Future

Today while coming home from my parents, it struck me that there is something wrong with the way we visualize the future. I realized that when we picture ourselves doing something in a future time, we do it in the exact same way as when we try to visualize something from the past, the images we project in our heads are similar. It seems that we do is more like thinking about how we will remember the future once it has passed, and this concept for the first time bothers me.

When we think about a past event we take something that we have previously sensed and recall it. We basically replay a movie from the material we have stored in a past time, and the images we project in this movie can be more or less representative of the reality as it happened. On the other hand, when we experience the present we don't really recall much, we sense the events as they are happening to us and try to react to them. If our brain can not interpret something in real time, then somehow it fills in the gap by fabricating a fictitious sensation based in our past experiences, but in any case the present is a time of feeling, of sensing the moment.

Now, if in the scale of time the future is closer to the present than to the past,  then why when we think about the future we first build the images and sounds like if it were a memory, and from those memories then generate feelings? Shouldn't it be the other way around? Shouldn't it be more coherent to try to just "feel" the future and then, as a second process build the images and sounds that can help us interpret those feelings?

UNDER RE-CONSTRUCTION....