By: Alireza Hejazi

Futures metacognition deals with an individual's knowledge about his/her own futures thought processes, his/her self-awareness, self-regulation, and control of his/her own futures thought processes, and his/her beliefs about all of these matters. That is, futures metacognition has to do with the how, when and why an individual uses what he/she knows in futures thinking and how he/she feels about the future.

A number of studies has been conducted on neurological mechanisms of thinking about the future in recent years aiming at the development of futures metacognition. These studies are going to address futures thinking by surveying the contribution of various functional neuroimaging methods to our understanding of the neural underpinnings of futures thinking. In one of these researches an attempt was made to investigate the neural correlates underlying the ability to envisage specific future events. The resulting data were notable in two respects.

First, a distributed set of cortical regions of the brain were identified that appears to be important for episodic future thought and that is not isolated to regions within frontal cortex. Second, these regions neatly broke apart into two sets of regions, each characterized by their pattern of activity across tasks.

One set of regions, previously implicated in the simulation of bodily movements, was characterized by greater activity during episodic future thought than recollection of autobiographical memories (and by more activity for both these tasks than imagining a familiar individual). A second set of regions was characterized by equivalent patterns of activity during episodic future thought and recollection (and greater activity for both these tasks than imagining a familiar individual).

This latter set of regions is commonly engaged during tasks that require people to reinstate visual–spatial context. Accordingly, it is suggested that simulation of bodily actions and reinstatement of visual–spatial context may be particularly relevant to the understanding of the ability to mentally represent a future event.

Despite the fact that we are far from a full understanding of the modularity of the human brain, the use of imaging techniques is obviously based on the premise that brain functions are modular.

Speaking scientifically, the ability to envision specific future episodes is a ubiquitous mental phenomenon that has seldom been discussed in the neuroscience literature. In the mentioned above study, a number of subjects underwent functional MRI while using event cues (e.g., Birthday) as a guide to vividly envision a personal future event, remember a personal memory, or imagine an event involving a familiar individual.

Two basic patterns of data emerged. One set of regions (e.g., within left lateral premotor cortex; left precuneus; right posterior cerebellum) was more active while envisioning the future than while recollecting the past (and more active in both of these conditions than in the task involving imagining another person). These regions appear similar to those emerging from the literature on imagined (simulated) bodily movements. A second set of regions (e.g., bilateral posterior cingulate; bilateral parahippocampal gyrus; left occipital cortex) demonstrated indistinguishable activity during the future and past tasks (but greater activity in both tasks than the imagery control task); similar regions have been shown to be important for remembering previously encountered visual-spatial contexts.

Hence, differences between the future and past tasks are attributed to differences in the demands placed on regions that underlie motor imagery of bodily movements, and similarities in activity for these two tasks are attributed to the reactivation of previously experienced visual–spatial contexts.

That is, subjects appear to place their future scenarios in well known visual–spatial contexts. The results of this study offered insight into the fundamental and little-studied capacity of vivid mental projection of oneself in the future. It seems that we are wired so that visual–spatial contexts are interlinked with our chronic-spatial comprehending capabilities.

Coming back to our conventional futurist debates, we may put forward the matter within the frame of preferred future. We know that the preferred future may be discerned through a process of creative visualization. In this process, individuals are asked to close their eyes and enter a restful state. From there, in their minds’ eye (left lateral premotor cortex), they take steps to a hedge or wall (the number of steps is based on how many years into the future they wish to go). Over the hedge is the preferred future. They walk into that future. The facilitator asks them for details such as: Who is there? What does the future look like? What can they see, smell, hear, touch, taste? Intuit? This exercise articulates the future from the brain – it is more visual. This shows that when we think about the future, we prefer to see the future according to our desired images. The important point is not with our preferred images, but the natural mechanism of brain that produces such images.

Regardless of such scientific findings, many other questions continue to arise from different points of views that should be addressed by either the neuroscientists or the psychologists such as: What can neuroimaging contribute to our pursuit of an understanding of futures thinking?  Does it really help to be able to look into the brain? To borrow an analogy, can one really truly understand how computers work by opening up a computer chassis and probing the components with a heat gun? Can identifying the when, where, and how much in the brain provide enough information so that we can begin, from this information, to derive principles of futures thinking? Even if we had a perfect picture at infinite spatial and temporal resolution of what was actually happening in the brain during thinking about the future, would we even then begin to understand natural mechanisms of futures thinking? Does it really matter what the limits of neuroimaging are with regard to answering questions about futures thinking?

Answering such questions may pave the way of understanding futures metacognition in a better manner. Does futures metacognition really tell us anything that will help our understanding of futures thinking? Do we need to know what modules overlap in function or how large they are or where they are located in the brain? Does this information really matter? What spatial scale in the brain is the most critical for the understanding of futures thinking? While all of our tools are able to probe many different spatial scales, there are also many which have not been investigated yet.

Does this matter? Join me in my next post on futures metacognition.

Notes:

Inayatullah, Sohail. Six pillars: futures thinking for transforming, Foresight, VOL. 10 NO. 1 2008, pp. 4-21, DOI 10.1108/14636680810855991

Kraft, Eduard et al. Neural Correlates of Thinking, Springe r-Verlag, Berlin, 2009.

Szpunar, Karl et al. Neural substrates of envisioning the future, PNAS,  January 9, 2007, vol. 104, no. 2, http://www.pnas.org_cgi_doi_10.1073_pnas.0610082104