Chronesthesia

In psychology, mental time travel (also called 'chronosthesia') 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 in 1997. The synonymous term chronesthesia was coined by Endel Tulving. 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. Mental time travel may be one of several processes enabled by a general scenario building or construction system in the brain. This general capacity to generate and reflect on mental scenarios has been compared to a theatre in the mind that depends on the working together of a host of components. Investigations have been conducted into diverse aspects of mental time travel, including individual differences relating to personality, its instantiation in artificial intelligence systems, and its relationship with theory of mind and mind-wandering. The study of mental time travel in general terms is also related to – but distinct from – the study of the way individuals differ in terms of their future orientation, time perspective, and temporal self-continuity. Various neuroimaging studies have elucidated the brain systems underlying the capacity for mental time travel in adults. Early fMRI studies on the topic revealed a number of close correspondences between remembering past experiences and imagining future experiences in brain activity. Addis et al. conducted an fMRI study to examine neural regions mediating construction and elaboration of past and future events. The left hippocampus and posterior visuospatial regions are involved in past and future event construction, neural differentiation. The right hippocampus, right frontopolar cortex, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in future event construction.