Humans have an incredible capacity for “mental time travel.” We can look back into our past, by recollecting memories and past experiences, or we can look forward into our future, by projecting new and possible events in our lives. Foresight is our ability to accurately predict future outcomes. It is a long-term, “bigger picture” view [...]

The way we think of past events in our lives is very flexible and subject to change. Whenever we look back at our life story, it can change based on our perspective and what information about our lives we choose to pay attention to and find important. We can take this flexible nature of our [...]

Focus on positive memories Focusing on positive memories can be a great way of staying motivated and committed toward our long-term goals and values. In a 2011 issue of Psychological Science, researchers discovered that loyal baseball fans are more likely to remember details of events when their team won, rather than when their team lost. [...]

There was an interesting study recently published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism. Researchers at the University of Montreal’s Center for Studies on Human Stress tested to see the effects of cortisol (“the stress hormone,” commonly associated with our body’s fight-or-flight response) on participant’s memories of an emotional event. The experimenters had participants [...]