By mining our memories:
If you stop and think about it, the ability to construct future scenarios in our minds is really quite remarkable. As far as we know, all other species, including our closest primate relatives, react to events as they occur. They can learn from these events and apply that learning in the future (think of chimpanzees learning how to catch ants by poking a stick into the mound and doing the same thing for every new ant mound they find), but they do not assemble complex pieces of information into a coherent whole of the future.
The Dish 