How and Why We Can Mentally Time Travel
We all do it, but the ability is pretty multifaceted if you think about it
Hiya!
“Get out of your head and stop thinking so far into the future, just stay in the moment” is probably the most repeated piece of advice I’ve received throughout my life from people who know me well. I’ve heard it often enough that I can usually catch myself from getting so caught up in the future that I lose sight of right now, then redirect my focus. It’s called “mental time travel,” and we all do it.
Your body is always here, but your mind is not tethered the same way. You think about what happened yesterday and about your plans for tomorrow. We plan our vacations months to years in advance and lie in bed ruminating over long-past mistakes. Whether mental time travel is a wonderful or harmful ability depends entirely on how we use it, but either way, it’s pretty remarkable we can do it at all. So how and why do we do it?
Some Basics About Mental Time Travel
What’s that saying? If you want to know your future, look at your present decisions? It’s so simple and true. The more we envision our future, the more our current behaviors and decisions are directed toward creating that future — and we couldn’t do this without the power to mentally time travel.
No one knows how long we’ve had this fun little ability, but psychologist Endel Tulving introduced the concept to the scientific community during the 1980s, and he’s still studying it.
Thanks largely to Tulving, mental time travel is a pretty well-researched topic today. So much so that many psychologists suggest mental time travel is a fundamental part of what it means to be human.
In the early days, Tulving was the one who suggested we (humans) use the same brain mechanisms for both remembering our past, and envisioning the future. Further case studies about amnesiacs add weight to Tulving’s idea, too.
Individually, pondering the future allows us to connect our present actions and behaviors with our vision of our future selves. A psychologist at UCLA who studies the effects of time perception, Hal Hershfield, and his colleagues found that people often make more future-oriented decisions when they strongly regard their future selves. (This has been my personal experience too.)
Interestingly, Hershfield followed up by asking people about their subjective sense of how long the present lasts. He found that the longer the participants conceived the present moment to be, the fewer emotions they felt about the future. Whereas people were more likely to make future-oriented decisions when they viewed “right now” as shorter.
Hershfield’s research shows the more we think about the future, the more likely we are to participate in sustainable behaviors. Perhaps is likely why younger generations, especially Gen Z, are such powerful voices in the fight against global warming. Especially considering research shows that young people think about their future an average of 59 times a day. All while they watch Earth’s climate spiral further out of control with every passing year.
Anyway, in the decades since Tulving put mental time travel on the scientific radar, experts wasted no time in trying to understand how and where it happens in the brain — and why.
How and Why We Can Mentally Time Travel
The word “memory” is actually an umbrella term with several types of memories. Specifically, it’s our episodic memories we can thank for our ability to mentally time travel. Episodic memories are our personal memories or memories of our personal experiences—The things that happen to us, the places we go, our interactions with others, and how we feel during all of it.
Going back to Tulving real quick, there was a case study from the early 1980s concerning a man referred to as “K.C.” that inspired Tulving to announce mental time travel to the public. Because of brain lesions, K.C. couldn’t remember any personal memories (episodic memories), such as visiting a family lakehouse. It was so bad that K.C. couldn’t even imagine going to the lake house in the future, even though he cognitively knew his family owned the house.
Many assume our episodic memories contain perfect recollections of our experiences—but they don’t. We get frustrated when we can’t remember everything perfectly or when memories slip right out of our heads. But that’s because our memories aren’t photo albums. They don’t just exist to reminisce on past sentimental memories.
Episodic memories are survival skills we evolved to keep us alive by using past experiences to help predict future events — to mentally mind travel — and we aren’t the only animals capable of it. Birds, apes, and other mammals can do it too. Though, as far as we know, we are the only ones who extend our foresight into imagination capable of creating fictional stories.
Where Mental Time Travel Happens in the Brain
It appears the hippocampus is a significant player in terms of where mental time travel occurs in the brain. This makes sense, considering the hippocampus is involved with our emotions, learning, and, you guessed it, our episodic memories.
Research involving human and rodent brain recordings show the hippocampus activating when the subjects replayed both past events and while imagining events that didn’t actually occur — including futuristic ones.
Another brain imaging study shows similar brain networks activate regardless of whether we recall our personal past or personal future. They also found the hippocampus (specifically the left one) especially engaged in mentally time traveling to the past and future. Still, many other regions also came into play and even overlapped. Meaning that while the hippocampus is largely responsible for our episodic memories, mental time travel is a whole-brain event.
Perspective Shift
Everything I’ve mentioned so far applies to the individual, but humans are social creatures. We can achieve incredible accomplishments using collective action and are capable of an almost hivemind effect. Not to mention all evidence shows that teamwork and diversity are good for us, great for us. So how does mental time travel apply to the collective?
I mean, assuming we all, or at least the majority of us, can mentally time travel, doesn’t it stand to reason we can combine forces? After all, the “collective conscious” is an idea we can’t seem to let go of. Could collective mind travel actually exist? And if so, would it influence the future the way it does on an individual level?
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I love the portion at the end where you think on collective consciousness and what could be done. I'm linking it in my mind to the article you wrote in which intentions are shown to have at least some effect on the past. I only read that one quickly though, so I can't map it very well to this one. But that seems like perhaps an instance of collective consciousness? I wonder if the same areas of the brain were activated.
I would also be so curious to see how emotions mapped to each instance of thinking past vs thinking present. That would be cool too. Do the same areas get activated, regardless of whether we are rethinking what has occurred or thinking about what could.
Love these articles! Slowly catching up!