Mental time travel: is it possible to mentally travel through time?
Mental time travel (MTT) is the ability to mentally project oneself back in time or forward in time to remember an event from one’s past or to imagine a possible occasion in one’s future (Madore,2016). The interest in the subject on time travel is fueled by some people believing its physically achievable while at the same time being logically absurd (Smith & Nicholas J.J). The concept of time travel has been looked into vaguely and not a lot found on the same. It also doesn’t have a straight forward answer, but with encouraging discoveries that they may work if researched and tried further. Mental time travel, the term “coined to refer to the faculty that allows humans to mentally project themselves back in time to relive or forward to pre-live, events” (Suddendorf & Corballis), is one of the concepts that has fertile findings.
The breakthrough made by scientists after several tests on volunteers shows that mental time travel is also unique to the human mind and differentiated from animal consciousness (Madore,2016). Researchers have also been able to unearth time travel from the mind’s origin.
Mental time travel is an essential and crucial link to what we tend to do every day. We do not seem to consider this and assume it is episodic memory that guides us to make sober decisions from our comparison to the past. (Theodoros,2017) The episodic memory only helps in storing the information in our past events as opposed to mental time travel that gives us the restrain not to repeat our previous mistakes which led to specific shortcomings. These decisions are favourable in the long term.
Mental time travel is as a result of “Chronesthesia” the “hypothetical brain/mind ability or capacity, acquired by humans through evolution, that allows them to be constantly aware of the past and the future” (Murray).
Understanding mental time travel calls for an understanding of the concept of episodic memory. Episodic memory as referred in the literature as discursive future thinking(e.g., Atance & O’Neill, 2001; Szpunar, 2010), whereas past mental time travel variably is known as episodic or autobiographical memory (e.g., Conway & Pleydell-Pearce, 2000; Rubin, 2006; Tulving, 1983).
Episodic memory is a form of long memory that is information stored over a long period, whether a few hours, a few days ago or many years ago. The long-term memories mainly are found outside the conscious mind. The access of the information in the long-term memory many times is what makes it more reliable in the neural networks where it is encoded and makes it very easy to recall. (Theodoros,2017) Episodic memory, therefore, means the consciousness of daily events like locations, time, emotions specific to certain occurrences. It is the collection of past experiences encountered by a person at a particular time and place(Madore,2016). A person will remember vividly instances which occurred mainly at crucial scenarios. These scenarios will be both positive and negative. They include situations such as their birthday parties, graduations, the first kiss, burials of close relatives. This information can easily be retrieved when needed.
The last 15 years have witnessed a considerable level of research on mental time travel and are of the idea that the future and past mental time travel have a close relation and rely on the simple neurocognitive system.
Being able to travel mentally in time has been envisaged, especially into the future as a vast human evolutionary step if achieved (Theodoros,2017). This concept will enable humans to plan, prepare and shape what they deem of the future and to their advantage.
Some of the factors that affect mental time travel included: Age, future orientation and theory of the mind
Age in mental time travel
Our ages vary as we grow and learn new things in our daily ways of lives. We learn new things every day, and the body develops with the mind too. Until it is at its optimum stage in life when it tends to remain constant. (Madore,2016). Age is a significant factor which influences our perspectives and imaginations both of the present and the future.
The brain fully develops when a person attains the age of 25 and can reason critically and make sound decisions. At 18 years, a person can be deemed matured enough, but the mind will still have a margin of growth. Time travel brings about a challenge as the mind wanders and imagines scenarios at the age at which it begins to MMT (Kourken,2016).
older people have less ability to time travel mentally as compared to younger individuals (Kourken,2016). The older people have a longer travel time as compared to younger people. This difference is mainly contributed by their low mental capabilities which develop to their prime at 25 and maintain it for some time then gradually start to decline.
Ageing, therefore, makes it difficult for the long-term memory to retrieve information in older people, and discoveries have been made that show travelling to the future becomes harder due to aging. Memory differs with the variation in ages and is the factor which guides the presence and possibility of time travel. Mind developed with the development of humankind (Kourken,2016) The organs in the body, i.e. the temporal lobe and the hippocampus advance to help reassess the past and forecast the future. It is more developed in younger individuals and diminishes with older age.
Theory of mind
Theory of mind is the ability to attribute mental states, beliefs, intents, desires, emotions, knowledge etc. to oneself, and others, and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, intentions, and perspectives that are different from one’s own (Filomena,2016).
human beings have been able to forecast and foresee future development. It helped with the planning and preparation. Forecast in humans is evident when they used it to predict the onset of rains which affected the planting seasons and food security at large. Through the estimates, humans were able to store surplus food for future use. This characteristic is not unique to man alone but also other animals who developed anticipatory capacities to enhance their survival rate. E.g. bears eat a lot of salmon fish whenever they are migrating in summer, and this will help them survive through the winter. Such instinctual behaviour is lifesaving (Filomena,2016). They cannot be considered to have time travelled but have an inborn memory which seems to suggest so.
Learning and memory are regarded as adaptations for the future, which saves an individual of particular peril but which differs independently (Filomena,2016). A population may not stand to benefit from the same as knowledge and memory vary individually.
The plans and structures put in place are all part of innate memories that humans and animals have and can be ready for whatever storms come their way (Filomena,2016). They become flexible and adapt to new changes quickly while also using our episodic memory from the past to make the best right choices in progressing forward.
These are what the scientists refer to as future orientation and the ability to learn new things and retain them in conscious minds. As expounded below:
Future orientation in Mental time travel
Episodic memory reconstructs an event personally experienced by an individual (Filomena,2016). The mind achieves this by taking clues from the past and using them to shape the future. A person will realize it is sunset when he notices the sun disappearing in the horizon to the west. Having that time concept enables one to understand that the future will eventually also become the past. The common factor will be the time it will take to do so.
Episodic memory may be deemed as a dependable source of information, but specific instances of false memories are documented (Filomena,2016). These are memories created in the laboratory, and a person believes he had such cases. It means that time travel is not judged on its veracity but a person’s expression.
Mental time travel on mental health research
Any species which depends on the ability to plan, foresee and draw future event is susceptible to dysfunction if one contributing aspect of mental time travel is affected by the disease (Mahr & Csibra,2018). Authors name brain pathology as a common cause of disrupted mental time travel, they fail to look into psychopathological syndromes as an origin to clearly understand the importance of mental health travel for standard functioning and adaptive behaviour.
Critical evaluation of failures of any behaviour may contribute a lot to grasping of its physiology better than learning about the intact physiology itself.
Mental disorders which are shown by the failure of components of mental time travel can help explain the neuro-psychology and also the neural networks present in mental time travel
(Mahr & Csibra,2018). The worst disorders considered deficits in mental time travel are the varied forms of dementia. Amnesia and damage to the frontal lobes are probable causes of disrupted mental time travel.
In contrast, researchers discovered that spindle cells (an evolutionary novel cell type unique to apes and humans, located in the anterior cingulate cortex where the integration of cognition, emotion and motor control takes place, degenerate early in the course of Alzheimer’s disease. (Nimchinsky et al.)
Travel time researchers use psychiatric patients to conduct the various experiments and observe the changes and improvements if any. The patients are helped through therapy and studied to see the possibility of time travel. While some people will argue that it has no benefits, “Nothing makes such benefits of chronesthesia more apparent than studying people who have suffered brain damage that impairs their mental time travel ability but does not affect other cognitive functions” (Murray).
Various treatments are found in the process, and the psychiatric patients can reverse their situations and start over again with the same memories and ethical decision making just like other ordinary people (Mahr & Csibra,2018). The brain organs develop and adapt to the changes which touch on the organs in the medial temporal lobe and the hippocampus. This development in the brain opens up doors to better treatment of mental cases which did not seem possible before.
Understanding the effects of mental time travel on health research leads to the undertaking of Neural investigation, which helps to expound the resemblance and distinction in how information appears in various species (Ekren,2018).
Comprehending neural implementation benefits us in understanding the steps used by people to anticipate and how they interact with other creatures and animals at large. We should, however, take care not to focus so much on the prefrontal cortex in the research of neural mechanisms and forget about hippocampus as it has a more crucial role in the episodic memory and its general role in time travel. The dialogue on neural mechanisms fails to fully show how vital the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is to the long-term memory and episodic memory (Ekren,2018). It has been found that MTL can bind information coming from various sensory cortices into a united trace: the hippocampus, via the entorhinal cortex, receives convergent input from a variety of unimodal and polymodal association cortices in the temporal, frontal and parietal lobes (Bunsey & Eichenbaum 1995; Suzuki & Amaral 1994).
Mental time travel on human emotions
Humans tend to give a forefront perspective to emotional information whenever they time travel in time either to the past or future. There are three primary reasons why and these are: First, the mental stimulation of emotional situations helps one to make adaptive decisions. Second, it can serve an emotion regulation function (Mahr & Csibra,2018). Third, it allows people to construct and maintain a positive view of the self.
People tend to have varied feelings, and this changes their perceptions and in time travel memories of past events and imaginations of the future are not necessarily the representations from the past and future respectively but can be generated information pieces that are retrieved from memory (Ekren,2018). These kinds of illustrations can be biased depending on the individual. It will be in priority of those that someone would desire to take and select. Emotions have a crucial role in the determination of the option to make as it calls for information considered as the most important in regards to individual goals and expectations. Consequently, emotional stimuli are typically remembered with more details than neutral stimuli (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden 2005; Kensinger et al. 2006), and autobiographical memories for emotional events are associated with a higher subjective feeling of mentally reliving the past (D’Argembeau et al. 2003; Talarico et al. 2004).
The positivity and negativity of representations also influence the feeling representation as actual events have a more excellent feeling of pre-experiencing and re-experiencing than negative images (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden 2004).
It is, therefore, suggestive that humans accord an advantaged stature to emotional information whenever they travel forward or back in time (Mahr & Csibra,2018). Some situations may be the reason for such an occurrence; by mentally imagining the future humans tend to create images which positively affect their present undertaking so that they can adequately safeguard their futures and by doing this help to enhance their survival rates.
Humans invoke their emotions in time travel and create favourable futures in their mental time travel and are motivated to make specific changes in their life like living healthy and taking good food or avoiding certain behaviours which shorten the life spans (werning & Suddendorf,2016). The good memories are envisioned as past achievements and provide guides to repeating such moments while the negative ones are the shortcomings that they came by and provide lessons on how to avoid them and let them not reoccur again (Ekren,2018).
People who possess higher visual imagery come up with better and detailed representations of their past and futures and which tend to be more meaningful and even more emotional. (werning & Suddendorf,2016). At times the experiences of time travel may not be all about the plans or measure to take to be better but to feel better at present certainly. Some researchers perceive that at times people retrieve the good old memories to improve on a present negative mood.
Mental time travel will continue to amuse and puzzle many, but with extensive research and breakthroughs, it will open up more avenues to better understand how the state of mind work and how to travel into the future or the past effectively, and how this will eventually change the future. It is possible to move mentally into time, and adequate studies and research will shape this reality.