Abstract

Are memory and imagination two manifestations of the same capacity? Some recent work on the psychology and neuroscience of remembering gave philosophers a new occasion for revisiting this classical question. Based on evidence from the study of amnesiac patients, Tulving (1985) hypothesized that the abilities to episodically remember one’s own past and imagine future personal episodes are two sides of a coin. In line with this hypothesis, neuroimaging studies revealed that your brain operates similarly when you remember the madeleine you ate yesterday at your mother’s house and when you imagine yourself eating a madeleine at your house tomorrow morning (Okuda et al. 2003; Addis, Wong, and Schacter 2007). Still, a widely discussed question is how these two mental time travel abilities relate to each other. Are they fundamentally the same?