Why time travel is more common than you think.
Mental time travel is a thing, and you're doing it 29% of the time.
Welcome to The Experiment, where we’re still not sure if Texas is back or, for that matter, where it’s been. This week we’re digging into the science behind time travel, Matt Zeller reports from Digital Dunkirk, and Jack Hughes offers up something that has nothing to do with Britney Spears, Dan Quayle, or anyone on the Supreme Court. This week, he’s examining two separate but equally important groups – the police who investigate crimes and the district attorneys who prosecute the offenders. Yes, ma, you’re going to like this one.
And as always we recommend what to do (subscribe to Axios Austin’s free newsletter), read (“The Texas Abortion Bounty Hunter’s Handbook” on McSweeney’s), watch (Y The Last Man), and listening to (check out our Spotify playlist).
But first, did you hear about the time traveler in London?
Aery Yormany arrived in London last month all the way from 2714 to warn us that in 2061 an artificial virus will kill 30 percent of humanity, in 2043 an artificial cloud will cover Earth for an entire year, and in 2029 The Purge will become an actual thing. No word, so far, on when the Baltimore Orioles will return to the playoffs. He also said the COVID-19 vaccines don’t work. He must have done his own research.
One hopes we’ll heed his warnings more closely than those of John Titor, who was sent from 2036 to 1975 to retrieve an IBM 5100 computer, which does not bode well for the supply chain. On his way back to the future, Titor stopped off in Tampa in the year 2000 for “personal reasons.” During his stay at the turn of what he said would be Earth’s last century, he predicted a second Civil War sparked by violence at the border, a third World War between the Americans and the Russians in 2015, the 2008 Beijing Olympics would be cancelled, and Mad Cow disease would become a pandemic lasting until at least 2036.
This, of course, is balderdash. No one stops off in Tampa for personal reasons. You go there to become a male entertainer and not to become a fireman. One guy ended up there because he was a left-handed high school chemistry teacher who somehow gained 15 miles an hour on his fastball in middle age. But no one goes to Tampa for personal reasons.
These are examples of the most common form of time travel. Back to the Future and Terminator led us to believe that this was time travel full stop, but the truth is that time travel comes in many forms. Avengers: Endgame posited travel to alternative timelines, though unfortunately not a single one of them imagined a movie business not completely overrun by comic book characters.
Time travel has always existed.
Time travel has always existed. We talk about how books take us to a different world and how movies transport us, yet harumph about jet packs. Time travel is not always pretty; trauma carves into our hippocampus where we relive events from the past down to the smells and physical sensations. We were promised jet packs, but we got PTSD.
And we are all time travelers. Most of us are just obeying the speed limit, taking it one day at a time. Some of us fly faster than the earth’s rotation, traveling into the future by hours; some fly the other direction and land in the past, earlier than we took off. Jet lag could be the physical hangover from time travel.
A Christmas Carol is also a time travel story, but we don’t think of it that way because it seems too obvious. Scrooge revisits old regrets. Scrooge plots a line into an unknowable future and extrapolates his lonely demise. That’s not time travel, you’re thinking. That’s just moving through time in your thoughts to relive the past… Oh. In a 2018 study, three scientists (only one of whom taught at a college in Boston, and he wouldn’t let them forget it) called this “mental time travel,” or our ability to “simulate both past and future events” by reconstructing memories into episodic events at a “temporal distance” from the present. We do this about 29% of our waking lives, they found.
Humans are not born with the ability to travel through time, writes Claudia Hammond, the author of Time Warped: Unlocking The Secrets Of Time Perception:
A baby, with little by way of autobiographical memory, lives constantly in the present. She’s happy. She’s crying. She’s hungry. She’s miserable. A baby experiences all this, but doesn’t think back to how cold it was last month or worry that temperature might drop again soon.
Then gradually a toddler will begin to develop a sense of self. With that development comes an understanding of time, of yesterday as distinct from tomorrow.
We begin to understand the concept of time as we gain the ability not to crap our pants. This might not be completely unrelated. In fact, potty training could be our first foray into time travel. We resist the urge to soil our diapers because our little toddler brains can conjure the image of pooping in a potty in the (we sincerely hope) near future. But still, we’re talking about toddler brains, hardly the stuff of legends.
Even at that age … imagining one’s self in the future remains a challenge. The psychologist Janie Busby Grant found that if you ask three-year-olds what they might do the following day, only a third can give an answer judged to be plausible.
There is a romance we ascribe to a child’s mind. But a child lives in the moment for lack of better alternatives. They don’t have a library of memories to use as building blocks for their future. They have no clue what’s going on. I asked some parents of young children to ask their kids what they expected to do the next day. One kid said he was going to “play mouse.”
Living in the moment is overrated. The future is where it’s at. Last September, two researchers from the University of Queensland theorized (in a peer-reviewed, published study) that time travel is only possible into the future. This tracks the findings of that trio from 2018 who found that mental time travel only existed, at least in detailed episodes, into the future. In his own time travel book, Stephen King wrote, “The past is obdurate,” but we proved in Forget the Alamo what malarkey that is. We’re constantly writing over our own source code, reconstructing memories into visions of the future. The past is not a recording. Our memories are building materials for the future.
The past is not a recording.
Let me put this more plainly: memory is what we use to imagine. When you remember and when you imagine, the hippocampus and other parts of your brain that process personal information, spatial navigation, and sensory information all light up in the same order. According to an MRI machine and Aristotle, your brain doesn’t know the difference between recollection and creation. In researching this essay, I ran across a brilliant piece in The Atlantic by Julie Beck.
The first clue that memory and imagining the future might go hand in hand came from amnesia patients. When they lost their pasts, it seemed, they lost their futures as well. This was the case with the famous patient known by his initials, “H.M.” H.M. had epilepsy, and to treat it, he received an experimental surgery in 1953 that removed several portions of his brain, including almost his entire hippocampus, which is a vital brain structure for memory. After the surgery, H.M. had severe amnesia, and also appeared to struggle with the future. A researcher once asked H.M., “What do you think you’ll do tomorrow?” He replied, “Whatever is beneficial.”
In another experiment, a neuroscientist named Eleanor Maguire asked people to picture standing inside a museum. People with functioning memories had no problem conjuring themselves in a room with a domed ceiling or a marble floor. Amnesiacs, however, could not.
Researchers are still trying to pin down exactly how different brain regions are involved in these processes, but much of it has to do with the construction of scenes. You can remember facts, sure, and you can make purely informational predictions—“We will have jet packs by 2050”—often, when you remember, you are reliving a scene from your memory. You have a mental map of the space; you can “hear” what’s being said and “smell” smells and “taste” flavors; you can feel your emotions from that moment anew. Similarly, when you imagine something you might experience in the future, you are essentially “pre-living” that scene. And just as memories are more detailed the more recent they are, imagined future scenes are more detailed the nearer in the future they are.
Just as talent is not evenly distributed among the populace, and some, I’m not saying who, have to live with memories of not making contact at all in Junior Babe Ruth tryouts, not everyone is equally suited to mental time travel. Brooders and worriers can sit this one out, as can the anxious. That 2018 study found that only optimists are suited to transporting mentally to a detailed future episode.
As our memories become fuzzier, they become more malleable, like softening clay.
This suggests a possible paradox: An aging optimist would accumulate memories that are the building blocks of detailed imagination, but as we age our memories fade. As I am writing this, I cannot tell you where the following objects are: my passport, my vaccine card, or my favorite pen. As we accumulate the raw materials for time travel, do we also lose the ability to access them?
Hammond, the one who wrote Time Warped: Unlocking The Secrets Of Time Perception, argues the opposite. As our memories become fuzzier, they become more malleable, like softening clay.
This means that what may have seemed like a flaw before – our difficulty to recollect the past accurately – is actually an advantage. If memories were fixed like videotapes then imagining a new situation would be tricky.
All this is to say, that as well-suited to mental time travel as recent studies would indicate I am, and as confident in my predictions about how Ted Lasso S2 will end—Ted has to go see about a boy, Rebecca can’t have Sam but he has to stay, Nate will betray Richmond with Rupert, the Roy-Keeley contrivance will bore me—I can’t see into that future. It’s maddening, I tell you. I guess I’m going to have to wait to find out what happens when the season finale airs this coming weekend. Ask Aery Yormany.
Jason Stanford is the co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Twitter @JasStanford.
Más
How we’re getting through this
Communicating with plants
Pondering partisan divisions
Thanking God I’m a county boy
Subscribing for free to Axios Austin
Making Persian cucumber and herb yogurt
Forgetting the Alamo at Zilker Park on October 22
Making roasted lemony fish with brown butter, capers and nori
What I’m reading
Wendi Aarons and Omar L. Gallaga: “The Introduction From the Texas Abortion Bounty Hunter’s Handbook” - Funny stuff.
If this all makes perfect sense to you and not like something from a rejected season of The Handmaid’s Tale, then read on, patriot.
Michael Azerrad: “My Time With Kurt Cobain” - This is a lovely bit of writing. If you’re Gen X, read this.
As I was talking with Kurt, he was experiencing heroin withdrawal. He told me he was in bed because he was nursing a cold, which made sense—he was coming off a tour that had gone from Australia to New Zealand to Singapore to Japan to Hawaii. All those shows and travel would naturally take a toll on anybody, even someone who had just turned twenty-five. It didn’t really seem like he had a cold, but I ignored that. Like many people around him, I just didn’t want to know. Which is ridiculous—I was a reporter.
Marina Bolotnikova: “America’s Car Crash Epidemic” - Slow down, y’all.
American roads have been designed for the convenience of drivers, which means they’ve been engineered for speed.
And speed is the decisive factor in a car crash’s severity. Everything else — drunk driving, distracted driving, bad weather — makes crashes more likely to happen, but speed is the difference between life and death, especially for pedestrians and bikers, who don’t have the armor of a car. A pedestrian has a 10 percent chance of dying when hit by a car at 23 miles per hour, a 25 percent chance at 32 mph, and a 75 percent chance at 50 mph.
Ben Thomas: “The Man Who Tried to Weigh the Soul” - So thiiiiiis is why we think the human soul weighs 21 ounces. Because balderdash.
The experiments’ actual results, and their failure to achieve acceptance as scientific canon, are entirely beside the point. Science has gone one way, and pop culture another. Functional neuroimaging has tied every conceivable function once associated with the soul to specific regions and structures of the brain. Physics has mapped the linkages between subatomic particles so thoroughly that there’s simply no space left for spiritual forces.
What I’m watching
S can’t watch zombie shows; they give her persistent nightmares. So I’m watching Y The Last Man by myself, a bit at a time in the mornings when I exercise. I honestly can’t tell you if this story about a virus that kills (very nearly almost) everyone with a Y chromosome is any good, but I’m watching it.
What I’m listening to
Believe the hype about Blk Odyssy. If you like Kendrick Lamar, you might like Austin’s buzzyist band.
Went to a thing where Jenn Palmieri sang the virtues of her latest musical obsession, the Michigan Rattlers. If Sun Volt got custody of you after the Uncle Tupelo divorce (I’m a Wilco man, myself), you will adore “That Kind of Life.”
This is a bop with clever wordplay. Can’t wait for Wet Leg’s upcoming full-length album in 2022 and their inevitable invasion of SXSW.
This is just good times here. The Meters put “The Hand Clapping Song” out two months before I was born. Like me, it still holds up.
Don’t know what show this song from 1968 played on, but Slim had it going on.
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