221 | Adam Bulley on How Mental Time Travel Makes Us Human

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2023

⏱️ 81 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

One of the most powerful of all human capacities is the ability to imagine ourselves in hypothetical situations at different times. We can remember the past, but also conjure up possible futures that haven’t yet happened. This simple ability underlies our capability to organize socially and make contracts with other people. Today’s guest, psychologist Adam Bulley, argues that it’s the primary feature that makes us recognizably human, as he argues in the new book The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight (with Thomas Suddendorf and Jonathan Redshaw).

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Adam Bulley received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Queensland. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain and Mind Centre and School of Psychology, The University of Sydney, and the Department of Psychology at Harvard University.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.
0:03.7	Welcome to the first podcast of 2023. And to start out, I want to do a little thought experiment here.
0:11.0	Imagine that I told you that if you go to patreon.com slash Sean M. Carroll,
0:17.2	you could pledge a small amount of money to support Mindscape. And in return,
0:22.0	you would get the ability to listen to ad-free versions of the podcast, as well as to ask questions
0:27.3	at the monthly AMA, ask me anything episodes. Now that's true. I've said that to you before,
0:33.0	you probably already know it. But I'm not actually pitching the patreon right now. Instead,
0:37.9	I want to think about what is going on in your mind when I say those words. We're conjuring up
0:46.0	an image, right? You can imagine doing that, going to patreon, kicking in a dollar per episode,
0:51.9	or what have you, or you could imagine not doing it. You can contemplate different hypothetical
0:58.8	futures. This is an ability that human beings have to think counterfactually to not just say
1:06.0	this is happening therefore that. In other words, not to just be automatic or unconscious about
1:13.2	our reactions to what is going on, but to think through different hypothetical possibilities.
1:20.7	Even hypothetical possibilities that involve things in the future. Not just right now, right here,
1:26.8	right this moment, but at some undetermined time in the future, there's different hypothetical
1:32.4	possibilities and we can sit down, imagine them, and choose which one we want. This is a remarkable
1:39.9	ability and it's not at all an obvious one to evolve over biological time. In fact, arguably,
1:46.6	it is only human beings who have this ability of all the different animal species or plant species
1:53.8	for that matter here on earth, the ability to what we call mentally time travel to put ourselves in
2:00.5	hypothetical future situations as well as of course to remember real past situations or even to
2:06.9	remember fake past situations for that matter. This ability to imagine ourselves at different
2:12.0	moments of time in different situations seems to be uniquely human. Now of course, it's a spectrum,
	...

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