Have you ever found yourself in the shower the morning of a big event — say a job interview, a presentation or a tough conversation with a loved one — practicing what you’re going to say? You might set a stage in your mind, picturing the scene in myriad ways, rehearsing the situation — not unlike Nathan Fielder’s newest HBO show.
You might not realize it, but what you’re doing is actually mental time travel: drawing on your past to imagine a possible future and placing yourself there in your mind.
“We have something akin to a virtual time machine in our heads,” says Thomas Suddendorf, professor of psychology at the University of Queensland and co-author of The Invention of Tomorrow, a book on mental time travel published in 2022. “We can, in our mind’s eye, relive past events and project ourselves forward and imagine potential future situations.” Suddendorf and ...
