Mental time travel

In psychology, mental time travel is the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past (episodic memory) as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future (episodic foresight / episodic future thinking). The term was coined by Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis, building on Endel Tulving's work on episodic memory (Tulving proposed the alternative term chronesthesia ). Mental time travel has been studied by psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, philosophers and in a variety of other academic disciplines. Major areas of interest include the nature of the relationship between memory and foresight, the evolution of the ability (including whether it is uniquely human or shared with other animals), its development in young children, its underlying brain mechanisms, as well as its potential links to consciousness, the self, and free will. Declarative memory refers to the capacity to store and retrieve information that can be explicitly expressed, and consists of both facts or knowledge about the world (semantic memory) and autobiographical details about one's own experiences (episodic memory). Tulving (1985) originally suggested that episodic memory involved a kind of ‘autonoetic’ (‘self-knowing’) consciousness that required the first-person subjective experience of previously lived events, whereas semantic memory is associated with ‘noetic’ (knowing) consciousness but does not require such mental simulation. It has become increasingly clear that both semantic and episodic memory are integral for thinking about the future. Mental time travel, however, specifically refers to the ‘autonoetic’ systems, and thus selectively comprises episodic memory and episodic foresight. The close link between episodic memory and episodic foresight has been established with evidence of their shared developmental trajectory, similar impairment profiles in neuropsychiatric disease and in brain damage, phenomenological analyses, and with neuroimaging.