> Some of our unconscious powers of prospection are shared by animals, but hardly any other creatures are capable of thinking more than a few minutes ahead. >>

> Some of our unconscious powers of prospection are shared by animals, but hardly any other creatures are capable of thinking more than a few minutes ahead. >> That's simply not true. Evolution and historical knowledge are intertwined with our RNA/DNA more than we know. These are two very different kinds of informational processes: - the one done by evolution, using genes and other non-conscious supra-individual "devices": (1) does not produce information that can be shared horizontally (unless you're a bacterium) through communication, (2) is not processed consciously in communication, aka "you don't talk about it and analyze it collectively in conversations" (unless you're a scientist talking about evolutionary biology) and (3) it does require individuals to break-out of the moment and think a bit deeper on shit, even if this may have the side effect of making you less attentive and sometimes makes you seem insensitive bordering on either psychopathy or autism depending on your social skills (or an "evil ego-centric not-living-in-the now intellectual" for less sophisticated minds) - the one done by individuals, using their brains, either consciously or not, and usually in data formats that can be easily encoded in language for people to be able to talk about their visions of the future and "infect" others with them; this is the realm of memes and visions and most of the interesting shit happens there Also, the article mentions some pretty deep insights when talking about depression, anxiety etc. Imho there's quite a lot that could be done in psychiatry and positive psychology through more "future-vision focused" therapies. Yeah, it's dangerous shit to play with, we know what happened when Hitler did "future-vision therapy" on a whole nation and it went wrong... But it's a tool with great potential, that requires you to break-of-the-now a little bit. And yeah, generally the powerful tools that result from "breaking-out-of-the-now" tend to be dangerous, like nuclear weapons and nuclear power (not "thinking in the now" sane person would develop technology that requires millenia-long waste disposal planning), but we're sure gonna be glad to have these tools once we start moving around the universe more... (Oh, and I dunno what's with this anti-NYT sentiments Americans have lately... as an European I find it the most enjoyable source of Sunday morning reading from the american press, once you learn to ignore it's obviously partisan political agenda and focus on the actual content.)