Right now, you can travel to the past or experience the future—all from the comfort of your own brain. Just imagine it. Really, that’s all you have to do: Imagine the past or future and there you are.
This is true of more than just pictures. When our mind time-travels forward or back, we experience muted versions of the emotions associated with the scene. We don’t just remember the past, we relive it; and we don’t simply imagine the future, we experience the likely emotional impacts of our decisions.
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
But why? Why are we forced to cringe and blush even now when remembering hitting a parked car while waving to our first real girlfriend after dropping her off at the passenger terminal of the Bainbridge Island ferry? Why do our knees shake and our usually robust constitutions turn to banana jelly when we imagine falling from a rock climb?
It turns out, as you might imagine, that connecting emotion with events in memory (mental time travel) adds weight to events. The more emotionally charged a memory, the more influential it is in determining our future choices.
As a practical consequence, mental time travel squeezes our range of choices toward the center. Remembering embarrassment, we refrain from the further hitting of parked cars; imagining fear, we don’t put ourselves in the dangerous situation that would create it (or, we do, but we’re aware of the consequences). We become more careful, less impulsive. The results of our choices become less extreme.
The Age of Time Travel
An Australian study found that very few three-year-olds but most four-year-olds could describe two things they did yesterday and predict two things they would do tomorrow (as well as two things they didn’t do yesterday and two things they wouldn’t do tomorrow). It seems our fourth birthday is our passport for time travel.
Mental time travel allows us to predict the social as well as physical results of our actions—we know that if we post mean comebacks on our Facebook friends’ walls (even when they’re wrong), we’ll be excommunicated from the group. We know that it’s a good idea to compliment a friend’s ugly baby.
Humans are social, and the mental time travel of linking emotion with memories and using them to live in the future allows us to remain so.