Have you ever found yourself in the shower the morning of a big event - say a job interview, a presentation or a tough conversation with a loved one - practicing what you're going to say? You might set a stage in your mind, picturing the scene in myriad ways, rehearsing the situation - not unlike Nathan Fielder's newest HBO show. You might not realize it, but what you're doing is actually mental time travel: drawing on your past to imagine a possible future and placing yourself there in your mind. "We have something akin to a virtual time machine in our heads," says Thomas Suddendorf, professor of psychology at the University of Queensland and co-author of The Invention of Tomorrow, a book on mental time travel published in 2022. "We can, in our mind's eye, relive past events and project ourselves forward and imagine potential future situations." Suddendorf and late collaborator Michael Corballis coined the term in