What Would Happen If Humans Live Beyond Time? Publisher



Rezaei N^{1, 2, 3} ; Saghazadeh A^{4, 5} Show Affiliations
Source: Biophysics and Neurophysiology of the Sixth Sense Published:2019

Abstract

Thoughts on the future events have enormous potential to affect the way we act now. Therefore, the accuracy of our predictions of the future would be reflected in the adequacy of our current actions in order to achieve our goals. Research led to recognition of some potential factors, in particular, the temporal proximity of the target event, which might influence our estimations of future events. Interestingly, all such factors converge on one point, which is the limitation of information that the conscious brain can process. Given the prominence of unconscious thought to gather and process information than conscious thought, it is proposed that unconscious thinking may promote the quality of prospection by overcoming artifacts from consciousness, thereby providing more accurate estimations of the future. Here, the term conscious/unconscious prospection is defined as the degree of belief in/freedom from the present time. In an attempt to provide a framework for the hypothesis of conscious → unconscious prospection (CUP), the principles of unconscious thought theory and information-integration theory along with the mechanism of action of default-mode network (DMN) are used. The chapter presents evidence of how through which-the mainstream moving from conscious thought towards the unconscious thought-the probability of the secondary information integration and therefore the accuracy of prospective thinking will be increased. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019.