The brain on ‘tomorrow’

There may be political violence. There may be political settlements. There may be deaths of celebrities. There may be births from major celebrities. There may be a major wedding between celebrities. There may be a messy break-up between celebrities. There may be at least one major earthquake or typhoon in the country. There may be a challenge to the legitimacy of the current government. There may be a significant response to it from the current government. I listened to the 2007 predictions that have been made by these so-called psychics and the only thing I found remarkable is how they seem to be so comfortable, almost arrogant in their own belief that by some powerful assignation of the universe, they are bestowed some gift that could peer into the future that holds not only psychics like themselves, but also the rest of us.

Notice that all the so-called psychic predictions could not really totally go awry because they cover a wide spectrum of possibilities; they are never specific (for instance, what is the intensity of this major earthquake or what is the maximum strength of this major storm?). We are located in a spot of the planet that is really on the Rim of Fire as far as tectonic activity is concerned and we are also along the path of the storms. What do the earth sciences or the other sciences, for that matter, have to do and discover further to deserve your attention? They must wonder that since the media and the public consult psychics so much more and I have watched these hosts delight and absorb with interest the psychics’ wide general statements that are wrapped in the entertaining but meaningless psychic language. In case we have to be reminded there will always be deaths, births, marriages and split-ups among celebrities because they are, if you have not noticed yet – people – which means they go through the same rites of passage just like the rest of us non-celebrities. And for a country like ours as politically stable as jello on a barbecue stick, you have something else going on in your head if you can predict government instability and consider yourself gifted.

Listening to all the psychic predictions for this year lent me an impression that this year will be, as Charles Dickens opened his A Tale of Two Cities, "the best of times and the worst of times." But A Tale of Two Cities is a literary work of fiction while the psychic predictions are bold ventures into something real – what we all commonly potentially hold – the future – and these ventures are at the very least, annoying and insulting, to anyone who holds a memory of anything. And this is why: science has peered on to our brains to see what happens when we want to predict the future and found that we all rely on memory to do so.

The study, entitled "Neural substrates of envisioning the future" by Kark. Szpunar, Jason M. Watson and Kathleen McDermott, appeared in the Jan. 9 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. From what I read in the journal, it appears that scientists have previously looked into human brain activity when the brain tries to "fashion behavior in anticipation of future consequences" and that much of this has to do with our capacity to anticipate, plan and monitor and they saw this activity to be in the frontal cortex.  But this study we are looking at now wanted to see what regions in the brain become very active when we envision ourselves in future scenarios – something that is even more fundamental.

These are the main things they found out: one, that when we place ourselves in future scenarios, we involve more than the frontal cortex but other parts as well (left bilateral cortex, left precuneus, right posterior cerebellum) that are known to be the major repositories of our memorabilia. This means that we plot our future not with writings on thin air but from what we remember. Second, that when we project ourselves in the future, it also involves the parts of the brain that govern our visual-spatial capacities. This means that we "act out" in our heads what our bodies would do in that projected act into the future; this means that body language plays a part in predicting the future. Finally, there are more activities in memory and the visual-spatial parts of the brain when one is thinking about one’s own participation in the future than when asked to imagine another individual into the future.

What cued the scientists on to the importance of memory into predicting the future is the quirky case of those with amnesia. Most of us know that amnesiacs cannot remember the past but few of us are aware that when asked what they want to do in the future, the amnesiacs also do not have an answer to that. This made the scientists think that memory may indeed play a large role in being able to predict the future. Knowing this now, I am curious as to what brain regions the psychics dig into when they make their predictions about other people, or even for the whole country. Knowing now that it is personal memory that comes into play when we predict our own future, what places a psychic in such an advantaged position, relative to the memory-holder, to make such bold assertions about what the future holds for another? With this new finding, entrusting your vision of your own future to psychics seems like voluntary surrender of what could be your most intimate property – your memory and your ability to change, transform and improve your life based on that memory. Then you are not a victim of a hoax but a volunteer. I can think of a million more encouraging things to start my year with than surrendering my memories to people who do not even know me and who utter words like "energy" that would make Einstein turn in his grave or get up to remind the psychics that he did not get his hair all permanently mussed up while alive for nothing (e=tomorrow?).

Another striking thing about the study’s findings is the one involving body language – that we act out our visions of ourselves in the future. This is a known method called "cold reading" among supposed psychics, where they read your body language depending on how you react to some scenarios/cues that they utter in staggered guesses. There is a pattern in human body language that is able to cue others on to what one is up to. My current TV hero is Dr. Gregory House and his character’s seething but intelligent and grounded skepticism enables his character to cull a pattern from seemingly random symptoms of body language and behavior and diagnose a disease and the path it will take.

Most, if not all the TV shows I have seen delighted in having these psychics predict our society’s future and the future of showbiz. Hardly any of them, save the business sections, featured projections based on the patterns of what we have done with ourselves in the past. This recent finding in science showed that the richness of the options for our future is largely based on the kind of memory we have. No memory to refer to, change or improve, then no future.

Turns out Dr. Jose Rizal was neuro-scientifically correct, too, when he said, "Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan ay hindi makararating sa paroroonan (Those who do not look behind to where they have been could never get to where they are going)." Remembering turns out to be the way our future unfolds. Neither tarot cards nor crystal balls necessary.

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