When you vividly imagine yourself in a future situation, your brain activates the same neural architecture it uses to recall past experiences. This isn't metaphorical. Most patients who lose the ability to form or recall memories also struggle with imagining futures. Your memory system and your imagination system are almost the same system. And fiction engages it directly.

When you read a trend report or forecast, your analytical mind evaluates, critiques, and often dismisses its findings. When you're immersed in a story, your brain processes the experience rather than arguing with it. You don't debate a narrative the way you debate a prediction. You inhabit it. Research confirms that readers spontaneously simulate characters' decisions as their own, creating transferable learning without triggering the usual resistance.

The difference comes down to one question.

Forecasts ask: "What will happen?" which tends to create anxiety and analysis paralysis, as you're stuck waiting for certainty that never comes.

Episodic future thinking asks: "What would I do if this happened?", creating agency. You're not guessing the right future. You're rehearsing many possible futures.

Each story you engage with adds to a mental library, the same kind of mechanism experts use to make critical decisions under pressure. Not through slow deliberation, or option comparison, but through recognition. They've encountered the shape of the situation before, even if the specifics are new.

That's the capability you're building, one story at a time.