October 3, 2026
Philosopher and 2026 MacArthur “genius grant” recipient Felipe De Brigard explains how our brains use imagination to reconstruct the past
By Allison Parshall edited by Claire Cameron
PM Images/Getty Images
Neuroscience
A month ago philosopher Felipe De Brigard received a strange phone call. “Are you in a private place where you can have a private conversation?” the voice on the other end asked.
He was on a work retreat surrounded by colleagues. “Just say you need to talk about your taxes,” the caller said. De Brigard excused himself to find a private space, panicking the whole time about his taxes—but it was actually the MacArthur Foundation on the line. De Brigard had been awarded a prestigious “genius grant,” an $800,000 fellowship with no strings attached.
“I just was floored. And I had to put everything back together and walk back in like nothing happened,” says De Brigard, who is a professor at Duke University and originally from Bogotá, Colombia. He is only the second philosopher to be awarded the fellowship in the past 30 years.
De Brigard would be the first to tell you that his recollection of that day may be flawed. As a philosopher and cognitive scientist, he studies the fallibility of memory. Our brains don’t work like digital cameras recording our experiences to a mental hard drive, he explains. We store only some parts of our experience—gestures, stories, the gist. When we go to retrieve those memories, our brains need to fill in the gaps.
De Brigard’s research shows just how intertwined our brain’s memory is with imagination. We use some of the same mental machinery to reconstruct the past as we do to imagine the future—and to imagine what might have been.
Scientific American spoke with De Brigard about why false memories form, why we dwell on the roads not taken, how forgiveness influences memory and whether we should worry about artificial intelligence becoming conscious.
[An edited transcript of the conversation follows.]
