Can mental time travel enrich our lives?

Any interest in time travel started for me back in the 1960s, sitting on a couch with my sister, listening to Mom reading us a bedtime story. A Wrinkle in Time written in 1962, is a young adult novel by Madeleine L'Engle.

“On a wild night, a strange visitor comes to the Murry house and beckons Meg, her brother, and their friend on a most dangerous and extraordinary adventure—one that will threaten their lives and our universe.”

My little sister remembers the cream, upholstered couch we sat on at the old house. And a cozy feeling snuggled next to Mom. We both remember how Mom used distinct voices for different characters. I can conjure an image of two little girls, smelling like Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. Our hair combed, wet against our necks. Surely we wore matching pastel-flowered pajamas and robes. Mom did love dressing her daughters alike.

We both remember how Mom only read one chapter a night. My sister a bundle of wiggling curiosity, beside herself for what happens next. My thoughts wandering to if everyone would make it home safely and keeping track of tesseracts and galaxies; ideas replaying in my head waiting for the next night where we’d find out more. Our young family book club where we learned patience and could speculate what we thought Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which would do next …

At an early age, a seed was planted. The concept of moving through space despite my having no experience other than what my young mind made up while listening. The title alone captured my imagination. How could time have wrinkles? And what is a tesseract? How could you move through space and time? Little did I know back then, but my fascination with portals to other universes would directly trace back to those bedtime story moments, snuggled up to Mom on a 1960s cream, upholstered sofa.

As we start a new year, we each practice a bit of mental time travel when we look into our personal crystal balls planning for what we’d like to accomplish this next year. Our own world-building of sorts; reviewing how last year went, and planting our own future seeds.

Can we time travel using our mind? Into the past and the future? What are the benefits of future thinking? Can this very human capability enrich our lives?

what is time traveling with our minds?

In psychology, mental time travel allows us to mentally revisit personal events from the past (episodic memory) as well as to envision possible scenarios in the future (episodic foresight/episodic future thinking). Mental time travel can help the way we make decisions for the future, based on lessons from our past.

Psychologist Endel Tulving presented a theory on the human ability to act today taking into consideration our pasts and potential futures. Tulving's theory stems from extensive memory research he'd conducted since the 1950s at Toronto, Yale University, and the Toronto-based Rotman Research Institute. He proposed an official term for what makes such mental time travel possible, our sense of subjective time where we can move around.

Chronesthesia— “a hypothetical brain/mind ability, acquired by humans through evolution, that allows us to be constantly aware of the past and the future.”

I like to time travel. I do it every day, although it wasn't until recently that I called it that. What I like about mental time travel is being able to revisit any where I've been — in any time, at any time. It’s like calling up a memory, a time slice, and examining it. Watching the context change when looking at it from far in the future. There’s a power to it.

Professor Katherine Blackwell said our memories are like Word documents. When they are opened and saved, you don't know exactly what changed, like a Word document shared with tracking turned off. Regardless of when you revisit a memory, the context changes. Your perspective of the memory changes, even if only slightly.

What starts me on a time travel journey? Old photos, movies, stories people tell, or everyday situations that remind us of something else as we move though our days. Why did that latté bring a smile to my face? Or that person who cut me off get me so riled up? Latté brings back the time the barista made me a vanilla latte by accident and that frothy art became my drink of choice for decades now. The car that cut me off? Reminding me I get pissed off too and sometimes it's an innocent mistake.

When we’re not really paying attention, our minds get hijacked to other times all day long and into our sleep. Why not enjoy time traveling? Or activate more at will?

what are the benefits of future thinking?

According to Jane McGonigal, your brain works to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there. She’s a future forecaster and world-renowned designer of alternate reality games, and professor at Stanford University. There’s a form of imagination called “episodic future thinking,” or EFT that is often described as a kind of “mental time travel.”

Because EFT allows us to emotionally “pre-feel” different possible futures, if we permit it, there’s a powerful decision-making tool at our disposal. When we ask questions like: “Is this a world I want to wake up in?” Or, “What do I need to do to be ready for it?” And, “Should I change what I’m doing today to make this future more or less likely?”

fMRI studies show future thinking increases connectivity between 11 distinct brain regions. Curiously, only 6 areas of the brain light up when we remember past events.

With Episodic Future Thinking, first there’s scene construction — where we mentally build a future world. McGonigal likens it to crafting a stage with props. Our brains hunt for realistic details and plausible ideas activating our hippocampus, the seat of memory and learning. Our brains always dig into our memories for past experiences, which is why McGonigal recommends training our imaginations by trying new things. Say 5 minutes a day learn something you’ve never done before. We’re going to Amsterdam and I don’t know Dutch so I decided to learn a Dutch word a day starting with Hallo.

Adding to our experiences, not knowing how they might be used in the future, is part of the game. Filling our brains with “clues to the future.” I remember early in my working career, various experiences, some painful learnings perhaps, that always had an air of — you may not know when that’ll come in handy in the future. Or when we decided to climb Mt. Hood. I had no idea the experience would funnel into a mantra I’d use during tough projects and life events — one foot in front of the other.

Next there’s opportunity detection — your brain looks for ways to achieve your goals. According to McGonigal it’s like an actor showing up for rehearsal — what’s my motivation? The brain fires up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, used when setting goals and tracking our progress. Then part of our motivation and reward centers (the putamen) are up to bat and keeps track of knowing what behaviors trigger positive results e.g. getting fresh air — helps me think clearer, or on a bad day — spending time in my kitchen cooking, grounds me.

Finally, there’s transportation to the future, where emotional centers of the brain light up (the insula and amygdala), giving you a sense of how you might feel in your imagined future. Good or bad. What actions should I take today that will help bring that future about or avoid it?

Taking the circumstances in my life and what-if-ing allows me to role-play in a future space as if I’m there, living and breathing, consuming and being consumed by the moment. The role-playing is different than watching from afar with a clipboard taking notes — like there's a grade you'll give yourself. Or worse, some judgmental baggage reviewer pretending to have your best interests at heart when they're wearing a thick overcoat of judgment you thought you'd recycled, or given away a long time ago.

Funny how time lends a different perspective each time you look back or venture forward.

can mental time travel enrich our lives?

As we start a new year, it's a natural moment in the rhythm of our lives for a personal restart as we reflect on last year and look forward to this year. Sometimes I use intentions versus resolutions. Neither are as restrictive as SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Since retirement, I’m drawn toward Intention, finding it closer to following intuition. More ethereal, less specific. There's a negative space around intention, leaving room for serendipity and spontaneity to participate as collaborators.

My planning for last year felt more tasky, goals broken down in a corporate cadence: yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly. I found myself agitated in reviewing 2023 and articulating 2024 goals. Part because they were too big like “finish the memoir around moving a historic mansion” — still not ready for submitting to an interested agent I found in 2011 and checked in with again in 2022.

Feeling my Type A personality pulled to overanalyze my progress and future plans versus chilling to participate in the journey; acknowledging how memoir changes over time. My point of view has morphed based on the passing of time. If I’d written the memoir right after the move, the lessons learned would be very fresh, but without a lot of retrospective time. After I retired the story would reveal how the mansion, unknowingly at the time, allowed me to understand when enough is enough. If I’d written after family health issues, the mansion takes on an ominous precursor to the ripple effects of stress affecting our health. And after my mother died last year, seeing the risk and effort that went into moving the mansion, added another layer of lived experience and resilience simmered into the legacies we leave behind.

As the years pass, the lessons I absorbed grow richer. Virtual time traveling through the last draft of the memoir while revisiting my journals is like standing along side my younger self as if I’m in the play Our Town. I’m reliving a past experience as an observer with knowledge of the future. And resisting the urge to wave my arms to get my younger self’s attention — either to change the outcome or tell her to relax because her future-self knows how it works out.

Time travel and decision making. Imagining, visualizing the future in vivid 3-D helps your brain envision it coming true by practicing. Gamers deal with world-building where different scenarios need to be conjured and executed. Having a toolbox of what-ifs in the memory bank helps gamers and us in real life.

While reading a book several of my millennial adult children have read, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, I’m struck by the world-building in the gaming culture. Back in the 1980s when I graduated with a computer science degree, the world of user interfaces was woefully archaic. Imagine playing games with “x”s and “o”s instead of the realistic graphics we see now. Left more up to your imagination, but I always felt the technology was too early for what I really wanted to achieve with it.

The novel’s about “two friends—often in love, but never lovers—they come together as creative partners in the world of video game design, where success brings them fame, joy, tragedy, duplicity, and ultimately, a kind of immortality.” Two lines struck me so far: “You can’t know you want something until it’s an option” and “How your sense of self could change depending on your location.” And I’d add, where you are in time.

“You can’t know you want something until it’s an option.”

Going into 2024, I want to continue to work on my memoir and experimenting with my newsletters and podcasts about the nature of our thoughts. In that spirit, I’m migrating my thought echoes podcast to a broader exploration with writers, poets, other artists, neuroscientists, psychologists, and philosophers.

This month, I’ll kick off the new podcasts with Katherine Benfante, author of Scattered, a time travel novel set in 1906 and 2006. A delightful mix of science and fiction based on Ernest Rutherford, an astrophysicist at McGill University, and his experiments gone awry taking his daughter Ellie with them into the 21st Century. We talk about Katherine’s creative process and how thought echoes and time travel are a wonderful canvas for conversation.

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While in Seattle babysitting our 2-yr-old granddaughter, I practiced future thinking about how to share quantum physics with a toddler before taking her on walks. On one stroll around the neighborhood, I talked about waves and particles. How she is the particle event that resulted from the waves of possibilities when her mama decided she wanted more of her husband‘s good people in the world. I shared how she has a lifetime of waves, of possibilities, to imagine before they collapsed into the events that will unfold into the stories of her life.

When we visit, I read to my granddaughter, all snuggled up next to each other on a grey upholstered couch. We’re not quite up to chapter books, but the time is coming. Earlier this month we spent time together so her parents could go on a babymoon before Baby Sibling is born. Our granddaughter has referred to the new baby as Baby Sibling Boy and Baby Sibling Girl. Her parents know the gender, but aren’t sharing. We’re delighted to wait.

Being alone with one's thoughts is a luxury. Taking time to just "be "with them versus reacting is like being with a two-year-old and allowing them to move around freely versus trying to direct their play. Kids flit from one activity to the next, no worries. Sometimes frustrated as they try to work something out.

Letting things unfold has its delights. Treating each day as a new start, full of possibilities. And rather than being hijacked by a todo list of shoulds, giving ourselves time to experiment with planting our own future seeds.

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