(Up to: Experience And Knowledge )

Can memory be thought of as a sixth (or seventh) sense? Just as we have extended the dimensional quota to include "time", it is conceivable that we need a way to sense this new dimension. Just as our traditional senses detect what is already there, and give us feedback, can it be that memory is simply our sense of what has already happened?

In this way, memory can be more or less sensitive, just as some people have better senses than others, and can see better, or hear better. A more sensitive memory can see more of the past, i.e. can remember more things, or in better detail.

Just as our eyes can be fooled, either to not see something, or to see something different (a href="http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html">see here), our memory is fallible too - we constantly forget things, or think something happened differently to what actually happened. Amnesia can be thought of as a "memory blindness".

If this is the case, is it possible to develop a sense of the future, too? This sounds silly at first, but makes a little more sense if you assume a causal spacetime. The difference between this and memory is that a sense of the future would have to rely far more on extrapolation of the current than archival properties. But we do this all the time, to a very small extent. "If I do this, then that will happen." We predict when a car will reach us, or how to catch a ball in flight. This is, in effect, a "memory of what will happen".

If senses can be trained, then why can't this sense of the future vary too? There are methods to improve memory, for instance. Does it therefore make sense that people should be able to predict the future to varying degrees too? Could this be the "sixth sense" traditionally talked of - premonitions, etc? Not all of the time, but there may be something in it. The problem is we are not trained or used to interpreting the information received from this sense, and so we tend to ignore it or laugh at it.

Just as one has to learn how to use one's eyes, or ears, or any other sense, perhaps it is possible to learn how to use an innate sense of time as well. The fact that the future is "unknown" is perhaps just as true as the fact that history is constantly forgotten. It doesn't necessarily mean that nothing happened, or that nothing will happen. Rather just that it is outside of our knowledge.

Note: Memory is a very personal thing, in that rather than being an accurate archive of past events, it may well be more of a "reconstruction" of past events. This could lead to it being clouded by current emotions and experiences. I conjecture that this is also a two-layer architecture - the memory of "actual" events is obscured by an "emotional" layer that tints the memory. This is mirrored by a psychological tainting of prediction (anti-memory), in which possible outcomes of a situation are coloured by experiences and emotions of the current, such as appears in social anxiety.
It therefore makes sense that a). past experience can be retrieved without this emotional layer, e.g. as in hypnotic regression, or through emotional "training", and b). there is a difference to be made in our predictive abilities too - for example our ability to catch a ball, and predict where it will be at a future point in time, is inherent, but this can be obscured by external factors that picture a scneario in which we, for instance, do not predict this correctly.

Is "prediction" just a term for a simple future memory?