All this adds immense urgency to perhaps the biggest mystery of food allergies: Why are they on the rise? Why are more babies and kids reacting badly to cookies, ice cream, cake, and milk? Why are more adults discovering that they can’t eat a lobster roll anymore?
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It turns out that some of the trappings of the modern world may have had some unintended consequences, and some well-intentioned guidance on how we should eat may have been completely wrong.
The settings and subjects haven’t changed much in his new collection, “Liberation Day,” but Saunders’s career-long strategies have acquired a deeper intensity, focus and bite. He’s always been a moralist, concerned with our obligations to one another; now, an ongoing and intense debate over democracy and its threats has further exposed that.
Psychologists have a fancy name for this capacity to bounce around in time inside our heads: They call it “mental time travel.”
But here’s the thing: Most animals can’t do it (at least, not to the degree that we humans do it). Neither can babies and infants, and neither can people with certain cognitive impairments, like advanced Alzheimer’s disease, for example. But there’s evidence that most members of our lineage, at least since the time of Homo erectus, have been able to mentally journey through time. And according to a new book by cognitive scientists Thomas Suddendorf, Jonathan Redshaw, and Adam Bulley, mental time travel made all the difference. In “The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight,” Suddendorf and his co-authors argue that the ability to envision future events while recalling past ones was a key development in the evolution of our species.
Before you went, you sipped smooth dark honey,
pleasure we nearly forget. With all of eternity