Maybe you went backward, replaying a meeting and cringing at something you said. Maybe you went forward, rehearsing the conversation that hasn't happened yet, already hearing the question you're dreading. Your body was in the kitchen. Your mind was somewhere in next Tuesday.

Scientists have a name for this: mental time travel. As far as we can tell, humans do it in a way no other species does. It might be one of the things that makes us human.

It's also, I've come to think, part of the raw material of The 5 Steps to Empathy™️. That's what this edition is about.

This comes out of episode four of What Does It Mean to Be Human?, the series I'm doing with Maria Ross. That episode was about hope, free will, and what we started calling the future-oriented mind. Watch it here, and read on for the science the episode only had time to gesture at, plus what I think is the most useful reframe of my own work I've landed on in a while.

The term mental time travel comes from psychologist Endel Tulving. His core insight was that memory isn't a filing cabinet where you store the past. It's a vehicle. The same system that lets you re-experience your past, what Tulving called episodic memory, is the system that lets you pre-experience your future. You don't just remember your last vacation. You can sit at your desk and feel the next one, before it happens.

No other animal appears to do this the way we do. A squirrel buries nuts for winter, but there's no evidence it's lying awake thinking about January. We do this constantly, and mostly without noticing.

That gift has a shadow side, and it's called worry. On the podcast, Maria described what she calls future tripping as a parent: one rough moment with her kid, and her mind fast-forwards twenty years to visiting him in prison. One data point, an entire imagined future. If you're a parent, or honestly if you're a person, you know that spiral. It can easily overtake you, hold you back from making decisions and taking action. That’s the shadow side.

The same machinery has a bright side, and it's called hope. Not optimism. Hope.

That distinction comes from Rebecca Solnit's book Hope in the Dark. Optimism is passive: the belief that things will work out on their own. Hope is active: the belief that the future is unwritten, and because it's unwritten, it can be shaped. Optimism waits. Hope looks for the opening.

Think about the movie scenes where the hero is trapped. In the original Star Wars, the trash compactor scene is a classic. Or a James Bond film, where 007 is tied up, the clock running out. Most of us would be goners. But the hero's instinct, there's got to be a way, keep looking, isn't blind positivity. That's the future-oriented mind doing its best work: simulating futures until it finds the one with a door in it.

Here's the research the episode name-checked but didn't have time to unpack, and it's the clearest proof of everything above.

In 1981, a thirty-year-old Toronto man named Kent Cochrane skidded off a highway exit ramp on his motorcycle. He spent a month in intensive care and survived, but the injury destroyed both of his hippocampi. Neuroscientists came to know him in the literature simply as K.C., and Endel Tulving spent years studying him.

What made K.C. remarkable wasn't just what he lost. It's what he kept. He could still explain how to change a tire. He knew what the internet was, even though it didn't exist before his accident, because he could absorb new facts. His semantic memory, the general knowledge store, (maybe that’s the filing cabinet) worked fine.

What was gone was anything personal. He couldn't recall a single specific episode from his own life, no matter how gently researchers prompted him. He knew his brother had died. He couldn't remember grieving him.

And then Tulving asked the question that mattered most: what will you be doing tomorrow? K.C. couldn't answer. He described the feeling as blank. Not sad, not anxious about not knowing. Blank, the same way his past felt blank. He could tell you that winter follows autumn. He could not imagine his own next winter.

That's the discovery that made mental time travel a real scientific concept instead of a metaphor. The exact same machinery that let K.C. relive his past was the machinery that let anyone imagine their future, and when it broke, it broke in both directions at once. You cannot separate remembering who you were from imagining who you'll be. It's one system, running in two directions, and K.C. lost the whole thing at once.

If you want to sit with K.C.'s full story, I'm sharing a link to a Slate profile written when he passed away in 2014.

Everything I've described so far is pointed at one person: my past, my meeting, my kid, my way out of the trash compactor. It’s all self-directed.

What happens if we turn that in another direction.

The same machinery that runs mental time travel inward, imagining my own next move, my own way out, can run outward instead. And when it does, it's an expression of empathy. Point that same capacity at someone else, fueled by compassion instead of self-interest, and you get the ability to imagine a way through their problem, not just yours. That's the whole insight. Mental time travel gives you the raw tool to imagine. Empathy and compassion are what aim it at another person.

I landed on that mid-conversation with Maria, without planning it, while we were talking through all of this mental time travel:

The future-oriented mind is what's enabling us to come up with solutions to our own problems. Empathy and connection is what's letting us come up with solutions to problems that other people have, because we're empathizing with their needs and understanding what they may be feeling or going through.

Maria stopped me. "Robert, that was a mic drop moment," she said. It was, because it's the hinge the whole episode turns on: the exact same cognitive horsepower that gets the hero out of the trash compactor is available to loan to somebody else, the moment you point it outward instead of in. The moment you add empathy.

I've spent ten years teaching a framework called The 5 Steps to Empathy™️, and the fifth step is Use Solution Imagination. I've described that step a hundred ways, in keynotes, in the book, in client conversations. This might be the cleanest one yet: Solution Imagination is mental time travel with someone else or on their behalf. It's taking what you've heard from another person and imagining what's possible. What would be the next statement to say or action to take that will resonate for them, based on what you understand about them. And then working together toward it. It's the same cognitive horsepower that gets the hero out of the trash compactor, just loaned to somebody who isn't you.

What does that look like at full strength?

Maria told a story near the end of our conversation that gave both of us goosebumps. It came from an episode of Finding Your Roots, where Henry Louis Gates Jr. traces people's family histories. A guest on the show discovered ancestors who had been enslaved, and their reflection was something like this: the fact that I'm sitting here means that people living through the worst circumstances imaginable still chose to bring children into the world.

You don't have children if you're certain there's no future worth handing them. Choosing to have a child, in that world, was an act of imagining a future you might never live to see, for a person who didn't exist yet. That's hope, given entirely to someone else. It might be the most courageous act of Solution Imagination in human history, repeated quietly, millions of times, by people whose names we'll never know.

And one smaller moment I keep coming back to. Maria asked her twelve-year-old what he thinks makes us human. He wanted her to stop asking podcast questions at the dinner table, fair enough, but then he said: free will. Nobody's controlling us. He didn't elaborate. He didn't need to. The future is uncontrolled. Nobody's written it yet. That's exactly what makes it shapeable, for ourselves and for each other.

Inward. Next time you're stuck, catch yourself and ask: am I waiting for this to work out, or am I actively looking for the opening? Waiting is optimism. Looking is hope. Only one of them changes anything. Which one do you default to? What might it be like to lean into hope? And if your default is hope, can you visualize your thought processes as you look for the opening?

Outward. Think of one person in your life who's stuck right now. A friend, a coworker, a family member in a hard season. Spend five minutes doing for them what you'd do for yourself: imagine their problem and seek their opening. Not the advice you'd give. Not what you'd do in their shoes. What is the opening that could go right for them and free them from the trash compactor, given who they are and what they value? That last part is everything. Solution Imagination only works if you've actually listened first. Otherwise you're just handing them your future instead of helping them find theirs. If it feels right, ask them a question that points toward that opening, rather than telling them what to do.

That's mental time travel, run on someone else's behalf. That's the gift we possess, transferred.

The future-oriented mind might be the most human thing about us. It becomes the best thing about us when we point it at each other.

I recently sat down with Anne Gillaspie on her podcast, OnlyFounders, which if you haven't clocked the joke yet, is a play on a certain other subscription platform. But the conversation itself was the opposite of a gimmick. It was one of the more adult conversations I've had on a podcast in a while, in the actual sense of the word: two founders being honest about what it's really like to start something and keep it running, including the parts nobody puts in the highlight reel. The fear, the exhaustion, the emotional weight of it. Anne created a space where we could just be real about that, and I left the conversation grateful for it.

More from Anne and OnlyFounders

I spent much of the last month on the road. In New York, including a quick jaunt to Fire Island on what turned out to be the most perfect weather weekend of the summer.

And then a week in Manhattan attending the Quirk’s Market Research Event. So fun catching up with so many colleagues and friends in the industry.

P.S. — If K.C.'s story stayed with you the way it stayed with me, I'm working on something related: a project on the conversations adult children and aging parents have about life transitions, memory, and what gets passed down. If that's you, or someone in your life, I'd love to hear from you.

Sign up here: https://form.typeform.com/to/Mf5GDlYT 

That’s all for this week. Until next time…

 Stay curious. Ask good questions. Let empathy follow.

Rob