Why would a man without a lottery ticket shoot himself after hearing the winning numbers?

Who is the most disappointed person at the Olympics?

And what does this have to do with Pan American Airlines or Botox?

And why should you always put yourself in the shoes of future

people? Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and an author at

Stanford, and in these episodes, we sailed deeply into our three-pound universe to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Today's episode is about mental time travel. Now, we've done two episodes in the past two weeks

on time traveling. I started with the concept of memory, which is our way of unhooking from

the here and now and putting ourselves into past time points. And in order to do this, you need this whole network of brain areas that are involved in situating you, not in the world that's right in front of you, but a remembered world.

This network allows you to resimulate what the spatial layout was, who was there, what your emotions were,

sounds and smells. All of this is run like a simulation, and nobody else can see it. It takes place

entirely in the privacy of your own skull. Then last week, I talked about the other direction

of time travel, imagining possible futures.

Simulation of what could happen next

is one of the most important jobs of brains.

We plan out what we're going to say, what we're going to do, how we're going to act in a

situation, what might happen to us, and on and on. And as a reminder about a couple important

points I made throughout those episodes, point one was that we spend most of our time as humans

disconnected from the here and now.

And playing these little movies in our heads, we're reminiscing on the past or we're

simulating the future.

And point two is it turns out to actually be the same core network of brain areas that's

...