In psychology, mental time travel 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, building on Endel Tulving's work on episodic memory. (Tulving proposed the alternative term chronesthesia.)
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.
