Brain Scans Of The Future

Reported July, 2007

ST. LOUIS (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- Remembering your past may go hand-in-hand with envisioning your future! It’s an important link researchers found using high-tech brain scans. It’s answering questions and may one day help those with memory loss.

For some, the best hope of ‘seeing’ the future leads them to seek guidance -- perhaps from an astrologist. But it's not very scientific. Now, psychologists at Washington University are finding that your ability to envision the future does in fact goes hand-in-hand with remembering the past. Both processes spark similar neural activity in the brain.

“You might look at it as mental time travel…the ability to take thoughts about ourselves and project them either into the past or into the future,” says Kathleen McDermott, Ph.D. and Washington University psychology professor.

The team used "functional magnetic resonance imaging” -- or fMRI -- to "see" brain activity. They asked college students to recall past events and then envision themselves experiencing such an event in their future. The results? Similar areas of the brain ‘lit up’ in both scenarios.

“We're taking these images from our memories and projecting them into novel future scenarios,” says psychology professor Karl Szpunar.

Most scientists believed thinking about the future was a process occurring solely in the brain’s frontal lobe. But the fMRI data showed a variety of brain areas were activated when subjects dreamt of the future. “All the regions that we know are important for memory are just as important when we imagine our future,” Szpunar says.

Researchers say besides furthering their understanding of the brain -- the findings may help research into amnesia, a curious psychiatric phenomenon. In addition to not being able to remember the past, most people who suffer from amnesia cannot envision or visualize what they’ll be doing in the future -- even the next day.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Washington University
Department of Psychology
St. Louis, MO 63130-4899
(314) 935-6565

For more information on advanced medical technologies, contact:

Ben Stein
American Institute of Physics
for the American Association of Physicists in Medicine
301-209-3088
bstein@aip.org

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