Audrey Niffenegger was on to something when she wrote The Time Traveler’s Wife. A man who is plagued by a specific incident and keeps going back to it when he is troubled. The concept is called Chronesthesia and it involves mental time travel. More accurately in reality this ability involves being able to the future and do this to a point where it actually has an effect. Most people can remember the past and understand the future, but those with Chronesthesia can be acutely aware of the future.
According to the findings published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there are two sets of independent processes that facilitate the travel. The first process is figuring out and remembering the specific event you keep thinking about. This can be any number of things and can involve many people. The second process is figuring out what part of time that event falls in; past, present or future. The main question the researchers are asking is “how do you know [any event] happened at a time other than now?”
While conducting studies, the researchers found that specific and consistently similar parts of the brain were used while remembering real and imagined events from the past and imagine events from the future. From their findings they were able to come up with a solid definition for Chronesthesia and in the study they define it as ” a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it.”
The ability to think about a specific time in the future and being able to experience it is ground-breaking research. Being able to be at your children’s birth or their graduation before it happens. There are many different uses for this research and finding and to think such radical findings are reality and just a work of fiction.
