Platt, Craig,

Maybe its not "time travel" in the sense you're using it, but I thought I'd
point out an interesting article (short) that appeared in Time along with all
the other "consciousness" articles.

Time Travel in the Brain
(http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1580364,00.html)

I've provided two key paragraphs below, but the jist is how infrequently people
are actually "in" the present moment. Our minds have us continually reflecting
back or projecting forward, and we rarely are "in" that "endless now". Its more
about Zen than time travel, but anyways...

"The human body moves forward in time at the rate of one second per second
whether we like it or not. But the human mind can move through time in any
direction and at any speed it chooses. Our ability to close our eyes and
imagine the pleasures of Super Bowl Sunday or remember the excesses of New
Year's Eve is a fairly recent evolutionary development, and our talent for
doing this is unparalleled in the animal kingdom. We are a race of time
travelers, unfettered by chronology and capable of visiting the future or
revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged
by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present. Alzheimer's
disease, for instance, specifically attacks the dark network, stranding many of
its victims in an endless now, unable to remember their yesterdays or envision
their tomorrows. ...

Perhaps the most startling fact about the dark network isn't what it does but
how often it does it. Neuroscientists refer to it as the brain's default mode,
which is to say that we spend more of our time away from the present than in
it. People typically overestimate how often they are in the moment because they
rarely take notice when they take leave. It is only when the environment
demands our attention--a dog barks, a child cries, a telephone rings--that our
mental time machines switch themselves off and deposit us with a bump in the
here and now. We stay just long enough to take a message and then we slip off
again to the land of Elsewhen, our dark networks awash in light."


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