books on mental time travel

The Science of Mental Time Travel and Why Our Ability to Imagine the Future Is Essential to Our Humanity

By maria popova.

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.

“To be human,” writes Dan Falk in In Search of Time: The History, Physics, and Philosophy of Time ( public library ), “is to be aware of the passage of time; no concept lies closer to the core of our consciousness” — something evidenced by our millennia-old quest to map this invisible dimension . One of the most remarkable and evolutionarily essential elements of experiencing time through human consciousness is something psychologists and cognitive scientists call mental time travel — a potent bi-directional projection that combines episodic memory , which allows us to draw on our autobiographical experience and call up events, experiences, and emotions that occurred in the past, with the ability to imagine and anticipate future events. Falk puts it unambiguously:

Without it, there would be no planning, no building, no culture; without an imagined picture of the future, our civilization would not exist.

As it turns out, episodic memory — a term coined in the early 1970s by Canadian neuroscientist Endel Tulving, author of the seminal book Elements of Episodic Memory — is central to our capacity for mental time travel and, according to many scientists, fairly unique to humans. Unlike other facets of memory, such as the acquisition of new skills, which are rooted in the here-and-now, Falk points out that episodic memory allows us “to peer back across time, using our imagination to revisit just about any event that we choose.” This mental reliving of the past may be the root of some distinct human maladies — take the wistful reminiscence over a lost love, for instance — but it is also central to our evolutionary survival, allowing us to anticipate future outcomes based on past ones and thus to plan better and be more prepared for what tomorrow may bring. (The dark side of this evolutionarily beneficial faculty is that our over-planning often ends up shortchanging our happiness .)

And yet the benefits outweigh the costs, in evolutionary terms. Falk explains:

The capacity for mental time travel gave our ancestors an invaluable edge in the struggle for survival. They believe there is a profound link between remembering the past and imagining the future. The very act of remembering, they argue, gives one the “raw material” needed to construct plausible scenarios of future events and act accordingly. Mental time travel “provides increased behavioral flexibility to act in the present to increase future survival chances.” If this argument is correct, then mental time travel into the past — remembering — “is subsidiary to our ability to imagine future scenarios.” Tulving agrees: “What is the benefit of knowing what has happened in the past? Why do you care? The importance is that you’ve learned a lesson,” he says. “Perhaps the evolutionary advantage has to do with the future rather than the past.” Modern neuroscience appears to confirm that line of reasoning: as far as your brain is concerned, the act of remembering is indeed very similar to the act of imagining the future.

Though we might not be able to “remember” the future, as the Red Queen does, we do envision it in ways strikingly similar to how we picture events from the past — Falk notes that fMRI studies indicate we use similar regions in the brain’s frontal and temporal lobes when thinking about events in either direction of time. What’s more, psychologists have found that much like it’s harder for us to remember an event in the distant past than a recent one, it’s harder for us to imagine an event in the distant future than one expected to take place soon. This hints at the massively misguided way in which we think of and evaluate memory, which we falsely depict as a recording device , versus foresight. Falk writes:

When we imagine the future, we know what we picture is really just an educated guess; we may be right in the broad brushstrokes, but we are almost certainly wrong in the details. We hold memory to a higher standard. We feel — most of the time — that our memories are more than guesses, that they reflect what really happened. When confronted with a conflicting account of how last week’s party unfolded, we cling to our beliefs: He must be mistaken; I know what I saw.

Falk cites the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter:

[The brain is] a fundamentally prospective organ that is designed to use information from the past and the present to generate predictions about the future. Memory can be thought of as a tool used by the prospective brain to generate simulations of possible future events… We tend to think of memory as having primarily to do with the past… And maybe one reason we have it is so that we can have a warm feeling when we reminisce, and so on. But I think the thing that has been neglected is its role in allowing us to predict and simulate the future.

In order to mentally time-travel into the future, the brain has to accomplish a couple of things at once — we activate our “semantic memory,” which encompasses our basic knowledge of facts about the world and thus helps paint a backdrop for the imagined scene, and we call on our episodic memory, which pulls on our autobiographical library of remembered experiences to fill in specific details for this general scene. Curiously, episodic memory tends to be rather flawed but, according to two scientists Falk quotes, that’s okay since its core purpose is to provide “a more general toolbox that allowed us to escape from the present and develop foresight, and perhaps create a sense of personal identity.”

To be sure, just like elsewhere in cognitive science , human exceptionalism may be misplaced here — scientists have found that other species are also capable of varying degrees of mental time travel. Falk cites one of the most intriguing experiments, involving scrub jays. He writes:

Psychologist Nicola Clayton and her colleagues housed the birds on alternate days in two different compartments — one in which the jays always received “breakfast,” and one in which they did not. Then the birds were unexpectedly given extra food in the evening, at a location where they could access either compartment. The jays promptly cached their surplus — and they preferentially cached it in the “no breakfast” compartment. Because the birds were not hungry at the time of the caching, the researchers claim that the birds truly anticipated the hunger they would experience the next morning.

Still, the fact that humans are capable of remarkably elaborate and detailed mental time travel reveals something unique about our evolution and the development of such hallmarks of humanity as language and theory of mind. Falk writes:

In all likelihood, the capacity for mental time travel did not develop in isolation but rather alongside other crucial cognitive abilities. “To entertain a future event one needs some kind of imagination,” [the prominent psychologists Thomas] Suddendorf and [Michael] Corballis write, “some kind of representational space in our mind for the imaginary performance.” Language could also play an important role. Our language skills embrace mental time travel by the use of tenses and recursive thinking; when we say “A year from now, he will have retired,” we’re imagining a future time in which some event — which has not yet happened — will lie in the past… Mental time travel may have been “a pre-requisite to the evolution of language itself.” If mental time travel is indeed unique to humans, it may help us understand why complex language is also, apparently, unique.

In fact, the development of mental time travel may even be how the concept of time itself came into existence — according to Suddendorf and Corballis, our species emerged victorious in “an extraordinary evolutionary arms race” largely due to our growing capacity for foresight and sophisticated language, which not only gave us culture and “coordinated aggression” but also, for the first time in evolutionary history, enabled us to understand the concepts of “past” and “future.” The mental reconstruction of what has been and the imagining of what could be, they argue, created the concept of time and enabled us to understand the continuity between the past and the future. Falk, once again, puts it succinctly:

Mental time travel may indeed be the cognitive rudder that allows our brains to navigate the river of time.

In Search of Time is a fantastic read in its entirety, covering such facets of life’s most intricate dimension as how the calendar was born, why illusion and reality aren’t always so discernible from one another, and what the ultimate fate of the universe might be. Complement it with these seven excellent books on time and a fascinating read on how our memory works .

— Published July 1, 2014 — https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/07/01/mental-time-travel-dan-falk/ —

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Mental time travel is a great decision-making tool — this is how to use it

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When the future seems largely unpredictable, is there anything you can do to prepare for it?

“Yes!” says futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal . All you need to do is to tap into your imagination and envision all your potential futures — using what she calls “futures thinking.”

“Futures thinking isn’t a superpower, and you don’t have to fix everything or save everyone,” McGonigal writes in her new book called Imaginable . “But futures thinking is an incredibly useful, practical tool to prepare your mind to adapt faster to new challenges, build hope and resilience, reduce anxiety and depression, and inspire you to take actions today that set yourself up for future happiness and success.”

Her book draws on the latest research in psychology and neuroscience to show you how to train your mind to think the unthinkable. In this excerpt, you’ll get a taste of how you can start thinking like a futurist — and create a better future for yourself.

For the next 30 seconds, I want you to imagine yourself waking up tomorrow morning. Try to picture it in your mind or describe it to yourself as clearly as possible.

These questions may help make your imagined scene clearer. What room or space are you in? What wakes you up — an alarm, the sunlight, someone nudging you or calling you? Is it light out or still dark? Is there anyone with you? What are you wearing? What kind of mood are you in? And what’s the very first thing you do now that you’re awake?

Keep imagining your tomorrow morning until you have a clear answer to all of these questions.

This quick mental time trip you just took is an example of a highly imaginable future — it was likely quite easy for you to envision, with plenty of vivid details.

Now let’s try something more challenging. For the next 30 seconds, I want you to imagine yourself waking up one year from today.

Again, try to envision this as clearly as possible. Feel free to change as many or as few details as you want from the first scene you imagined. Are you somewhere different? Are you physically changed? What’s your mood? Do you have a different morning habit? What might that new habit be?

Keep imagining your morning one year from now until you have answers to all of these questions — even the harder ones. Notice how easily and automatically ideas came to you, or how hard you had to work to come up with details.

If you’re having difficulty imagining life 10 years from now, write down a description of what you imagine. It can be easier to think about the future with words rather than with mental images.

Now let’s try one more act of imagination. This time, I want you to imagine yourself waking up 10 years from today.

Take as long as you need to come up with a vivid and plausible image — of yourself, of the space that you’re in, and who might be with you. Where are you? What’s around you? What do you see, hear, smell, and feel? What’s the first thing on your mind when you wake up? What do you have planned for the day? How are you physically different?

Try not to make this future scene a total fantasy; stay grounded in what you feel is genuinely realistic and possible for you. If you’re having difficulty, write down a description of what you imagine. Sometimes, it’s easier to think about the future with words rather than with mental images.

You’ll probably find that 10 years is a trickier challenge compared with one year. Why? You’ve never been 10 years older than you are now, so your brain doesn’t know what to expect. Plus, there’s so much opportunity for things to change in a decade — your body, relationships, life circumstances, physical environment.

Your brain intuitively grasps this unknowability, so instead of confidently projecting one possibility, it opens up a blank space for you to consider multiple possibilities. You have to start making intentional choices about what you want to imagine in your future — you have to fill in the blanks.

“Episodic future thinking” or EFT is often described as “mental time travel” — your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.

Filling in the blanks takes considerable effort. But that’s precisely why this kind of imagination is so powerful. Instead of simply remembering what it knows, your brain has to invent a new possibility. It draws on past experiences, current hopes and fears, and your intuitions about what might possibly change in 10 years.

Then, after you’ve made this new memory, something amazing happens: What was previously unimaginable to your brain is now imaginable. You can revisit this new memory whenever you want and examine how it makes you feel. Does it spark positive or negative emotions? These pre-feelings can help you decide: Should you change what you’re doing today to make this future more or less likely? And because you invented this memory, you can change it whenever you want.

Scientists call this form of imagination “episodic future thinking,” or EFT. EFT is often described as a kind of “mental time travel” because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there.

EFT isn’t an escape from reality. It’s a way of playing with reality, to discover risks and opportunities you might not have considered. EFT is not a daydream in which you fantasize about waking up in a world where your problems are magically solved. It is a way of connecting who you are today with what you might really feel and do in the future.

An important element of imagination training is to fill your brain with what I call “clues to the future,” concrete examples of new ideas that might shape how your future turns out.

Because EFT allows us to pre-feel different possible futures, it’s a powerful decision-making, planning and motivational tool. It helps us decide: Is this a world I want to wake up in? What do I need to do to be ready for it? Should I change what I’m doing today to make this future more or less likely?

According to fMRI studies, EFT involves heightened activity and increased connectivity between 11 distinct brain regions. Compare this to remembering a past event, which activates 6 of the 11 regions of the brain.

There are three major kinds of sense making that happen when you engage in mental time travel to your future. First, your brain has to do what cognitive scientists call “scene construction” — mentally building the future world. Think of this as crafting the stage set, cast and props for a theatrical play.

During EFT, your brain goes on a hunt for realistic details and plausible ideas. To do this, it activates the hippocampus , the seat of memory and learning, and digs through your memories, plus any other facts and ideas you’ve stored away. Depending on what kind of future you’re imagining, the hippocampus identifies the most relevant stuff and retrieves and recombines it into a new scene.

Whatever you see in your future will always come from information your brain has already perceived and processed. Ideally, as you get better at imagining the unimaginable, you’ll incorporate not just obvious ideas and events but also surprising things that could be important in your future.

Another important part of imagination training is to try out new behaviors that could prove useful in the future. I call these micro-actions — taking no more than five minutes to do something today you’ve never done before.

That’s why an important element of imagination training is to fill your brain with what I call “clues to the future,” concrete examples of new ideas that might shape how your future turns out. When you have a hippocampus full of clues, your brain will have better data to draw on, and the scenes you construct will be way more interesting.

After scene construction, your brain starts to do what cognitive scientists call “opportunity detection.” Here, you look for ways to fulfill your needs and achieve your goals. For example: If you predict you will be hungry when you wake up in 10 years, what will future you eat? If you imagine yourself lonely when you wake up, who will future you try to connect with? Opportunity detection is like an actor showing up for rehearsal and asking, “What’s my motivation?” In other words: What do you want in this scene?

To figure this out, your brain fires up the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), a region that’s heavily used whenever you set goals and track your progress. Like the hippocampus, the vmPFC can suggest any goals you’ve had or previously considered. One of the most interesting things about EFT is that the motivations that pop into your mind first are likely to be closely linked to your deepest values and most essential needs, like always learning something new, helping others, pushing yourself to do brave things, taking care of your family, being creative, or putting new ideas or art into the world.

But you still have to figure out the best way for future you to achieve these future goals. So then the putamen , also part of the motivation and reward system, kicks in. The putamen helps keep track of which specific actions and behaviors typically lead to positive results for you. It’s the part of your brain that knows things like “I feel better when I get some fresh air”; “I make my mom happy when I text her back right away”; “If I’m having a bad day, cooking helps”; or “If I don’t stand up for myself in the moment, I’ll beat myself up about it later.”

There are real benefits to intentionally and carefully imagining futures that frighten you. This can help you do the important work of getting ready for anything — even things you’d rather not experience.

The putamen is like a reality check on your future imagination. Since the putamen is trained on real experiences, the future actions it suggests will be heavily influenced by strategies that worked for you in the past. That’s why another important part of imagination training is to try out new behaviors that could prove useful in the future. I call these micro-actions — taking no more than five minutes to do something today you’ve never done before. When you experiment with micro-actions, you expand what your putamen considers realistic behavior.

Finally, as your brain works to transport you to the future, feelings will kick in. The insula and amygdala , emotion centers in the brain, fire up to give you a preview of how you might feel in the future — excited, disappointed, hopeful, afraid, proud, jealous, joyful, sad, curious, bored, embarrassed, relieved, loved, lonely, awed, confused, stressed out, free or more. These emotions give you important information and help you decide: Is this a future I want to wake up in? Should I take actions today to make this future more or less likely?

Crucially, these are real feelings. Studies show that the emotions you experience during EFT can be just as psychologically powerful as emotions experienced in the present. This is one reason why many of us prefer to imagine best-case-scenario futures and avoid imagining the futures that scare us.

But there are real benefits to intentionally and carefully imagining futures that frighten you. This can help you do the important work of getting ready for anything — even things you’d rather not think about, let alone actually experience, someday.

Excerpted from the new book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal. Copyright © 2022 by Jane McGonigal. Used by permission of Spiegel & Grau LLC, New York. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Watch her TED Talk here:

About the author

Jane McGonigal is a future forecaster and world-renowned designer of alternate reality games designed to improve real lives and solve real problems. She is the Director of Games Research & Development at the Institute for the Future and currently teaches the course “How to Think Like a Futurist” at Stanford University, as well as serving as the lead instructor for the Institute for the Future’s series on the Coursera platform. She is The New York Times bestselling author of the books "Reality Is Broken" and "SuperBetter" and the new book "Unimaginable." Her innovative games and ideas have been recognized by the World Economic Forum, Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, O Magazine and the New York Times, among others.

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Life and mind: philosophical issues in biology and psychology, mental time travel.

Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past

by Kourken Michaelian

ISBN: 9780262551151

Pub date: February 6, 2024

Publisher: The MIT Press

312 pp. , 6 x 9 in , 10 line drawings

ISBN: 9780262034098

Pub date: February 5, 2016

ISBN: 9780262334587

Pub date: February 19, 2016

9780262551151
Published: February 2024
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Description

Drawing on current research in psychology, a new philosophical account of remembering as imagining the past.

In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on research in the psychology of memory to develop an innovative philosophical account of the nature of remembering and memory knowledge. Current philosophical approaches to memory rest on assumptions that are incompatible with the rich body of theory and data coming from psychology. Michaelian argues that abandoning those assumptions will result in a radically new philosophical understanding of memory. His novel, integrated account of episodic memory, memory knowledge, and their evolution makes a significant step in that direction.

Michaelian situates episodic memory as a form of mental time travel and outlines a naturalistic framework for understanding it. Drawing on research in constructive memory, he develops an innovative simulation theory of memory; finding no intrinsic difference between remembering and imagining, he argues that to remember is to imagine the past. He investigates the reliability of simulational memory, focusing on the adaptivity of the constructive processes involved in remembering and the role of metacognitive monitoring; and he outlines an account of the evolution of episodic memory, distinguishing it from the forms of episodic-like memory demonstrated in animals.

Memory research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Michaelian's account, built systematically on the findings of empirical research, not only draws out the implications of these findings for philosophical theories of remembering but also offers psychologists a framework for making sense of provocative experimental results on mental time travel.

Kourken Michaelian is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Kourken Michaelian's book will be a milestone in the study of memory. This systematic investigation covers an impressive span of philosophical and psychological work on memory, and is both well-informed in cognitive science and nuanced in its conceptual treatment of the topic. Michaelian's treatise provides a framework that will shape the debates on memory and mental time travel in the years to come Jordi Fernández, Department of Philosophy, University of Adelaide, Australia

In Mental Time Travel , Kourken Michaelian calls into question the intuitive assumption that memory is strictly about the past. In so doing, he offers a fresh multidisciplinary perspective into memory's constructive nature. Psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who study the concept of memory should consider this volume essential reading. Karl Szpunar, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of Illinois at Chicago

To me, what is most exciting about this book is its demonstration that good philosophy and good science are not incompatible, that philosophy can inform science... and that science can inform philosophy. Metapsychology Online Reviews

[T]his work has led me to consider questions that I had never thought about in my four decades of memory research. This is an essential book for anyone interested in memory. PsycCRITIQUES

Michaelian's book is a very valuable contribution to the small, but growing, philosophical literature on what is perhaps the most intriguing of the various phenomena involved in remembering. Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

...crisp and impressive. The Philosophical Quarterly

Mental Time Travel is a comprehensive look at the metaphysics, epistemology, and evolution of episodic memory that will be of interest to philosophers and psychologists alike. Philosophical Review

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Mental Time Travel : Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past

Kourken Michaelian is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

Drawing on current research in psychology, a new philosophical account of remembering as imagining the past.

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Mental Time Travel : Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past By: Kourken Michaelian https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/10591.001.0001 ISBN (electronic): 9780262334570 Publisher: The MIT Press Published: 2016

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Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

Description.

Drawing on current research in psychology, a new philosophical account of remembering as imagining the past.

About the Author

Kourken Michaelian is a Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Otago, New Zealand.

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Mental Time Travel

How does the brain zip back and forth in time.

Posted December 23, 2010

Remembering the past and envisioning the future: These are the closest we can get to "time travel," and a new study has investigated how this process works in the human brain.

Results of the study -- performed by Lars Nyberg of Sweden's Umea University, Reza Habib of Southern Illinois University, and Alice S. N. Kim, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving of the University of Toronto -- appear in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Chronesthesia is the technical term for the brain's ability to maintain simultaneous awareness of past, present and future and to "travel" back and forth between them.

Interviewed by a reporter from PhysOrg.com , Tulving said:

"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel': what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie - everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place -- past, present, or future.

"In cognitive neuroscience , we know quite a bit (relatively speaking) about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined space," he said. "We know essentially nothing about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined time. When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were ‘there,' as an observer or participant ('episodic memory '), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question we are asking is, how do you know that it happened at a time other than 'now'?"

The study is titled " Consciousness of subjective time in the brain."

The researchers asked participants to repeatedly think about "taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future." This helped them identify which areas of the brain are linked with thinking about the same event at different times. These are certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, cerebellum, and thalamus.

Tulving told PhysOrg.com:

"Until now, the processes that determine contents and the processes that determine time have not been separated in functional neuroimaging studies of chronesthesia; especially, there have been no studies in which brain regions involved in time alone, rather than time together with action, have been identified," Tulving said. "The concept of chronesthesia is essentially brand new. ... Therefore, I would say, the most important result of our study is the novel finding that there seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present. That is, we found some evidence for chronesthesia."

S. Rufus is the author, under the byline Anneli Rufus, of books including Party of One and Stuck.

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Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past (Life and Mind: Philosophical Issues in Biology and Psychology)

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Editorial Reviews

In Mental Time Travel , Kourken Michaelian calls into question the intuitive assumption that memory is strictly about the past. In so doing, he offers a fresh multidisciplinary perspective into memory's constructive nature. Psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers who study the concept of memory should consider this volume essential reading.

Michaelian's book is a very valuable contribution to the small, but growing, philosophical literature on what is perhaps the most intriguing of the various phenomena involved in remembering.

To me, what is most exciting about this book is its demonstration that good philosophy and good science are not incompatible, that philosophy can inform science... and that science can inform philosophy.

[T]his work has led me to consider questions that I had never thought about in my four decades of memory research. This is an essential book for anyone interested in memory.

...crisp and impressive.

Kourken Michaelian's book will be a milestone in the study of memory. This systematic investigation covers an impressive span of philosophical and psychological work on memory, and is both well-informed in cognitive science and nuanced in its conceptual treatment of the topic. Michaelian's treatise provides a framework that will shape the debates on memory and mental time travel in the years to come

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Mental Time Travel? A Neurocognitive Model of Event Simulation

Published: 30 April 2020
Volume 11 , pages 233–259, ( 2020 )

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Donna Rose Addis 1 , 2 , 3

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Mental time travel (MTT) is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: (1) acts on the same information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; (2) is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two (cf. predictive coding); and (3) is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this domain-general simulation system enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present.

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Mental Time Travel and Disjunctivism

István Aranyosi

Spontaneous and deliberate future thinking: a dual process account

Scott Cole & Lia Kvavilashvili

Episodic Memory, Simulated Future Planning, and their Evolution

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Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the editors of this Special Issue who also organized the Otago Mental Time Travel Symposium that served as inspiration for the paper, and the comments of anonymous reviewers. This work was supported thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program.

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Addis, D.R. Mental Time Travel? A Neurocognitive Model of Event Simulation. Rev.Phil.Psych. 11 , 233–259 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-020-00470-0

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Lord of the fourth dimension: David Tennant as Doctor Who.

Time Travel: A History by James Gleick review – from mechanical to mental

This roving study of our enduring fascination with time travel covers well trodden ground but finds the concept constantly evolving

A re we trapped in the present, free to move in space yet unable to travel in the fourth dimension? Or is there a chance, a glimmer of a possibility, that the past and future could unfurl to our physical experience at will? Despite the punchline being apparent from the off – lest we forget, such journeys are impossible – James Gleick’s latest offering sets out to question the questions, probing how the idea of time travel emerged, gripped our imaginations and shaped our society.

From the start it is apparent who’s the hero of this journey. “One way or another, the inventions of HG Wells colour every time-travel story that followed,” writes Gleick, pointing out that while a smattering of earlier stories explored utopian futures, it was Wells who, with his 1895 work, got to the nuts and bolts of the matter in knocking up a time machine.

It’s easy to forget that time travel is a relatively recent notion. As Gleick points out, for most of human history, change was incremental – yesterday looked much like today, today much like tomorrow. “Before futurism could be born, people had to believe in progress,” he writes. The development of technology, culminating in the industrial revolution, made that possible. As change abounded, the future, and what it might look like, became a subject for speculation. And as archaeology burgeoned, writers like E Nesbit began flights of fancy to the past, too.

Embraced by novelists, wrestled with by philosophers and informed by science – not least Hermann Minkowski ’s revelation, following Einstein’s breakthrough, of four-dimensional spacetime – the possibility that the arrow of time could be tinkered with became a meme. From pulp fiction writers such as Robert Heinlein , to F Scott Fitzgerald and his The Curious Case of Benjamin Button , from Terminator to Dr Who , science fiction blossomed.

As Gleick reveals, problems and paradoxes immediately spewed forth. Is our future governed by fate, or free will? Does time travel always mean ending up naked, your clothes left in the present? What would happen if a time traveller killed his or her grandfather when he was a child? “All the paradoxes are time loops,” writes Gleick as he canvasses the myriad responses to such conundrums. “They all force us to think about causality.”

Among those doing the thinking are philosophers and scientists. Attempting to tackle the idea that wormholes – tunnels in spacetime – could be turned into time machines allowing journeys into the past, even Stephen Hawking has entered the fray, concluding in his “chronology protection conjecture” that the laws of physics prevent it.

Cate Blanchett and Brad Pitt in the 2008 film version of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, based on Scott Fitzgerald’s short story about time travel

The consummate temporal tour guide, Gleick deftly navigates the twists and turns of our fascination with time travel, investigating its evolution in literature, exploring scientific principles that have hinted at or scotched the idea, and teasing apart the curious spell it cast across society with its suggestion of immortality.

But, as he notes, not every product of this obsession with time was profound. “The time capsule is a characteristically 20th-century invention: a tragicomic time machine. It lacks an engine, goes nowhere, sits and waits,” he writes, surveying various attempts to send snapshots of civilisation into the future. Indeed, it’s hard to know whether disappointment, amusement or simply bafflement will be the dominant emotion when the Crypt of Civilisation time capsule at Oglethorpe in Atlanta is opened in 8113 AD. Created in 1936, its contents, Gleick reveals, include a movie magazine, an electric toaster and a “lady’s breast form”.

Not every idea of time travel is rooted in the physical, and Gleick explores how in the act of storytelling we mess with chronology. “We don’t have enough tenses. Or rather, we don’t have enough names for all the tenses we create,” he writes of the complexity unleashed in literature by the concept. Readers, too, become time travellers, able to move at will backwards and forwards through a story. More than that, Gleick argues, books cannot be detached from time. “Even if you know a book well – even if you can recite it entire, like the Homeric poet – you cannot experience it as a timeless object,” he writes.

In probing the role of imagination and memory, Gleick also gives space to the concept of mental time travel, the phenomenon which allows us to immerse ourselves in our past and muse upon what the future might hold. But there, too, Gleick, drawing on Proust, uncovers complexity. “Our intelligence writes and rewrites again the story it is trying to recall,” he warns.

Time Travel is intoxicating, but that is only in part down to Gleick’s execution. Much of this is well trodden ground, our enduring fascination with the notion sown long ago by many adroit hands. At times, Gleick seems to get lost in his own, sometimes opaque, musings. Parts of the book are frustratingly repetitive, while his practice of paraphrasing obscure time travel stories before analysing their finer points too often feels like the dinner party anecdote that rather feebly concludes “Well, you had to be there really”.

Exasperations aside, Time Travel reminds us that our relationship with the slippery concept of time is far from static: technology continues to shape our view, even now. “With persistent connectedness time gets tangled,” Gleick notes. With the internet, it seems, time ahead and time past are both brought into the present.

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Your Brain Is a Time Machine: Why we need to talk about time

From space-time to the way minds keep time, getting to grips with the temporal is complex but rewarding, shows a new book

By Anil Ananthaswamy

31 May 2017

Neural circuits wire themselves to external stimuli to keep time

Herbert List/Magnum

“TIME is a road without any bifurcations, intersections, exits, or turnarounds.” With that, neuroscientist Dean Buonomano sets up the meat of his new book, Your Brain is a Time Machine – and an intriguing difference between the way we animals navigate time as opposed to space.

Natural time is what physicists fuss about. Is time real? Or is the passage of time an illusion, and do all moments in time exist in much the same way that all coordinates of space exist? Neuroscientists, on the other hand, fuss about clock time and subjective time.

To explain natural time, physicists and philosophers back eternalism, according to which the past, present and future are all equally real. “There is absolutely nothing particularly special about the present: under eternalism now is to time as here is to space,” writes Buonomano.

The other main explanation of natural time is presentism, according to which only the present moment is real – a view that tallies with our sense of subjective time. The past is gone, the future hasn’t happened yet. “Neuroscientists are implicitly presentists,” says Buonomano. “But despite its intuitive appeal, presentism is the underdog… in physics and philosophy.”

“Mental time travel is a human capacity. But to do it, biology first had to figure out how to keep time”

Buonomano decides it is time to simultaneously tackle the physics and the neuroscience of time. The title of the book is derived from the now well-regarded idea that our brains are prediction machines. Whenever we perceive something, theory says that what we perceive is not objective reality, but rather the brain’s best guess as to what’s causing the sensations impinging on the body. But popular accounts of the theory often ignore one dimension of the prediction machinery: time.

Buonomano points out that the brain is continuously making real-time predictions, not just of “what will happen next” but also of “when it will happen”. To do so, the brain needs complicated machinery for keeping time – to predict not just what will happen within microseconds, but what might happen in seconds, minutes, hours, even days, weeks, months and years.

This ability to predict the long-term future is reliant on memory. In fact, that’s really the main evolutionary use for memory, as a storehouse of the information needed to predict the future. With memory and cognition, our brains became time machines – we could travel back and forth in time. This mental time travel is a human capacity, distinguishing us from other animals, hence the book’s title. Scrub jays, oddly, seem to demonstrate similar abilities, but proof of mental time travel in animals is hard to come by as yet.

To indulge in mental time travel, biology first had to figure out how to keep time, not unlike how scientists in the 17th century invented the pendulum clock. Christiaan Huygens’s high-quality pendulum clocks were the first to keep time more accurately than clocks within the human brain.

Buonomano’s book is full of delicious details about the myriad ways in which cells – neurons and other types – tell the time. For example, there’s the complicated sounding suprachiasmatic nucleus, a cluster of neurons at the base of the hypothalamus that acts as a master circadian clock. Circadian clocks depend on pendulum-like oscillations of the levels of specific proteins. One of which is aptly named period.

But unlike our clocks, which can tell time over a vast range of intervals, the brain has no single clock. For example, lesions in the suprachiasmatic nucleus don’t alter the brain’s ability to discern temporal patterns at the scale of seconds: there are different clocks for that. If there’s one clear message about the neuroscience of timekeeping, it’s that neural circuits can wire themselves in response to regular external stimuli. In other words, they can keep time, all sorts of time.

Reading Buonomano’s book, it’s hard not to marvel at how time and timekeeping pervade our existence – whether in the form of the clocks and instruments we build or through the mechanisms inherent in our brains. Buonomano creates a sense of wonder about just how complex the temporal brain is and about what a spectacular job it does of timekeeping.

Buonomano writes lucidly, in an almost matter-of-fact fashion, choosing crystalline clarity over flowery prose. So the occasional writerly sentences stand out, for example, when he writes: “The duration of the beat of a hummingbird’s wing is as concealed to our sensory organs as is the drifting of the continents.”

Buonomano’s clear writing is most apparent when he writes about the physics of time. Given that his expertise is neuroscience, this is no small feat. His explanation for why Einstein’s special theory of relativity implies the existence a block universe – a 4D manifold of space-time in which here, there and everywhere exist alongside the past, present and future – makes a masterful case for eternalism.

Special relativity destroys the notion of simultaneity – the idea that two observers moving with respect to each other could agree on the timing of events. When speeds get close to the speed of light, the temporal order of events can be perceived differently by different observers.

Buonomano writes: “If we assume that all events that ave ever or will ever occur are permanently located at some point in the block universe… then the relativity of simultaneity becomes no more puzzling than the fact that two objects in space can appear to be aligned or not depending on where you are standing. Two telephone poles along a highway appear aligned if you are standing on the side f the road, but not if you are in the middle of the road – it is a question of perspective.” And so it is with time.

But eternalism clashes with our subjective experience of the flow of time: in other words, physics clashes with neuroscience. While it’s true that we feel the passing of time, and thus instinctively favour presentism, Buonomano points out that our notions of subjective time are intricately linked to our notions of space. He shows this with the metaphors we use to talk about time: “That was a refreshingly SHORT commercial. We have been studying time for a LONG time… I’m looking FORWARD to your reply; in HINDSIGHT that was a terrible idea.” For timekeeping, the brain co-opts the neural circuits that are used to represent space, thus treating time and space similarly, in a curious analogy to special relativity.

This leads to one of the most intriguing questions raised in the book: could our theories about physics be informed by the very architecture of our brain? “Now that we know that the brain itself spatializes time, it is also worth asking if the acceptance of eternalism has benefited from the fact that it resonates with the architecture of the organ responsible for choosing between eternalism and presentism,” writes Buonomano.

“Could our theories about physics be informed by the very architecture of our brain?”

The state of scientific knowledge about time is such that no straight answers are forthcoming. The book, a compelling read for the most part, somewhat peters out towards the end, with more questions raised than answers. Understandably so. “Our subjective sense of time sits at the center of a perfect storm of unsolved scientific mysteries: consciousness, free will, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the nature of time,” writes Buonomano.

Your Brain Is a Time Machine can be disquieting, as the implications settle in, for example, of inhabiting a universe in which all moments exist. But the book ultimately leads to an internal quieting, as one realises that all the profound scientific discoveries of the past century or so are struggling with a common enemy: time.

Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The neuroscience and physics of time

Dean Buonomano

W. W. Norton (Buy from Amazon *)

This article appeared in print under the headline “All the time in the world…”

(*When you buy through links on this page we may earn a small commission, but this plays no role in what we review or our opinion of it.)

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40 Best Time Travel Books To Read Right Now (2024)

This post may contain affiliate links that earn us a commission at no extra cost to you.

Travel back in time with the best time travel books, including engrossing thrillers, romance, contemporary lit, and mind-bending sci-fi.

Table of Contents

Best Time Travel Books

Books about time travel promise to not only transport you across time periods and space – Doctor Who-style – but also tesser you into new dimensions and around the world. Most readers already know about classics like The Time Traveler’s Wife , A Christmas Carol , and The Time Machine .

For romance time travel, grab In A Holidaze or One Last Stop . For contemporary and new time travel books, Haig’s The Midnight Library and Serle’s In Five Years captivated our hearts and minds.

Recursion re-kindled our love for science fiction, and Ruby Red transported us to 18th-century London. Books like Displacement promise intuitive and raw commentary about generational trauma and racism in graphic novel form.

Below, find the best time travel novels across genres for adults and teens, including history, romance, classics, sci-fi, YA, and thrilling fiction. Get ready to travel in the blink of an eye, and be sure to let us know your favorites in the comments. Let’s get started!

Contemporary & Literary Fiction

If you enjoy contemporary and literary fiction filled with strong main characters, these are some of the best books in the time travel genre. Uncover new releases as well as books on the bestseller lists. Of course, we’ll share a few lesser-known gems too.

In Five Years by Rebecca Serle

Would your life change if you had one seemingly real dream or premonition? What if some key facts were missing but you had no idea? Can we change the future?

One of the best books about time travel and friendship, don’t skip In Five Years . In fact, we read this New York City-based novel in half a day. Have the tissue box ready.

Dannie nails an important job interview and is hoping to get engaged. Of course, this is all a part of her perfect 5-year plan. Dannie has arranged every minute of her life ever since her brother died in a drunk driving accident.

On the night of Dannie’s “scheduled” engagement, she falls asleep only to have a vision of herself 5 years into the future in the arms of another man. Did she just time travel or could this be a dream? When Dannie arrives back in 2020, her life goes back to normal. …That is until she meets the man from her dream.

We were expecting In Five Years to be a time travel romance story; however, this is a different type of love and one of the best books about strong friendships .

Read In Five Years : Amazon | Goodreads

Before the coffee gets cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Translated by Geoffrey Trousselot | We just love Japanese literature . One of the most debated time travel books among our readers – you’ll either love it or hate it – Before the coffee gets cold takes place at a cafe in Tokyo, Japan.

Along with coffee, this 140-year-old, back-alley cafe lets visitors travel back in time. Four visitors at the cafe are hoping to time travel to see someone for the last (or first) time. The way each patron views the cafe says a lot about them. The details and repetition are everything.

True to the title, visits may only last as long as it takes for the coffee to grow cold. If they don’t finish their coffee in time, there are ghostly consequences.

Before the coffee gets cold asks, who would you want to see one last time, and what issues you would confront?

Along with the many rules of time travel, these visitors are warned that the present will not change. Would you still travel back knowing this? Can something, anything, still change – even within you?

The story has a drop of humor with a beautiful message. We shed a tear or two. Discover even more terrific and thought-provoking Japanese fantasy novels here .

Read Before the coffee gets cold : Amazon | Goodreads

If you are looking for the most inspiring take on time travel in books, Haig’s The Midnight Library is it. This is one of those profound stories that make you think more deeply . TWs for pet death (early on) and suicide ideation.

The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

Imagine if you could see your other possible lives and fix your regrets. Would that path be better? Would these changes make you happier?

Set in Bedford, England, and at a library , Nora answers these questions as she intentionally overdoses on pills. Caught in the Midnight Library – a purgatory of sorts – Nora explores books filled with the ways her life could have turned out. She tries on these alternative lives, pursuing different dreams, marrying different people, and realizing that some parts of her root life were not as they seemed on the surface.

Find hope and simplicity in one of the most authentic and heaviest time travel novels on this list. Haig addresses mental health through a new lens that is both beautiful and moving.

With a team full of avid readers and librarians, discover our top selections featuring more books about books .

Read The Midnight Library : Amazon | Goodreads

The Two Lives of Lydia Bird by Josie Silver

Some of the best time travel books are those with alternate realities, including The Two Lives of Lydia Bird . There are content warnings for prescription pill addiction and more.

Set in England, Lydia and Freddie are planning their marriage when the unthinkable happens. Freddie dies in a car accident on the way to Lydia’s birthday dinner. In a matter of seconds, Lydia’s world falls apart. She isn’t sure how she will survive. When Lydia starts taking magical pink sleeping pills, she enters an alternate universe where Freddie is alive and well.

Caught between her dream world and real life, Lydia must decide if she will give in to her addiction – living in a temporary fantasy world – or give it up completely.

While the repetitive and predictable plot drags a bit – slightly hurting the pacing – the overall story shows emotional growth and the nature of healing after loss. And, as Lydia soon learns via her dreams, no love is perfect. Maybe her future was destined to be different anyway, which is reminiscent of Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library .

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The First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August by Claire North

If you are looking for more suspenseful books about time travel and like Groundhog Day , check out The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August. However, this is not just one day on repeat; instead, this is a lifetime.

Harry August is repeatedly reborn into the same life, retaining his memories each time. No matter what Harry does or says, when he lands on his deathbed, he always returns back to his childhood, again and again. On the verge of his eleventh death, though, a girl changes the course of his life. He must use his accumulated wisdom to prevent catastrophe.

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An Ocean of Minutes by Thea Lim

When it comes to time travel books, An Ocean of Minutes is one of the most original takes about time travel’s effects on alternate history.

Polly and Frank are deeply in love in 1981 when a pandemic devastates the planet. By the end of 1981, time travel (invented in this alternate reality in 1993) has been made available.

Because of this invention, individuals can sign on to work for the TimeRaiser corporation in order to escape or save their loved ones in the present. Due to a flaw in the technology, though, they can only transport people for 12 years. This prevents them from stopping the pandemic by just 6 months.

When Frank gets ill, Polly signs up, both agreeing they will meet back up in 1993. Now alone in the future, Polly has to learn to navigate a world she has less than zero preparation for. In this world, she is a time refugee, bonded to TimeRaiser without a physical cent to her name.

Lim uses the time travel mechanic to cleverly explore the subject of immigration, forcing the reader to follow Polly blindly into a world they should know, but don’t. This is what makes An Ocean of Minutes one of the most unique time travel novels on this reading list.

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Time Travel In Science Fiction

For fantasy and sci-fi lovers, take a quantum leap into fictional worlds, quantum physics, possible futures, black holes, and endless possibilities. See if you can tell the difference between the real world and new dimensions.

Recursion by Blake Crouch

Recursion is one of our all-time favorite time travel books to gift to dads who love sci-fi. Can you tell what we gave our dad for Christmas one year?

In Recursion, no one actually physically time travels – well, sort of. Instead, memories become the time-traveling reality.

Detective Barry Sutton is investigating False Memory Syndrome. Neuroscientist Helena Smith might have the answers he needs. The disease drives people crazy – and to their deaths – by causing them to remember entire lives that aren’t theirs. Or are they!?

All goes to heck when the government gets its hands on this mind-blowing technology. Can Barry and Helena stop this endless loop?

Recursion is also a (2019) Goodreads Best Book for Science Fiction.

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This Is How You Lose The War by Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar

Best Time Travel Books, This Is How You Lose The War Max Gladstone book cover with red cardinal and blue jay

A Goodreads runner-up for one of the best science fiction novels (of 2019) – and one of the shortest time travel novels on this list – This Is How You Lose The Time War follows two warring time-traveling agents falling in love through a letter exchange.

Red and Blue have nothing in common except that they travel across time and space and are alone. Their growing and forbidden love is punishable by death and their agencies might be onto them.

In a somewhat beautiful yet bizarre story, we watch as Red and Blue slowly fall for each other and confess their love. They engage in playful banter and nicknames. Every shade of red and blue reminds them of each other.

The first half of the novel is a bit abstract. You might wonder what the heck you’ve gotten yourself into. However, once you get your feet planted firmly on the ground of the plot, the story picks up and starts making more sense.

We can’t promise you’ll love or even understand This Is How You Lose The Time War – we aren’t sure we do. However, this is truly one of the most unique sci-fi and LGBTQ+ time travel romance books on this reading list – written by two authors. Also, maybe crack out the dictionary…

Explore even more of the best LGBTQ+ fantasy books to read next.

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All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

A debut novel, All Our Wrong Todays is both a humorous and entertaining time travel book that speaks to how we become who we are.

In 2016, technology perfected the world for Tom Barren. However, we all know that perfection doesn’t equate to happiness. Barren has lost his girlfriend, and he just happens to own a time machine… Now, Barren has to decide if he wants to keep his new, manipulated future or if he just wants to go back home to his depressing but normal life.

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Here And Now And Then by Mike Chen

Imagine getting trapped in time and starting over. That’s exactly what happens to IT worker, Kin Stewart, in one of the bestselling science fiction time travel books, Here And Now And Then .

Stewart has two lives since he is a displaced time-traveling agent stuck in San Francisco in the 1990s. He has a family that knows nothing about his past; or, should we say future. When a rescue team arrives to take him back, Stewart has to decide what he is willing to risk for his new family.

Here And Now And Then is a time travel book filled with emotional depth surrounding themes of bonds, identity, and sacrifice. Find even more books set in San Francisco, California (and more!).

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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe is one of the most unusual books about time travel out there.

Our protagonist Charles Yu lives in a world where time travel exists and is readily available to the average person. And yes, he is named after the author, and yes, it is as meta as it sounds; and yes, this is just the beginning of this speculative fiction time travel book.

Charles Yu’s day job is spent repairing time machines for Time Warner Time. But in his free time, he tries to help the people who use time travel to do so safely and to counsel them if things have gone wrong.

It’s no surprise that Charles’ entire life revolves around time travel since his father invented the technology many years ago. And then he disappeared. In fact, Charles is also trying to find out just what happened to his dad, and where – or when – he’s gone.

How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe won’t be for everyone, but it’s one of the best time travel books if you want delightfully meta, fantastically non-linear, and very very weird.

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The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez

For beautiful, lyrical time travel novels about found family and love, The Vanished Birds is a must-read.

Nia Imani exists outside of time and space. She travels in and out of the world through a pocket of time with her space crew. They emerge to trade or sell goods every eight months. But eight months for them is 15 years for everyone else.

She has lived this way for hundreds of years. Though she has her crew, and there are people she shares connections with sporadically throughout their lives, she is lonely. And although she barely ages, she watches friends and lovers grow old and die.

One such person is Kaeda, who meets Nia for the first time when he is 7. The next time he sees her, he has aged 15 years, while she is only months older. She continues to come every 15 years of his life, always looking the same.

Then one day a mysterious, mute boy falls from the sky into Nia’s life. His name is Ahro, and there’s something extra special about him. Something that could revolutionize space travel forever. And now there might be people after Ahro who won’t love him the way Nia does.

If you love a character-driven book with exquisite prose – and a few time warps – this is one of the best time travel books for you.

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Night Watch by Terry Pratchett

Night Watch is one of the most fun and thrilling books about time travel. It’s also a bit ridiculous and very very British.

Why can’t policing just be simple? All Sam Vimes wanted to do was capture and arrest a dangerous murderer. But thanks to those damned wizards and their experiments, he and the killer have both been accidentally thrown back in time thirty years.

And to top it off, the man who would have become a mentor to young Sam Vimes in the past has been killed in the process! How’s Vimes going to get this all sorted out?

The City Watch he’s spent years improving is just a bunch of semi-competent volunteers at this point. He’s got no money, no clothes, and no friends. But at least he’s making enemies fast. Can he catch the killer, stop history from not repeating itself, and get home to his family? Oh, and the city’s about to dissolve into civil war. Typical.

Night Watch is perfect if you prefer your time travel books to be fantasy-based.

P.S. There may be mild spoilers for previous books in the Discworld series, but this can be read as a standalone. And if you only ever read one Discworld novel, this is one of the best there is – and so far the only one of the Discworld books with time travel!

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The Future of Another Timeline by Annalee Newitz

The Future of Another Timeline is one of the few time travel books to explore history through a feminist lens.

In 1992, Beth – a high school senior – and her friends Heather, Lizzy, and Soojin attend a riot grrl concert with Heather’s boyfriend Scott. But afterward, one of Scott’s not-so-funny sexist jokes gets out of hand and Lizzy accidentally kills him. Now they’re on the run, and the bodies just keep piling up.

Meanwhile, in 2022, Tess is part of a group of women and non-binary people working together to change history. They have the use of five time devices which only allow them to travel backward and back to the present day – but never forwards.

Beth and Tess come from two wildly different times (1992, and 2022, respectively). But, while Beth is busy making history, Tess is quite literally trying to change it. However, both of them want the same thing: a better world. When their worlds collide, will they be able to save each other – and the world?

The Future of Another Timeline is a time travel fiction celebration of feminism and queerness with lots of sci-fi and punk rock thrown in. This is one of the best time travel novels for those who enjoy stellar women making history .

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The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley

The Kingdoms is wildly imaginative and sure to enchant fans of time travel books, alternative history stories, and tales about parallel universes.

In 1898 Joe Tournier steps off a train and suddenly can’t remember anything that comes before that moment. The world he now finds himself in is as foreign to him as it is to us: an alternate history/reality where the UK lost the Battle of Trafalgar and is now a French colony.

In this world, the British are kept as slaves. Napoleon is a popular name for pets, and tartan is outlawed. Since Joe arrives on a train from Glasgow speaking English and wearing tartan, there is some speculation he might be from The Saints, a terrorist group based in Edinburgh fighting for freedom.

But all Joe remembers is the fading image of a woman and the name Madeline. Although he is identified by his owner and brought “home,” Joe is determined to find this Madeline. And his resolve is only strengthened when he receives a postcard signed ‘– M’ and dated 90 years in the past.

Discover even more books about Scottish culture, history, and everyday life.

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The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley

The Light Brigade is one of the best time travel stories for anyone who loves character-driven tales or books about war and conflict.

As war wages on Mars, the military has devised the perfect soldier to fight on the frontlines: being made of light. The Light Brigade, as they’re called back home, is made up of soldiers who have undergone a procedure that breaks them down into atoms capable of traveling at the speed of light. They are the perfect soldiers, but broken people.

The book follows one such soldier, Dietz, an eager new recruit who is experiencing battle out of sync with everyone else. Because of this, she – and we – see a different reality of the war than the one presented by the Corporate Corps. As Dietz becomes more and more unstuck in time, she becomes more and more unsure of her own sanity and the role she is playing in this war.

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The Umbrella Academy by Gerard Way

The Umbrella Academy Vol. 1 by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba book cover with illustrated image of person's body meshed with a guitar

You Look Like Death Volume 1 | Now a popular (and excellent) Netflix TV show, The Umbrella Academy is one of the best time travel books of all time.

One day, forty-seven children are suddenly and inexplicably born to women who were not previously pregnant. Eccentric millionaire Reginald Hargreeves goes around the world buying as many of the surviving children as he possibly can. He is able to get seven.

These children, it turns out, all have superpowers (except, it seems, for the unremarkable Number Seven aka Vanya). They become the crime-fighting group: The Umbrella Academy.

Fast forward several years, and Number Five, whose special power is that he can travel in time a few seconds or minutes per go, has mysteriously appeared after Hargreeves dies. And now he brings warning of an apocalypse – one which he insists none of his siblings will survive.

The Umbrella Academy series currently has three volumes, all packed with tales of time travel, parallel worlds, family drama, and lots of epic battles. We’ve absolutely loved this time travel book series so far; we can’t wait to see what Gerard Way does with future installments.

Discover even more great books with music, musicians, and bands.

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Historical Fiction

Travel back in time to witness wars and history. See what happens if you try to rewrite the future. Many of these historical fiction books with time travel promise to teach you more.

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

We have a plethora of Agatha Christie fans amongst our Uncorked Readers , and Turton’s The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evenlyn Hardcastle is inspired by Christie.

Similar to Levithan’s Every Day , each day, Aiden wakes up in a different body from the guests of the Blackheath Manor. Trapped in a time loop, Aiden must solve Evelyn Hardcastle’s murder to escape. In the process, he navigates the tangled web of secrets, lies, and interconnected lives of the guests. Can he identify the killer and break the cycle?

The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle is an award-winning historical thriller and one of the best time travel novels if you enjoy Downton Abbey and Groundhog’s Day . Discover even more great books set at hotels, mansions, and more.

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Outlander by Diana Gabaldon

Outlander Series Diane Gabaldon book cover with old building on blue background

Travel back in time to Scotland in one of the most well-known time travel book series (and now TV series) of all time. Outlander is a part of pop culture. A New York Times bestseller and one of the top 10 most loved books according to The Great America Read, get ready to enter Scotland in 1743.

Claire Randall, a former British combat nurse, walks through an ancient circle of stones and is transported into a world of love, death, and war. This is a place of political intrigue, clan conflicts, and romantic entanglements. Claire must navigate the unfamiliar landscape while grappling with her feelings for the dashing Jamie Fraser.

Encounter even more cult-classic books from the ’90s like A Game Of Thrones , which is perfect for fantasy map lovers .

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11/22/63: A Novel by Stephen King

Best Time Travel Books 11/22/63: A Novel book cover with newspaper clipping of JFK being slain in Dallas

Written by bestselling author, Stephen King, 11/22/63 is one of the best award-winning time travel books for historical fiction lovers. Set in 1963 when President Kennedy is shot, 11/22/63 begs the question: what if you could go back in time and change history?

Enter Jake Epping in Lisbon Falls, Maine. Epping asks his students to write about a time that altered the course of their lives. Inspired by one of those haunting essays, Epping enlists to prevent Kennedy’s assassination. How is this time travel possible? With the discovery of a time portal in a local diner’s storeroom…

11/22/63 is one of the most thrilling and realistic books about time travel, according to both critics and readers.

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Kindred by Octavia E. Butler

If you are looking for historical fiction novels about time travel that address slavery and racism, be sure to check out Butler’s Kindred. This is also one of the best books published in the 1970s .

One minute Dana is celebrating her birthday in modern-day California. The next, she finds herself in the Antebellum South on a Pre-Civil War Maryland plantation. Dana is expected to save the plantation owner’s son from drowning. Each time Dana finds herself back in this time period as well as the slave quarters, her stays grow longer and longer as well as more dangerous.

Examine the haunting legacy and trauma of slavery across time. For younger readers, there is also a graphic novel adaptation . Discover more books that will transport you to the South .

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What The Wind Knows by Amy Harmon

A bestseller and Goodreads top choice book, if you devour historical Irish fiction, What The Wind Knows will transport you to Ireland in the 1920s.

Anne Gallagher heads to Ireland to spread her grandfather’s ashes. Devastated, her grief pulls her into another time. Ireland is on the verge of entering a war, and Anne embraces a case of mistaken identity. She finds herself pulled into Ireland’s fight for Independence at the risk of losing her future life. She also falls for another main character and doctor, Thomas Smith.

What The Wind Knows is one of the best time travel novels that both romance and fantasy readers can appreciate. Witness connections that transcend time.

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The Shining Girls by Lauren Beukes

Known for being one of the best time travel books for thriller lovers, The Shining Girls also has the reputation as the spookiest novel on this reading list.

Kirby Mazrachi is the last shining girl – a girl with a future and so much potential. Harper Curtis is a murderer from the past meant to kill Mazrachi. However, Kirby is not about to easily go out without a fight, leading her on one violent quantum leap through multiple decades.

As Kirby races against time to track down a serial killer and unravel the mysteries of the House, encounter themes of resilience, fate, and the shining spirit that can transcend even the darkest forces.

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Time Travel Romance Books

We love a good time-travel romance novel, but we also understand how hard it can be to hold onto love when time is so unstable. From queer love stories set on trains to holiday celebrations, fall in love across time with these books.

One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

From bestselling author, Casey McQuiston of Red, White, & Royal Blue – one of our favorite LGBTQ+ books for new adults – don’t miss the most-talked-about book (from 2021), One Last Stop.

Twenty-three-year-old August is quite the cynic and living in New York City. Up until now, August has jumped schools and towns as often as you change a pair of socks. August has also never been in a serious relationship and wants to find “her person.” August’s life suddenly changes, though, when she meets a beautiful and mysterious woman on the train.

Jane looks a little…out of date… and for good reason; she’s from the 1970s and trapped in the train’s energy. August wants nothing more than to help Jane leave the train, but does that mean leaving her too?

A feel-good, older coming-of-age story, laugh out loud and be utterly dazzled as you follow love across time and space. You’ll cozy (and drink) up in the parties and community surrounding August. One Last Stop is one of the all-time best LGBTQ+ time travel books – and perfect if you enjoy books that take place on trains .

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The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

The Time Traveler’s Wife is one the top time travel romance novels – and not just because the story features a librarian . We are so biased.

Henry and Clare have loved each other pretty much forever. Unfortunately, Henry has Chrono-Displacement Disorder, sporadically misplacing him in time. Of course, this time-traveling dilemma makes Clare’s and Henry’s marriage and future together pretty darn interesting.

Grab some Kleenex as they attempt to live normal lives and survive impending devastation. The Time Traveler’s Wife has also been made into a romantic movie classic . Watch even more fantasy movies with romance .

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In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren

If you are looking for a sweet and sexy holiday rom-com set in Utah, grab In A Holidaze by Christina Lauren.

Mae leaves her family and friend’s Christmas vacation home after drunkenly making out with an old childhood friend. Blame the spiked eggnog. Unfortunately, Mae’s secretly in love with her best friend’s brother, Andrew. On the ride to the airport, Mae wishes for happiness just as a truck hits her parent’s car.

Mae lands in a time-travel loop where her dreams start coming true. Is it too good to last? What happens when she isn’t happy once again? Is she trapped?

For holiday books about time travel, this one is sure to put you in the Christmas spirit if you enjoy movies like Holidates or Groundhog’s Day . It’s light with a happy ending – typical of this author duo. We also recommend In A Holidaze if you are looking for Christmas family gathering books – a big request we see here at TUL.

P.S. Did you know that Christina Lauren is a pen name for a writing duo, Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings? Christina Lauren also wrote The Unhoneymooners , which was also hilariously enjoyable and set on an island .

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A Knight In Shining Armor by Jude Deveraux

For cozy time travel romance books and a feminist tale set abroad, try A Knight In Shining Armor .

Dougless Montgomery is weeping on top of a tombstone when Nicholas Stafford, Earl of Thornwyck, appears. Although this armor-clad hunk allegedly died in 1564, he stands before her about to embark on a journey to clear his name. Convicted of treason, Montgomery vows to help her soon-to-be lover find his accuser and set the record straight.

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The Night Mark by Tiffany Reisz

Set in South Carolina, if you love lighthouses and beach vibes, you’ll find something enjoyable in the time travel romance, The Night Mark .

After Faye’s husband dies, she cannot move on and recover. Accepting a photographer job in SC, Faye becomes obsessed with the local lighthouse’s myth, The Lady of the Light.

Back in 1921, the lighthouse keeper’s daughter mysteriously drowned. Faye is drawn into a love story that isn’t hers and becomes entangled in a passionate and forbidden love affair.

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The Seven Year Slip by Ashley Poston

Anyone who likes their time travel books to have a magical love story should pick up The Seven Year Slip for their next read. It’s one of our favorite magical realism novels .

When Clementine’s aunt dies, she inherits her fancy New York apartment on the Upper East Side. Although Clementine would really rather have her aunt back and can’t imagine living in her home, she eventually forces herself to move in and inhabit her aunt’s space.

And not long after, she wakes up to discover a strange man in her living room… except it’s not her living room, it’s her aunt’s… from seven years ago. Clementine’s aunt always said her apartment held a touch of magic; sometimes it created time slips that brought two people together when they were at a crossroads.

But what happens when you start to fall for someone stuck seven years in the past? Clementine knows there’s no future together, but she also can’t let go of this link to her aunt.

Like her previous speculative fiction romance, The Dead Romantics , Ashely Poston’s unique time travel tale is full of heartache and grief. However, it will also make you swoon. Basically, this one is a must if you are a fan of time travel romance books.

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Classic Books

No time travel reading list would be complete without the classics. Below, uncover just a few great time travel novels that started it all.

The End of Eternity by Issac Asimov

The End of Eternity is said to be one of Asimov’s science fiction masterpieces. This is also one of the most spellbinding books about time travel – although some criticize the story for its loopholes.

Harlan is a member of the elite future known as an Eternal. He lives and works in Eternity, which like any good time travel novel, is located separately from time and space.

Harlan makes small changes in the timeline in order to better history. Of course, altering the course of the world is dangerous and comes with repercussions, especially when Harlan falls in love.

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A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

It goes without saying that Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol is one of the most famous and best time travel books for classic lovers – and a literary canon-worthy Christmas novel.

Ebenezer Scrooge is a greedy, lonely, and cruel man who truly has no Christmas spirit. Haunted by the ghosts of the past, present, and future, Scrooge must find the ultimate redemption before it’s too late. Does he have a heart?

Find even more classic and contemporary ghost books , including a few unique takes on ghosts.

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Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five is a somewhat bizarre time travel book about finding meaning in our sometimes fractured and broken lives. It’s also one of the most popular books published in the ’60s .

Similar to The Time Traveler’s Wife, Billy Pilgrim is “unstuck” in time in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Drafted into World War II, Pilgrim serves as a Chaplain’s assistant until he is captured by the Germans. He survives the bombing at Dresden and ultimately becomes a married optometrist. Things get a little wild…

Suffering from PTSD, Billy claims that he is kidnapped by aliens in a different dimension. Like most time travel novels, the story is out of order and Billy travels to different parts of his life.

Aliens come in all shapes and sizes; have more alien encounters with this reading list .

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A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain

First published in 1889, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of the most popular classic and satirical time travel novels that’s set close to our childhood home. Having grown up in CT close to the old Colt factory, this story makes us smile.

Hank Morgan supervises the gun factory and is knocked unconscious. Upon waking, he finds himself in Britain about to be executed by the Knights of King Arthur’s Round Table in Camelot.

Morgan uses his future knowledge to his advantage, making him a powerful and revered wizard, which unfortunately doesn’t quite save him as he hopes. Not to mention that Morgan tries to introduce modern-day conveniences and luxuries to a time period that isn’t quite ready for them.

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The Time Machine by H.G. Wells

The Time Machine is one of the best frontrunner time travel books of all time. Published in 1895, the Time Traveler recalls his exhausting time travel adventures to incredulous believers. He even disappears in front of them.

Blended with fantasy and science fiction over the course of 800,000 years, the Time Traveler battles “bad guys.” He also loses his time machine, debatably falls in love, and meets the underground dwelling Morlocks.

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Young Adults Books

For young adults and teens – plus adults who appreciate YA – read the best middle-grade and high school time travel books. We’ve included more time travel graphic novels and manga here too.

Displacement by Kiku Hughes

For historical YA graphic novels , Displacement is one of the must-read books about time travel that will teach young readers about generational trauma, racism, politics, and war.

Follow Kiku, who is displaced in time, back to the period of U.S. Japanese incarceration [internment] camps – essentially glorified prisons – during WW2. Kiku begins learning more about her deceased grandmother’s history, which mirrors the horrid actions under former President Donald Trump. How can Kiku help stop the past from repeating itself, and more so, how can we?

In a simplistic but powerful style of storytelling, Hughes’s emotional YA WW2 book is accessible to young readers. Displacement is also one of the shorter and quicker books with time travel on this list. Find even more LGBT+ graphic novels to read – one of our favorite genres.

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The Girl From Everywhere by Heidi Heilig

Changing the past can be pretty tempting. We’ve even seen that The Flash cannot resist. However, altering the course of history can be dangerous…

The first of two YA time travel books, Nix is the daughter of a time traveler. Her dad can sail anywhere on his ship, The Temptation. Her dad has his own temptation, though: to travel back to Honolulu in 1868, the year before her mom dies in childbirth. Nix’s father threatens to possibly erase her life and destroy a relationship with her only friend.

Discover even more great books about maps. Or, travel via armchair with these ship books.

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Ruby Red by Kerstin Gier

Translated by Anthea Bell | If you are looking for time travel in books and enjoy YA historical fiction, try Ruby Red , which is the first in the Ruby Red Trilogy.

Gwyneth Shepherd quickly learns that she can easily time travel, unlike her cousin who has been preparing her entire life for the feat. Gwyneth wants to know why such a secret was kept from her. There are so many lies. Gwyneth time travels with the handsome Gideon back and forth between modern-day and 18th-century London to uncover secrets from the past.

Back in our MLIS and library days, Ruby Red was one of our favorite YA time travel books to recommend since so few knew about the series. Just a small warning that this enemies-to-lovers trope is a tad sexist, though. Find books like Ruby Red on our books with red (and more colors) in the title reading list .

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Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children by Ransom Riggs

A little creepier for young adult time travel novels, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is all about time loops. We’ve only read the first in this eerie series that mixes manipulated vintage photography with a suspenseful and chilling story.

Jacob discovers a decaying orphanage on a mysterious island off the coast of Wales. Known as Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, the building isn’t exactly abandoned… Jacob runs into peculiar children who might be more than just ghosts.

If you are looking for Kurt Vonnegut-esque time travel books for teenagers, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children is for you. Find even more great adult and YA haunted house books to add to your reading list .

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A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L’Engle

One of the most well-known books about time travel for families – made even more popular by Oprah and Mindy Kaling, A Wrinkle In Time , is the first book in The Time Quintet .

Although a time travel book series for elementary and middle-grade students – and also a 1963 Newbery Medal winner – adults will love the lessons and whimsical sci-fi quality of A Wrinkle In Time.

Meg Murray and her brother, Charles Wallace, go on an adventure in time to find and rescue their father. Their dad disappeared while working for the government on a mysterious tesseract project.

Watch this thrilling time travel adventure mixed with a coming-of-age story and a little girl power, too.

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Orange by Ichigo Takano

Translated by Lasse Christian Christiansen and Amber Tamosaitis | This YA sci-fi romance manga is one of the most endearing time travel books you’ll ever read.

On the first day of 11th grade, Naho oversleeps for the first time ever. She also receives a letter that claims to be sent from herself 10 years in the future. The letter tells her both of the two big things that will happen to her that day as proof of sender: she will be late, and there will be a new kid in class named Naruse Kakeru from Tokyo who will sit next to her.

Naho is unsure if she trusts the letter, or whether or not she should heed its warnings – especially since it talks about past regrets and trying to undo them.

Orange is an adorable, but heartbreaking time travel manga that teaches us the meaning of friendship, love, regret, and so much more. If you’re looking for the best books about time travel for teens, Orange is the perfect option (and adults will love it too).

Read Orange : Amazon | Goodreads

If you devour the time travel genre, don’t miss these great movies…

If you enjoy books that take you back in time, you might also appreciate these top movies with time loops . Would you be able to fix past mistakes, fall in love, and you know, maybe not die this time? Find out if these protagonists succeed.

Travel Back In Time With These Reading Lists:

Best ’90s Books
Iconic ’80s Books
Best WWII Historical Fiction

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45 Comments

Hi, nice list but just FYI you have one of the novels named incorrectly: it should be All Our Wrong Todays, not All Our Wrongs Today.

Thanks for letting us know! Every year, this list grows, and sometimes we miss a few mistakes.

The Things Are Bad Series by Paul L Giles is the funniest, most insightful time travel books I’ve ever read. It has everything!

Thanks so much for the review and rec!

Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain is an engrossing time travel book that I enjoyed immensely.

Our readers and contributors are big Diane Chamberlain fans. Thanks!

A huge time travel fan. A great list. Another time travel book recommendation: Oona Out of Order by Margarita Montemore. Wonderful story.

Thank you so much for the kind words and recommendation! We’ll have to check it out.

Great list, thanks. I also love seeing all the recommendations in the comments. I would add the Chronos Files series to your list. And, of course, the film ABOUT TIME, which is fantastic!

Thanks so much for the recommendations. We appreciate it!

Mental Time Travel

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Intervention Overview

Mental time travel involves both positive reminiscence about past events, as well as positive imagination about future events. Just as with the HEAL process, practicing mental time travel motivates students to focus on and absorb the positive experiences in their lives. Encourage students to share their excitement about an upcoming vacation, birthday, or other positive event. You can also have students bring to mind a favorite memory and picture all the details of that positive event. Though this can be done in a single session, research suggests that practicing daily mental time travel, for at least two weeks, contributes to the most significant improvements in wellbeing (Quoidbach et al., 2009).

Intervention Guide

Does it work.

In one study on mental time travel, a group of 210 university students were asked to imagine four positive events that could happen the following day(Quoidbach et al., 2009). Some of the examples students shared were receiving a text message from a significant other, eating at their favorite restaurant, or getting the job they interviewed for. Participants reported a significant increase in happiness and decrease in anxiety by thinking about positive future events, as opposed to negative or neutral ones (Qoidbach et al., 2009). Quoidbach and colleagues (2010) completed an additional study the following year with 282 university students and employees in Belgian. They found that positive mental time travel, both reminiscing about the past and imagining the future, were linked to improvements in positive emotion and life satisfaction (Quoidbach et al., 2010).

References:

Quoidbach J., Berry E., & Hansenne M., & Mikolajczak M. (2010). Positive emotion regulation and well-being: Comparing the impact of eight savoring and dampening strategies. Personality and Individual Differences , 49 (5),368-373. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2010.03.048.

Quoidbach, J., Wood, A.M. & Hansenne, M. (2009). Back to the future: the effect of daily practice of mental time travel into the future on happiness and anxiety. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 4 (5), 349-355. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760902992365

This content is provided to you freely by EdTech Books.

Access it online or download it at https://edtechbooks.org/addressing_wellbeing/mental_time_travel .

How a millennial Lyft driver used the gig to travel to all 50 states, launch a food blog, and get started on a book

Kreskin J. Torres, a Lyft driver, has traveled across all 50 states, documenting his dining experiences.
Torres is working on a book, an app called Rideshare Foodies, and is organizing a national potluck.
He said gig driving is just temporary and has helped him achieve his larger goals.

Kreskin J. Torres, 35, has eaten his way through all 50 states — including Alaska and Hawaii. His ticket to doing so? Driving for Uber and Lyft .

The Army veteran and Baltimore native has documented his dining on his blog Rideshare Foodie . After seven years, he's learned the most profitable times of day to drive, the best locations to find riders in each city and the optimal strategies for maximizing tips .

"You just got to work smarter, not harder," Torres said. "From my experience, I've been in every state, so I know how every city works now."

At the same time, he's been able to pursue his foodie passions. Torres is now working on a book called "Taste of the States," his recommendations app called Rideshare Foodies, and planning a series of events to honor dishes from various states and their history.

While driving for ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft can be a flexible way to earn money for people like Torres who have more than one hustle, it can also be a recipe for burnout. Among the dozens of drivers Business Insider has spoken with over the past few months, many are already dreaming of what's next — starting a business or finding new modes of employment .

And that's Torres' main career advice for those considering it. After all, he's not planning to do the job forever, as he hopes to transition away, though it helped him jump-start new paths for his future.

"Do not make this the end all be all," Torres said, noting how Uber and Lyft have threatened to pull out of Minneapolis. "When it started, it was advertised as a gig, a side hustle."

Traveling the country as a gig driver

As a veteran, he said this job has been relatively stress-free and helpful for not feeling lonely, a similar sentiment he's heard from veterans with PTSD.

"I enjoy meeting and connecting with different people and getting to see different places," Torres said.

He decided to spend his next few years on the road using driving to fund his adventures and to meet locals who could point him to the best restaurants and experiences.

"The great thing is you get to learn about different cities and how everything operates," Torres said.

Learning the most profitable places and times to drive

Torres noticed he would get more profitable rides driving around suburbs, airports, and sports stadiums, locations coveted by drivers as they get more tips and sometimes elevated fares.

He learned New Year's will always be profitable , though rides slow down around February before picking up in mid-March. It's led him to be more methodical about the types of rides to take, as well as planning when to save more of his earnings and when to splurge a little on food and travel.

"After seven years, I'm a lot more experienced. It depends on the time of the season, so I usually can do a lot more business in college towns," Torres said. "I would visit a city, see what they're known for, a little history behind it."

Torres was making enough to comfortably travel the country, though he's always been careful since he said passengers are sometimes confused by his out-of-state license plate. He also faced a permanent deactivation from Uber last year over a dispute over the color of his car.

He doesn't have a wife or kids, nor does he have an apartment, as he mainly lives out of his car to save money. He acknowledges that growing competition on the road and lower earnings could put a greater dent in savings for people with families or permanent residences.

Torres has transitioned to driving full-time for Lyft , and he typically is online for 12 hours a day but only actively drives five to six hours in between waiting around airports.

He said he's increasingly put himself in his passengers' shoes to determine the best places and times to drive — he likely won't put in the effort to drive during rain, and he's more likely to do later trips around concert venues or bars.

To continue supporting his travels, he said he sometimes does airport rides at 3 or 4 a.m., as well as rides between 6:30 a.m. and 10 a.m. during the morning rush. He also said being online around noon is fruitful for corporate workers, while 3 p.m. is right when schools let out. He usually tries not to drive around evening rush hours but sometimes resumes later at night.

He also devotes more time to driving between Wednesday and Sunday, when rides are more frequent, whether for "whiskey Wednesdays" or Friday afternoon happy hours. This is also when he can best network with passengers and hear their stories, as he said he occasionally gets to drive famous people.

Torres said drivers should consider this a short-term opportunity while working toward long-term goals. As he eases off the app, he has his eyes set on more international travel in the coming months. He's also investing more time in his food app, a local recommendation tool that functions like a Facebook group in which people ask questions about, for example, the best bartender in the area or where to go for particular dishes. It has launched on Android and set to be released on Apple by the summer.

"The most positivity that you can get out of it, do whatever you can and get the most out of it," Torres said. "The next few months will probably be my last time doing this because I'm focusing on other things, so I always had a plan for the things I was going to do."

Are you a ride-hailing driver who's struggling to pay bills or has had recent success? Have you recently pivoted to a new career from driving? Reach out to [email protected] .

Watch: How truck driving became one of the worst jobs in the US

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COMMENTS

Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal
The disillusionment is that what the author means is not mental time travel per se, but rather a kind of non-literal time travel involving memories of the past and future within the moment one is living in. This is a compromise that some readers will not appreciate, and making matters worse, the author seems to gloss over the idea that he is ...
The Science of Mental Time Travel and Why Our Ability to Imagine the
As it turns out, episodic memory — a term coined in the early 1970s by Canadian neuroscientist Endel Tulving, author of the seminal book Elements of Episodic Memory — is central to our capacity for mental time travel and, according to many scientists, fairly unique to humans. Unlike other facets of memory, such as the acquisition of new ...
Mental time travel is a great decision-making tool
EFT is often described as a kind of "mental time travel" because your brain is working to help you see and feel the future as clearly and vividly as if you were already there. EFT isn't an escape from reality. It's a way of playing with reality, to discover risks and opportunities you might not have considered.
Mental Time Travel
by Kourken Michaelian. Paperback. $45.00. Paperback. ISBN: 9780262551151. Pub date: February 6, 2024. Publisher: The MIT Press. 312 pp., 6 x 9 in, 10 line drawings. MIT Press Bookstore Penguin Random House Amazon Barnes and Noble Bookshop.org Indiebound Indigo Books a Million.
Mental Time Travel
In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on research in the psychology of memory to develop an innovative philosophical account of the nature of remembering and memory knowledge. ... Michaelian situates episodic memory as a form of mental time travel and outlines a naturalistic framework for understanding it. Drawing on research in constructive ...
Mental Time Travel
In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on research in the psychology of memory to develop an innovative philosophical account of the nature of remembering and memory knowledge. ... Michaelian situates episodic memory as a form of mental time travel and outlines a naturalistic framework for understanding it. Drawing on research in constructive ...
Mental Time Travel by Kourken Michaelian: 9780262551151
Mental Time Travel is a comprehensive look at the metaphysics, epistemology, and evolution of episodic memory that will be of interest to philosophers and psychologists alike. Drawing on current research in psychology, a new philosophical account of remembering as imagining the past. In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on...
Mental Time Travel
Michaelian situates episodic memory as a form of mental time travel and outlines a naturalistic framework for understanding it. Drawing on research in constructive memory, he develops an innovative simulation theory of memory; finding no intrinsic difference between remembering and imagining, he argues that to remember is to imagine the past.
Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal
In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on research in the psychology of memory to develop an innovative philosophical account of the nature of remembering and memory knowledge. ... Michaelian situates episodic memory as a form of mental time travel and outlines a naturalistic framework for understanding it. Drawing on research in constructive ...
Mental time travel
Mental time travel. In psychology, mental time travel is the capacity to mentally reconstruct personal events from the past ( episodic memory) as well as to imagine possible scenarios in the future (episodic foresight /episodic future thinking). The term was coined by Thomas Suddendorf and Michael Corballis, [1] building on Endel Tulving 's ...
Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge o…
In this book, Kourken Michaelian builds on research in the psychology of memory to develop an innovative philosophical account of the nature of remembering and memory knowledge. ... Michaelian situates episodic memory as a form of mental time travel and outlines a naturalistic framework for understanding it. Drawing on research in constructive ...
Mental Time Travel
Mental time travel research has given rise to an ongoing debate between causal and simulation theories of memory (see Constructive Memory), which has, in turn, triggered a debate between continuist and discontinuist views of the relationship between remembering experienced past events and imagining possible future events (see Imagination).This section describes the concept of mental time ...
Editorial: Memory as Mental Time Travel
The idea that episodic memory is a form of mental time travel has had an enormous impact on research in psychology and is becoming increasingly influential in philosophy. The idea, however, is relatively recent. When Tulving ( 1972) first introduced the term "episodic memory", he defined it essentially as a specialized store devoted to ...
Mental time travel: A conceptual overview of social psychological
In this overview article and in the special issue on Mental Time Travel, we aim to identify key themes of mental time travel research, point to communalities and differences, and help to integrate various aspects of mental time travel research. Future directions regarding open questions, need for theoretical integration, and further empirical ...
Mental Time Travel
Interviewed by a reporter from PhysOrg.com, Tulving said: "Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such 'travel ...
Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal
Mental Time Travel is a comprehensive look at the metaphysics, epistemology, and evolution of episodic memory that will be of interest to philosophers and psychologists alike. ― Philosophical Review --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.
'Mental Time Travel' Can Help You Make Better Decisions
The concept of "mental time travel" is used in disciplines like psychology and neuroscience to describe our ability as humans to recall and reconstruct past events from our lives, as well as to ...
Mental Time Travel? A Neurocognitive Model of Event Simulation
Mental time travel (MTT) is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process - constructive episodic simulation - and demonstrate that the 'simulation ...
Time Travel: A History by James Gleick review
With the internet, it seems, time ahead and time past are both brought into the present. Time Travel: A History by James Gleick is published by Pantheon (£16.99). To order a copy for £12.74 go ...
Your Brain Is a Time Machine: Why we need to talk about time
This mental time travel is a human capacity, distinguishing us from other animals, hence the book's title. Scrub jays, oddly, seem to demonstrate similar abilities, but proof of mental time ...
Ben Springett, Mental time travel: Episodic memory and our knowledge of
Book review: Mental Time Travel: Episodic Memory and Our Knowledge of the Personal Past. [REVIEW] Steven James - 2017 - Memory Studies 10 (3). Self-Referential Memory and Mental Time Travel. Jordi Fernández - 2020 - Review of Philosophy and Psychology 11 (2):283-300.
40 Best Time Travel Books To Read Right Now (2024)
One of the most well-known books about time travel for families - made even more popular by Oprah and Mindy Kaling, A Wrinkle In Time, is the first book in The Time Quintet. Although a time travel book series for elementary and middle-grade students - and also a 1963 Newbery Medal winner - adults will love the lessons and whimsical sci-fi ...
Mental Time Travel
Intervention Overview. Mental time travel involves both positive reminiscence about past events, as well as positive imagination about future events. Just as with the HEAL process, practicing mental time travel motivates students to focus on and absorb the positive experiences in their lives. Encourage students to share their excitement about ...
Lyft Driver Traveled to All 50 States, Launched Food Blog
Apr 20, 2024, 3:08 AM PDT. Kreskin J. Torres has traveled to all 50 states thanks to Uber and Lyft driving. Kreskin J. Torres. Kreskin J. Torres, a Lyft driver, has traveled across all 50 states ...
7 Ways To Travel More Sustainably
getty. 2. Opt For Public Transit. Public transportation — buses, trains, light rail, etc. — is always more sustainable than a private ride. If possible, use public transit to get to and from ...
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