time-symmetry of personalities

I spend very little time thinking about the past. I never dream about the future neither. The latter fact often bothers my wife. She considers me insensitive for not dreaming about the future of our family. Interestingly, she is also the nostalgic one in the family. (She keeps large boxes of old printed photos and regrets about her lost digital archives.)

Today I learned that this dichotomy is perfectly normal!

Apparently, thinking about the autobiographical past and planning about the future both exercise the same parts of the brain. In other words, one's relationship with time extends symmetrically in both directions.

This squares well with the fact that remembering is an active reconstruction. We simulate the past just like we simulate the future.

“There is a kind of symmetry between looking forward and backward, though we seldom think of it that way. We know that in plotting our next move, we are selecting paths into the future, analyzing the best available information and deciding on a route forward. But we are usually not aware that when we look back in time, our penchant for pattern-making leads us to be selective about which memories have meaning. And we do not always make the right selections. We build our story—our model of the past—as best we can. We may seek out other people's memories and examine our own limited records to come up with a better model. Even then, it is still only a model—not reality.”

Ed Catmull - Creativity, Inc. (Pages 177-178)