Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it lands with someone like you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.
Happy Wednesday, founders,
Welcome to this week’s bonus edition: Part 2 on the brain’s default mode network, and why it is a key mental toolkit to understand for founders’ decision-making.
Yesterday, we looked at how our brain forms light bulb moments during unexpected moments like a walk or a shower: through a process called associative recombination.
This process gathers fragments from separate memories and binds them into new connections, and it only happens during a default mode network, in other words, when our mind is not focused on a specific task.
Today, we are moving on to the second mechanism.
One that I'd argue is even more directly relevant to what founders do: episodic future thinking.
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The brain that uses memory to see forward
In 2007, Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter and his collaborator Donna Rose Addis published a paper that ran against the standard model of memory. They called it the constructive episodic simulation hypothesis.
The prevailing assumption was that memory and imagination were distinct cognitive functions, one looking backward and one forward, using different neural systems. Schacter and Addis examined fMRI data and found otherwise: remembering and imagining engage the same core network, with common neural activity for both the past and the future.
Common and distinct regions engaged by the construction and elaboration of past and future events (Addis et al. 2007).
The brain has no separate system for imagining the future: it uses memory. When we simulate a future event, a conversation that hasn't happened, the hippocampus retrieves fragments from past experiences and recombines them into a projection. Episodic memory supports the construction of future experiences by providing access to episodic details that can be recombined into novel events.
What episodic future thinking looks like in practice
Episodic future thinking (EFT) is the brain's capacity to mentally simulate specific events that haven't happened yet. It's distinct from abstract planning, roadmaps, strategy documents, and frameworks. Those draw on semantic cognition: general and conceptual. EFT is concrete and experiential.
For founders, EFT is operating constantly:
Feeling a potential red flag from a new hire
When something feels off about a candidate, the brain has already created a forward simulation drawing on patterns from every previous hire, team dynamics stored in memory. The feeling of unease is EFT operating ahead of conscious processing.
Sensing where a market is heading
The founder who saw a market change coming was doing episodic future thinking, recombining patterns from past experience into a model for the future.
Anticipating how a decision will form with the team
EFT at the social level: simulating the relational consequences of a choice before it's made, using stored episodic data about those specific people and their specific dynamic.
Episodic future thinking has been shown to support far-sighted decision-making, with imagined future outcomes facilitating the ability to make decisions that support them. The mechanism is structural.
Why the overthinker's architecture matters here
One of the more compelling findings from research on episodic simulation is that the hippocampus is engaged to a greater degree when imagining than when remembering. Future thinking is more cognitively demanding than recalling the past. It requires the active recombination of episodic fragments into novel configurations rather than the retrieval of something already stored.
The DMN, which runs at higher volume in overthinkers, is the same network that supports EFT. The founder who can't stop processing, who runs a conversation in their head before it happens, who thinks through second and third-order consequences before committing, is doing EFT more continuously and at greater depth than they realize.
How we interpret that experience shapes how we manage it. If we treat continuous forward simulation as something to suppress, we interfere with a process that has real decision-making value. If we understand what it is, we can build the conditions for it to serve the purpose.
What good conditions look like
EFT is most productive when we mentally construct: concrete rather than abstract, specific rather than general, and connected to personally meaningful goals rather than anxious worst-case projections.
Be more specific
Abstract anxious thinking, like ‘what if this goes wrong,’ does not build the condition for episodic future thinking to perform, because it’s too vague. Be specific: who is present in the situation you’re worried about, what are they likely to say, and what could that decision cost? The more concrete the mental scenario, the more useful the output.
Feed it before high-stakes decisions
EFT quality depends on the richness of the available episodic material. Before a significant hire or a pricing decision, deliberately revisiting analogous past situations gives the simulation engine relevant memories to rely on.
Check the direction to separate EFT from rumination
EFT moves forward and generates new framings. Rumination replays the same scenario from the same angle without arriving anywhere new. If the thinking is moving in a different direction from where it started, the DMN is doing its job. If it's returning to the same point on repeat, that's a different problem.
Key takeaways
The brain uses the same system to remember the past and simulate the future. The hippocampus doesn't distinguish between retrieval and forward projection: it recombines episodic fragments in both directions. EFT is built from what we’ve already experienced, which means the range and depth of past experience directly determines the quality of the forward simulations you can run.
For founders, EFT relies on capabilities that are often attributed to gut feel or intuition: noticing a red flag early or sensing a market shift. Understanding the mechanism makes it more deliberate to apply.
The practical actions are: keep the simulation specific, feed it with relevant past material before big decisions, and learn to distinguish forward projection from rumination loop.
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Until next week,
Lavena
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