Remembering the future

Your brain is built to forecast.  You know what you will be doing in the next few hours, in the next few days, in the next few weeks.  You don’t know the details.  You don’t know for sure.  But you have a reasonably good forecast.  And it is based on what you remember and similar things in the past.

Some people get a lot out of forecasting.  Maybe you do.  Maybe you could get more.  Here’s a way to check.

Pick some activity that you do routinely every few days.  

What is it and when are you going to do it next?

You probably thought of the answer in words.  That’s forecasting.  But you can do better than that.  Turn on your mind’s eye and imagine what you expect to happen in that activity. 

This space intentionally left blank
 to remind you to stop reading and imagine.

You will notice that your mind’s eye could call up details that you didn't think to mention when you answered in words.  You saw the actions in sequence.  You could have picked any part of the sequence and found even more details.

Now go through the sequence again, but change some part of what you saw.  Don’t improve it.  Just change it.

With your mind’s eye, you could forecast how the changed sequence would go.  You could sense how you would feel about the change.  You could decide whether you would like the change.

You could even pick out some cues that would remind you about the change at the right time to try it.  If you really want to be reminded of the change, be sure to pick (and image) a few cues that you will see just before you have to act on the change.   

You can use this trick to improve your memory.
Unless you forget about it.

Your language channel gets plenty of practice in forecasting.  People ask you what you are going to do and your language channel answers.  You may not have noticed the forecasting you do with images.  You may find that you get more use out of imagery forecasting when you pay attention to that skill.  You will probably find that you get better at imagery forecasting with more practice.

Or at least, that is our forcast