"Our brains are not, as far as I know, running any kind of recognizable simulation like we would with a computer." One way to implement the 'remembering' of th

"Our brains are not, as far as I know, running any kind of recognizable simulation like we would with a computer." One way to implement the 'remembering' of the ball position is to run a forward model of the trajectory in your head. Your brain has specialized hardware for running forward models (short-term simulations) of physical systems. You need these to control your body precisely in the face of delays in the feedback from your limbs. A nice story - it's a just-so story, but a nice one - is that we repurpose this simulation hardware to simulate systems we observe outside our bodies. Expert ball-catchers have a very good simulation, beginners have a bad one. If you're already an expert, you can get even better by running your simulation off-line: this may be why experts can practice by visualizing their golf swing or swim stroke but newbies can not improve much that way. There is some physical evidence that the off-line model stuff is real, as when you imagine yourself walking, or watch someone else walking, some of the same parts of your motor cortex are active as when you are actually walking. My very favourite part of this explanation trail is as follows: animals got very good at modelling the behaviour of other animals, in order to predict what they will do next: Eventually, they/we started re-using the same systems to understand and explain our own behaviour into the future. This is (at least part of) what we call consciousness. Now, you may or may not buy this, but it's rather elegant as a hypothesis.