ABSTRACT
To compensate for their sluggishness, our big brains have found ways to predict what will happen and to begin to respond before the critical moment. Our species, and most others, could not have survived if they had not mastered how to live in the immediate future. We keenly realise this when first learning to drive when everything happens too fast until we learn to read the road to anticipate events rather than beginning to brake only when a pedestrian actually steps off a curb. It takes long experience to learn all the critical cues that we need to make such predictions, but our modest accident rates per millions of motorist hours and miles show that we can become rather good at this. As we grow older, our reaction times become slower, but we also have longer experience of the world to guide our predictions. May improving our capability for instant prophecy compensate for increasing slowness in old age?
