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The Nature article Recalling the Future reviews the book Predictions in the Brain: Using Our Past to Generate a Future wherein Harvard’s Moshe Bar reviews cognitive science research about memory.

From the article I learned that there is growing experimental evidence for significant overlap between memory recall and future simulation. This relationship indicates that prediction is one potential reason why memory evolved: prediction is a unifying principle of the brain’s function and predictions are created from memories.

It seems that our minds spend a significant amount of time making predictions. These predictions are often mundane but sometimes they provide useful insight or even a survival advantage in a harsh and dangerous world. As our brains generate detailed pictures of future events, memory plasticity allows us to augment our recalled memories with up-to-date information. This also allows us to make new associations with a basis in past experience.

In a happy juxtaposition, I also watched Nova’s What Are Dreams? on the same weekend that I read the Nature article. That’s where I learned of an interesting twist on the conventional notion that dreaming helps to reinforce memories. I’ve heard before that dreaming may be involved in moving memories from short-term storage to long-term storage. Now it seems that dreams may also be involved in using memories to help us predict.

This idea is expressed here by Harvard’s Robert Stickgold:

…this is all about the function of sleep and the role of dreaming in processing memories, that it refines the memory, it improves the memory, it makes the memory more useful for the future, and so when they come back, they’re going to be better.

My sense is that when we’re asleep and when we’re dreaming, we are actually conscious and figuring out what’s important about what happened to us and how that relates to everything else that’s happened to us in the past and figuring out what that means about our future.

I’ve often thought (as I’ve searched the house for my car keys) that my memory connects my past to my present. But I’m also aware of how often my memories of past experiences help me in new situations—sometimes when circumstances are similar and sometimes when they’re not.

MIT’s Matt Wilson puts prediction in perspective when he highlights the biggest challenge that we face as humans:

…it is the unknown of the future. And in REM, we may have the opportunity to step into that future world with no risk, because the consequences are simply things don’t work out as you might have expected, and then you wake up.

A safe and secure dry run of sorts…

Memory is information about the past but one useful outcome of remembering the past is the more effective predictions of the future. It seems that our brains are constantly involved with making predictions—both while asleep and awake—and that the key component to these predictions is a result of our mind’s ability to remember.