Now or Then?

The ability to anticipate what might happen in the future is an important life skill that allows us to plan and prepare for what’s to come, but we understand very little about how our brains actually do it. By repeatedly showing volunteers the same short clip from the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel while in an fMRI brain scanner, researchers were able to see which areas of the brain became active as the participants began to anticipate what was coming next. Intriguingly, areas of the brain linked to vision seemed to be involved in anticipating events in the next few seconds, while the middle parts of the brain anticipated 5 to 8 seconds in the future and the front of the brain was anticipating up to 15 seconds ahead. None of us can see the future, but now we know a bit more about how we anticipate what lies ahead.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

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Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

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• Image adapted from PK
• Research by Caroline S Lee, Mariam Aly & Christopher Baldassano, Columbia University, Department of Psychology, New York, NY, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic (CC BY 2.0)
• Research published in eLife, April 2021