Mental Time Travel: A Retrospective

Because imagination activates the same neural circuits used in understanding the present, one can access that imagination even in non-linguistic animals through decoding techniques applied to large neural ensembles. This personal retrospective traces the history of the initial discovery that hippocampal theta sequences sweep forward to goals during moments of deliberation and discusses the history that was necessary to put ourselves in the position to recognize this signal. It also discusses how that discovery fits into the larger picture of hippocampal function and the concept of cognition as computation.