Chronesthesia is a phenomenon in which the brain is not only aware of what’s happened in the past, but also what will happen in the future. People who experience chronesthesia mentally time travel in subjective, or abstract, time. There are two main components to this experience: the first is similar to watching a movie and seeing a particular situation, group of people and setting; the second component has to do with the time period and whether it’s happened in the past, is happening in the present or will happen in the future. Experiencing this phenomenon, or furthermore, having the ability to time travel to the future, can greatly affect the way a person makes their decisions.
Neuroscientists understand a great deal about perceived, imagined and remembered space, but not much at all about perceived, imagined or remembered time. While scientists are currently researching chronesthesia, they’re still not positive of which parts of the brain are directly responsible for this knowledge. Recent studies have utilized resonance imaging to explore the neural correlates that are used during mental time travel. To figure out what parts of the brain correlate with which moments in time, subjects were asked to think of the same event occurring at different time intervals. For example, some subjects would have to form a detailed mental “video” of taking a walk at a specific time in the past, while other subjects would have to play the same image, but think of it as taking place in the future.
Chronesthesia is not an easy subject to wrap your mind around. Even if you’ve accepted that people can mentally time travel and even see the future to some degree, the next step is understanding how the brain does this. However, it’s important to remember that several past scientific discoveries were once deemed solely as the things of science fiction novels. Over time, though, truth was attributed to many of these now-proven facts. There are many inventors and scientists in the world who spend ample amounts of time on a project that the majority of outsiders believe is a waste of time, ridiculous or impossible. But in order to advance, one must open their mind up to at least the possibility of another realm of though and maybe even time. Humans generally think that time is linear, because up until now, all evidence to the contrary has been null. However, many physicists think that time is much more complicated than that.
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