This term was coined by Suddendorf and Corballis in 1997.
Scientific research – and what does it mean?
Scientific research articles are written for a specific audience: Researchers that are experts in the same field or a related field of research (e.g., the research area of how we think about the future). The structure of these articles, the methods used, and the language they are written in require training to be understood. So what do they tell us?
It is important to translate high-quality research into a structure and language that makes it accessible to a broader audience.
Usually, we think about the future prospectively, looking forward in time: Imagining what might happen tomorrow or in a week from now. What happens if we imagine the future as if it had already happened? The method of Retrospective Future Thinking investigates this question. In several scientific articles, the effects of thinking about the future from a retrospective perspective are examined.
Below, you can find a “translation” of two scientific articles describing the research of retrospective future thinking in a short, easier to understand format.
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#01 – A novel method of future thinking
Retrospective future thinking as a novel method to imagine the future: remembering autobiographical events from the perspective of the future self The research described in this article was developed during Ayleen’s Masters thesis in close collaboration with Annette Bohn. In 2022, the article was published in the international peer-reviewed journal Memory. Below, you will find…
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#02 – Remembering future life goals
Remembering future life goals: Retrospective future thinking affects life goal qualities This article was authored by Ayleen Roderer, Lynn Ann Watson, and Annette Bohn. The research described in this article is build on the methodology of Retrospective Future Thinking: Remembering the future from a perspective as if it had already occurred. Here, we examined how…