Issue 78: Terminology Tuesday: Episodic Future Thinking
The neuroscience behind what the woo-woo crowd has been calling visualization all along.
In This Issue
Recent Issues
Terminology Tuesday: Episodic Future Thinking
Updates:
Marsh Press News: Artwork
On the Serial Memoir: Tomorrow
Food for Thought: Imagining What We’ve Never Lived
Recent Issues
Fact-Check Friday: The Crash After Curiosity
Tuesday’s issue made learning sound pretty good. This is the correction. When feedback disappears and confusion keeps generating more confusion, the same brain that felt electric forty-eight hours ago files a formal complaint. This week’s fact-check is about cognitive friction: what it actually costs to stay in not-knowing, why the urge to quit arrives as a fully formed argument, and why that’s a nervous system response, not a character flaw. Sometimes the smartest move is stepping away from the screen. The brain keeps working when you’re not watching.
Terminology Tuesday: Why Learning (Sometimes) Feels Like Hitting the Jackpot
This week's Terminology Tuesday started with a weekend of falling headlong into workflow systems and not wanting to stop—and turned into an investigation of why certain kinds of learning feel electric while others feel like a drain. And because this is Remapping Myself, we brought it all the way back to working memory, habit formation, neuroplasticity, and how to design conditions that make the jackpot feeling less accidental and more repeatable.
Terminology Tuesday: Episodic Future Thinking
My dad toured an assisted living place on Friday. Nothing in his situation has shifted, and no decision is anywhere close. The visit sat in this narrow frame: something to keep in mind for some later chapter. For “when things get harder” is how I framed it. It was future-oriented, but in a way that stayed safely hypothetical, shelved under a version of reality that might never show up in quite that form.
The visit itself didn’t surprise me. The way he talked about it afterward did.
My dad has vascular dementia, which means I never quite know what will stay with him or how he’ll think about something once it’s no longer right in front of him. Vascular dementia comes from changes in blood flow to the brain and often shows up most clearly in attention, processing speed, and executive functioning—planning, organizing, holding steps in mind—as much as in memory itself. That mix makes it harder to keep a clean thread about the future: imagining a scene, weighing options inside it, and then carrying those impressions forward all draw on systems that are now patchy for him.
I’d braced for some kind of pushback. What I’d been quietly afraid of, if I’m honest, was that he would leap straight to panic, assume this meant a move was happening now, and feel like it was being decided around him. Instead, he told me what he’d noticed. He mentioned small details. He brought it up again, not in a worried loop, but like he was turning over something interesting. I didn’t know how to hold that, so I did what I usually do: I went looking for a way to explain it. I turned to neuroplasticity and psychology.
I thought of the stages of change first—precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, etc. I know that model well, and it kept casting him as a point along a sequence. That felt off. It gave me a sense of where he might be headed, but not what was opening up inside that willingness to look.
Then my brain reached for cope ahead—the DBT skill where we mentally rehearse a difficult future scenario on purpose. If anything in that toolkit was going to cover this, it would be that one. Coping ahead, though, is formal. We carve out time. We pick a scenario. We walk ourselves through it with intention. What he was doing felt looser, like his mind was quietly turning toward a different possibility without bracing for impact.
So I kept digging. The term I landed on was episodic future thinking. Rolls right off the tongue.
The Brain’s Version of “I’ve Been There”
Developmental psychologists Cristina Atance and Daniela O’Neill named future episodic thinking in 2001: the ability to mentally pre-experience a specific future event—not just knowing it as a fact, but actually placing ourselves inside it. It builds on earlier work about mental time travel: the same capacity that lets us re-enter a memory also lets us step into a scene that hasn’t happened yet. Dad hates sci-fi and I love this for him.
The part that surprised me most is that the brain doesn’t really distinguish between remembering and imagining. They run on the same equipment. Daniel Schacter describes memory less as an archive and more as a parts warehouse—the hippocampus stores fragments of experience specifically so it can reassemble them into new scenes. Future ones. Possible ones. Places we’ve never been but can already almost feel.
Before it can build that scene, though, the brain reaches for a script first—a general sense of what this kind of experience looks like based on what we’ve already lived. That scaffolding goes up before any specific detail gets added. Which is why prior experience shapes future imagination so strongly, and why the same setting can mean completely different things to different people walking through it.
That’s memory doing its job. And also, quietly, doing ours.
What the Visit Actually Changed
Researchers distinguish episodic future thinking from semantic future thinking. I love the language here. It makes sense. Semantic future thinking sounds like a headline: I might move someday. Episodic future thinking feels more like stepping into a specific morning—the corridor, the breakfast room, the way the light falls in a place you might actually live. One is words, the other is a scene.
That difference shifts how the future lands emotionally and how the brain files it away.
Once we’ve walked through a place—noticed what feels comforting, what doesn’t, how our bodies respond—the idea reorganizes itself. It stops being an abstract category and becomes a location our minds can return to with actual detail. That’s what I was seeing in the way he talked about the tour: an idea turning into a place his mind now knew from the inside, even though I never fully know which places his mind will be able to revisit or for how long.
Two years ago, this would have been a completely different interaction. Back then, assisted living in our family story was not a neutral possibility. It was a container for escalation: my mother’s increasing care needs, the unpredictability no one could tame, the constant adjustments required from everyone around her. Assisted living was a sentence—where they landed because they had to, because they’d “failed” living on their own. Hoo boy. I’m just going to set those cognitive distortions on the floor and walk away.
With distance—and no immediate crisis pushing on the decision—the intensity of that chapter stops defining the whole category. It becomes one version of what assisted living can mean instead of the only one. That tiny bit of slack creates room for a second interpretation to form, still vague, but present. The same setting starts to feel less like the site of past chaos and more like a place that might prevent certain kinds of difficulty from piling up in the first place. Or even be a place of so much positive experience that his stoic, Lutheran, Scandinavian heart explodes.
How a Future Topic Circulates
We can see episodic future thinking most clearly in the way a topic behaves after an experience like that. It doesn’t surface once and then disappear with a neat conclusion. It comes back around, but without pressure.
A remark about something he noticed. A comparison that only makes sense because his mind is still using the visit as a reference point. A detail that wouldn’t have mattered before but now has somewhere to land. From the outside, this repeated circling can look like indecision—a reluctance to “just make a choice.” In my dad’s case, it also brushes up against the reality that some threads simply drop; his vascular dementia means certain conversations don’t have a continuous arc. On the inside, the brain is revisiting the same material at higher levels of familiarity, trying it out in low-stakes ways and slowly weaving it into the existing map.
The past is still sitting in the room. What happened with my mother doesn’t disappear, and it shouldn’t. But it stops being the only template he has. There’s a growing ability to tease apart two realities: the specific conditions that shaped that earlier experience, and the different conditions he would be bringing into any future move. That distinction is subtle, almost hard to name, and it’s also what allows any movement at all.
This past experience is also really helpful in conjuring this future. He’s already lived in a property run by the same company. He understands how it works. He’ll be able to rely on those neural pathways to know how to order his meals, how to plan his activities, and how people will show up to help him. Where he’s missing some of that information since he’ll be there solo rather than with my mother, I’ll start talking about more often so I can help prepare him. For whenever.
Where Else This Shows Up
This kind of future simulation isn’t limited to big decisions. It’s there in smaller, quieter shifts too.
We start to imagine a different kind of work—not as a job search spreadsheet, but as how a Tuesday would feel if certain constraints disappeared. We picture living somewhere else and find ourselves mentally walking the neighborhood, noticing how long it might take to get around, how the evenings might unfold. We register a change in a relationship dynamic, and even if no conversation happens, it becomes harder to fully return to the old version of what we knew.
On paper, nothing has changed. No decision has been made. But our lived sense of things has already stretched to include an alternative.
This is also why vision boards are helpful. When we repeatedly put specific images in front of ourselves, we’re giving the brain raw material to build a scene. The more concrete and sensory the imagined scenario, the more the hippocampus has to assemble. Repetition and specificity are the actual mechanism—which is, when we strip away the shimmer, what solid visualization practice is already asking us to do.
When Future Scenes Mislead Us
The research doesn’t treat episodic future thinking as a magic solution. The scenes we construct are colored by our emotional state at the time, and when that state is running through cognitive distortions, the futures we rehearse can quietly steer us off course. My eating disorder apparently loves to take episodic future thinking and turn it into incredible weight loss success without me doing a dang thing other than ruminating. That’s not great. So now that I have the language for it, I can keep it in the safe zone and avoid the cognitive quagmires.
Fortune-telling is a common one. We imagine a future and then behave as if we’ve already seen the ending. One visit to one assisted living facility becomes, in our minds, a preview of the whole experience—like walking down a single hallway gives us reliable data on what it would feel like to live there day after day. The brain rushes to fill the empty spaces with certainty it hasn’t earned.
Overgeneralization tags along. One version of a place starts to stand in for every version. If the visit feels bearable, the entire category softens. If something registers as wrong, the whole option goes dim. We take a sample size of one and quietly promote it to “how this always goes.”
Emotional reasoning adds another layer. Because episodic future thinking is felt—there’s mood, texture, a sense of being inside something—the emotion of the simulation starts to read like evidence. If imagining it brings relief, we treat that feeling as confirmation. If it stirs dread, we treat that dread as information about the future rather than information about where we are right now.
And then there’s affective forecasting error: our very consistent inability to accurately predict how we’ll actually feel when we arrive in a future we’ve been rehearsing. We overshoot both the intensity and the duration of our future emotions, whether they’re positive or negative. The relief we expect or the loss we’re certain will flatten us rarely shows up in quite the form we pictured.
None of this cancels out the usefulness of the process. It just suggests we do well to hold our simulations lightly. Visualization may have real effects, but what we’re generating is a draft of a possible future, written from a particular vantage point.
What This Means for Decisions
We’re usually taught to think of decisions as the moment change begins. On the outside, that’s true: paperwork gets signed, boxes get packed, addresses are updated. Psychologically, though, most of the shifting has already taken place by the time we say yes or no. The future has been visited and revisited, made familiar enough that moving toward it doesn’t feel like jumping off a cliff. It feels like taking the next step on a path we’ve already walked many times in our heads.
What we owe ourselves is some curiosity about who, exactly, has been doing that imagining, and what they were carrying into those scenes.
Right now, that’s where things are with my dad. There’s no mandate that this turns into a move. No timeline. No requirement that it happen at all. We’re on the waitlist so we’ll get an opportunity to decide about his next move each time someone vacates an apartment in assisted living. What mattered about this visit—what I keep coming back to—is that he walked through a place and stayed curious. He didn’t collapse the experience into a verdict. He didn’t hand it back to me as evidence that something terrible is underway. The meaningful change is quieter than that: this possibility now exists in a different form, and he’s the one who’s been inside it.
He lives here. That’s still true.
And there is now another place his mind has been, a place he can return to in imagination, which may or may not matter later.
For a while, both can sit side by side. Dialectics and wise mind let us do that.
That’s one way a brain learns to live with a future it has already stepped into, even if only in passing.
Exercise: Drafting the Future
Think of something you’ve been circling but haven’t decided on yet—a move, a shift in work, a change in a relationship or routine. Ask yourself whether you’ve only held it as a category, or whether you’ve actually been inside a specific version of it with real detail. If it’s still mostly a label—semantic—what it would take to give it some texture? What could give your mind something more concrete to work with—a scene, an episode?
Then notice what might be skewing the picture. Are you treating one imagined outcome as inevitable? Letting a single experience stand in for the entire category? Letting the feeling tone of your simulation carry more authority than it deserves?
What you’re creating is a draft of a future that could exist. It’s useful. It’s worth tending. And it’s much easier to revise when you remember it’s a draft.
Updates
Marsh Press News
I’ve been quietly pouring time and energy and a kind of creativity I didn’t realize I’d been missing into something new at Marsh Press. Artwork. My own. Available as digital downloads you can print at home, and as canvas and print options delivered straight to you.
I didn’t know how much I needed this until I was already deep in it. It’s been fueling me in ways I forgot were possible. And making me laugh.
I’m almost ready to launch and I cannot wait to share it with you. More very soon.
On the Serial Memoir: Tomorrow
Starting tomorrow, I’ll be publishing Fat & Drunk is a serialized memoir about being fat and drunk. Getting there, being there, and recovering from there. Mostly. It’ll be for paid subscribers because nobody’s getting that stuff for free.
Food for Thought
Imagining What We’ve Never Lived
There’s a line buried in the neuroscience of episodic future thinking that reframed something I’ve been chewing on for years.
As mentioned above, before the brain can build a future scene, it reaches for a script—a framework assembled from prior experience. That scaffolding goes up first, and specific detail gets layered on top. Which means the future we’re able to imagine is always, at least partly, a remix of the past we’ve already lived.
That’s useful when the past is rich and varied. It’s a problem when it isn’t.
It goes a long way toward explaining why political conversations so often feel like they’re happening across a gap that facts don’t close. We tend to call that a values problem, or an ideology problem. And sometimes it is. But I’ve been saying for a long time that it’s also an imagination problem. Now I know why. If the brain builds futures from lived experience, then people who have never been unhoused, never navigated an underfunded school, never watched a parent’s mind start to slip—they may not be failing to care so much as failing to picture. The script they reach for first doesn’t have those rooms in it.
That also might be a bit too reductive, which is why this is food for thought.
I covered the Vote No campaign in 2012 as editorial director of Minnesota’s LGBTQ magazine, and what struck me then—and makes even more sense now—was the strategic decision to skip the argument and go straight to the story. Volunteers went door to door across the state asking people one question in about a hundred different ways: Do you know someone who is gay? Have you thought about what this would mean for them? Not statistics. Not legal framing. Just: here is a specific person, a specific relationship, a specific morning that will look different depending on how you vote.
What they were doing was handing people’s brains something to build with. Abstract information doesn’t build scenes. Statistics don’t build scenes. What builds scenes is particular, human-scale, sensory. A person. A kitchen table. A relationship with actual texture. The campaign understood—without calling it neuroscience—that you can’t ask people to imagine a future they have no raw material for.
Minnesota became the first state to vote down a same-sex marriage ban at the ballot box. The relational, story-based organizing got most of the credit, as it should. It all makes even more sense now that I understand the mechanism a little better.
It also cuts the other direction. People who have lived through hardship can overgeneralize just as readily—treating their particular experience as the template. One script, applied everywhere, leaving no room for a different version of the same category.
So can people imagine what they’ve never lived? Sort of. Imperfectly. And only with enough specific detail to actually construct a scene—which is the best argument I know for why personal essay and memoir function as something more than catharsis. They hand the brain raw material it couldn’t have gathered on its own. And I love it.
A fragment for someone else’s warehouse.
Whether they build anything with it is up to them.
