Thinking ahead: the value of future consciousness; Psychologists are recognizing the key role that the future plays in our thinking, our actions, and our successes and failures in life.

Future consciousness is the total set of psychological abilities, processes, and experiences that humans use to understand and deal with the future. We first become aware of the future along with the past and present through our perception of time--of change, duration, and stability; of becoming and passing away; of patterns, rhythms, and forms of change.

We expand and enrich our consciousness of the future by building up the mental framework of images, concepts, and principles through which we understand and experience time. We do this not only through memories of our own personal experiences but through learning history, observing and studying contemporary trends, and imagining possible futures. Without anticipation, hope, goal setting, and planning--all features of future consciousness--we would be aimless, lost, mentally deficient, passive, and reactive. On the other hand, we can develop all these capacities and in so doing improve the total make-up of our mind and character. A growing understanding of the future fosters intellectual synthesis and higher-level thinking and contributes to the development of ethics, character virtues, and--most broadly of all--the multifaceted capacity of wisdom.

Developing Our Foresight

All adult humans possess some capacity of foresight--the ability to imagine the future. We could not intentionally develop and act on conscious future goals unless we possessed a minimal ability to imagine the future and see in our "mind's eye" our goals and aspirations. But people differ greatly in their ability to think ahead. Some people have trouble thinking of what might happen tomorrow while others can imagine all kinds of richly defined alternative futures, sometimes extending centuries or even millennia into the future.

Few of us develop our foresight capacity as much as we can and should. We may envision only very short-term goals, or we may routinely direct our lives toward longstanding goals that are rarely questioned or altered. We may put little effort into attempting to imagine goals that are different from those we have pursued in the past. We may just never think much about changing our goals. Yet, if we simply target the same goals over and over again, our lives will remain stuck in the past.

There are many benefits associated with expanding our capacity for foresight, and we can do it by learning how to imagine many possibilities when we are thinking about the future. One simple technique is to repeatedly pose the question "What if?" and then visualize whatever possibilities occur to us. Developing our foresight in this manner can amplify our power to envision new and more-complex goals. Even if we simply engage in speculative visioning about the future, with no thought of practical or personal relevance, we will nourish our imaginative powers. By enriching our minds with new possibilities and expanding the psychological space in which we think, we increase our mental and behavioral freedom.

When we use our imagination to envision future possibilities, we bring our creativity into play. Human creativity is the ability to produce novel ideas, inventions, and behaviors. There are many …