You can slide through time to a world which does not yet exist

Laurence Gonzales in Deep Survival. Page 80.

Sometimes an idea can drive action as powerfully as an emotion. Plans are an integral part of survival. Plans are generated as one of the many outputs of the brain as it goes about its business of mapping the body and the environment, along with the events taking place in both, resulting in adaptation. Planning is a deep instinct. Animals plan, and a bird that hides seeds has a larger hippocampus than others, suggesting a larger capacity for spatial memory. But planning - predicting the future - may be even more fundamental than animal abilities suggest. In his book Complexity, M. Mitchell Waldrop points out that "All complex adaptive systems anticipate the future. . . . Every living creature has an implicit prediction encoded in its genes . . . every complex adaptive system is constantly making predictions based on its various internal models of the world. . . . In fact, you can think of internal models as the building blocks of behavior. And like any other building blocks, they can be tested, refined, and rearranged as the system gains experience."

The human brain is particularly well suited to making complex plans that have an emotional component to drive motivation and behavior. Plans are stored in memory just as past events are. To the brain, the future is as real as the past. The difficulty begins when reality doesn't match the plan.

Memories are not emotion, and emotion is not memory, but the two work together. Mental models, which are stored in memory, are not emotions either. But they can be engaged with emotion, motivation, cognition, and memory. And since memories can exist in either the past or the future, to the brain it's the same thing. You bookmark the future in order to get there. It's a magic trick: You can slide through time to a world which does not yet exist.