Whether you’re someone who can quickly assess a situation and make a decision, or you carefully weigh the pros and cons before making a choice, your memories of the past likely play a bigger role in your future than you realize. This isn’t necessarily a matter of learning from past mistakes or traumatic experiences that influence your view of the future. It’s more about our ability to draw on the past to actually imagine what our potential future might look like. This ability of our brains, known as “mental time travel,” can also help us make better decisions.

The concept of “mental time travel” is used in disciplines such as psychology and neuroscience to describe our ability as humans to remember and reconstruct past events from our lives, and to visualize how different situations and events might play out in the future. Some scientists even argue that the main purpose of past-life memories is “to provide information from the past as the scaffolding of the future,” as the authors of a 2023 study put it.

Similarly, other researchers describe mental time travel as a survival skill, giving us the chance to think about and plan for hypothetical future events. This ability to mentally construct a story for a situation that is not actually happening can also help us make decisions.

In her 2022 book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, Jane McGonigal, PhD—a futurist, researcher, author, alternate reality game designer, and participant in Lifehacker's 2015 "How I Work" interview series—explains how you can use mental time travel as part of your decision-making process.