Talk:Mental time travel

Content issue
The way this article is written, it really makes it sound like chronesthesia is the ability to literally travel through time (albeit only mentally). This would imply that people are (or could be) aware of precise future events.

I don't think that's what chronesthesia is actually considered to be. After reading the article and checking out a few of the citations, I'm still not completely clear on this, but it seems that these scientists are not making that claim, but rather that it's more of a hypothetical future that people are aware of. In other words, people are aware of the fact that there is a future, and can therefor make plans, consider different possible outcomes of present actions, etc... but not that they can actually see the actual future.

If they are in fact hypothesizing that humans have an innate ability to know the future, then that would obviously be one hell of an extraordinary claim. At the moment, that's how the article reads.

If, on the other hand, these scientists aren't saying that at all, but are simply talking about something more in line with "an awareness of the future in general", then I think it would make sense to make that clear right off the bat.

Thoughts? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 98.192.132.244 (talk) 08:07, 24 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Agreed - I have made a number of edits to the page to clarify the meaning of the terms. Devoveo (talk) 22:19, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

Clean up October 2018
I am making a series of edits to clean up this article as per the lodged request. These edits are in line with (and include references to) modern scholarship on the topic. Devoveo (talk) 23:13, 3 October 2018 (UTC)


 * You wrote in the lede: "The related notion <...> was termed chronesthesia". However the description of "chronesthesia" disappeared from Wikipedia after your rewrite. Please write a separate article (or at least a section here) to clarify what is this or at least how it is a "related notion". Staszek Lem (talk) 00:17, 4 October 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for catching this - I have created a re-direct from 'chronesthesia' to this page, and clarified that the terms are synonymous. Devoveo (talk) 21:49, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

I deleted the subsection 'Issues and future research' (poorly written, many inaccuracies), and added the content into the other main body sections. Devoveo (talk) 21:37, 4 October 2018 (UTC)