The ever-eloquent Marshall McLuhan once said: “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

It is a quote we often refer to as we try to raise people’s awareness of our human tendency to explain today’s developments and trends in terms of the past or look at what might be tomorrow in terms of today or even yesterday. Past, present and future often appear as a tapestry woven out of assumptions based upon past experience.

At the same time, we make frequent use of techniques to bring possible futures closer to people and render them ‘experiencable’ by describing or visualizing them in a way that it seems as if they were our present context today. Diaries set in 2027 describing events of 2016 as past events, news-bulletins anno 2043, artifacts dug up from the year 2056, etc. … they instantiate, make ‘present’, that which is not there yet.

Brain imaging research at the University of Washington in St-Louis now sheds light on the regions of the brain we use to imagine future events. It turns out they strongly overlap with the regions we use to recollect the past.

“Postexperiment questionnaires indicate that while envisioning the future, subjects tended to place those images in the context of familiar places (e.g., home, school) and familiar people (e.g., friends).” In other words, to imagine the future, we remember the past and put our projection in that context.

When we use persona-like techniques to help people envision and get a grip on ‘characters’ in an altered future context, this is in a sense what happens. Part of the current persona context is taken along and reshaped based upon the effects of future influences, providing people with a grip to explore the unknown future context using present and past experiences.

Thanks to Mark for pointing out the link to me.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 24th, 2007 at 16:23 and is filed under future, methods & techniques, science, visions, visualization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.