the way that the human brain goes about the task of “remembering the past” is actually very similar to how it goes about “imagining the future

Deep down, these are activities with very different functions and outcomes — predicting the future is a lot less reliable, for one thing. But in both cases, the brain goes through more or less the same routine

Daniel Schacter at Harvard

We tend to assume that the brain must be like a computer

But that’s not it at all

Schacter believes that pieces of data relevant to any particular memory — times, images, sounds — are stored piecemeal in different parts of the brain. When we want to “remember” something, another part of the brain assembles these pieces into a (hopefully) coherent picture. It’s like running a new simulation every time you need a memory, and it’s the same thing we do when we try to imagine some event in the future