Step Outside Yourself

Slate:

Mental health experts bombard us with advice to “focus on the present,” “savor the moment,” and “live in the now.” Prominent branches of meditation highlight the importance of being aware of the present moment, and research has demonstrated that the mind is unhappy when it wanders.

The human tendency to leave the present moment, to mentally travel to different times or places, often faces criticism. For example, English author and columnist Terence Blacker warned of the “excessive sensibleness” of continuously planning for the future and stated, “Looking too much into the future can be as harmful as dwelling pointlessly on the past. The trick is to live as well as you can in the present.”

Yet the human mind possesses remarkable abilities of time travel, teleportation, and mindreading. We can step forward or backward in time by reliving previous accomplishments or trying to predict how we will feel in the future. We mentally traverse space by envisioning what it might be like to be in faraway places. And we enter other people’s heads by considering what they are thinking or predicting how they might act in the future. Humans are the only animals that can transport themselves robustly beyond the here and now. In fact, our minds have a hard time keeping still. Is there a purpose to these forms of mental simulation?

Read the whole story: Slate