Memory and imagination

The Science of Mental Time Travel: Memory and How Our Ability to Imagine the Future Made Us Human

by Maria Popova

Shedding light on “the cognitive rudder that allows our brains to navigate the river of time.”

Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland remains one of my all-time favorite books, largely because Carroll taps his training as a logician to imbue the whimsical story with an allegorical dimension that blends the poetic with the philosophical. To wit: The Red Queen remembers the future instead of the past — an absurd proposition so long as we think of time as linear and memory as beholden to the past, and yet a prescient one given how quantum physics (coincidentally, a perfect allegorical exploration of Wonderland) conceives of time and what modern cognitive science tells us about how elastic our experience of time is. As it turns out, the Red Queen is far more representative of how human memory actually works than we dare believe./.../