Why can’t you tickle yourself? (Time Traveling: Part 2)

Why are people who can’t remember their past also unable to picture their future? Why do we get so anxious about the world changing around us? What should you advise the president if we find ourselves at war with extraterrestrials? And what does this have to do with Wayne Gretzky, or the Greek goddess of memory, or hitting a bottle to get ketchup onto your French fries? Join this week’s episode to find out about one of the most important things brains do: simulations of possible futures.

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More Information:

Hassabis D, Kumaran D, Maguire EA. (2007). Using imagination to understand the neural basis of episodic memory. Journal of neuroscience. 2007 Dec 26;27(52):14365-74.

Schacter DL, Addis DR, Buckner RL. (2008). Episodic simulation of future events: Concepts, data, and applications. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 2008 Mar;1124(1):39-60.

Irish M, Halena S, Kamminga J, Tu S, Hornberger M, Hodges JR. (2015). Scene construction impairments in Alzheimer’s disease–A unique role for the posterior cingulate cortex. Cortex. 2015 Dec 1;73:10-23.

Madore KP, Szpunar KK, Addis DR, Schacter DL. (2016). Episodic specificity induction impacts activity in a core brain network during construction of imagined future experiences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2016 Sep 20;113(38):10696-701.

Correia SP, Dickinson A, Clayton NS. (2007). Western scrub-jays anticipate future needs independently of their current motivational state. Current Biology. 2007 May 15;17(10):856-61.

Byrne P, Becker S, Burgess N. (2007). Remembering the past and imagining the future: a neural model of spatial memory and imagery. Psychological review. 2007 Apr;114(2):340.

Eagleman DM. (2008). Human time perception and its illusions. Current opinion in neurobiology. 2008 Apr 1;18(2):131-6.

Dudai Y, Carruthers M. (2005). The Janus face of mnemosyne. Nature. 2005 Mar 31;434(7033):567-.

Schacter DL. (2019). Implicit memory, constructive memory, and imagining the future: A career perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science. 2019 Mar;14(2):256-72.

Eagleman DM, Downar JD (2023). Brain and Behavior: A Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective. Oxford University Press.

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