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It was Suddendorf and Corballis who raised the idea that mental time travel into the past was closely linked to time travel into the future.

Any other significance to the brain areas found to be activated into future visualization experiments? Maybe - these are the same areas important for theory of mind or thinking about the perspectives of others, and spatial navigation tasks.

It's not hard to find examples of highly creative forward-thinking adults who seem to have had this prodigious memory pattern (Nikola Tesla, Isaac Asimov, Leonardo Da Vinci etc.) but amazingly we think we see some of these budding versions in our clinic because of our interest in highly gifted and twice exceptional (gifted with LD) learners. Vivid personal memory doesn't always translated into academic success in the early years of education - because it's usually impersonal or rote memory that's emphasized in school. Vivid visualizers can be easily distracted, lost in their daydreams, or more concerned with personal trivia (what Toby brought to school, the games on Sarah's DS, etc.) or personal experimentation (homemade catapults) than the steps for rounding decimals or regurgitating dates and names for a history test.

“Long-term memory differs from short-term memory in requiring the synthesis of new proteins,” Kandel said, adding that there’s a high threshold for information to be entered into long-term memory. “Something really has to be important to be remembered,” he said. Long-term memory stimulates protein syntheses, Kandel said, by altering gene expression. While the genes themselves remain unchanged, their activity levels are tweaked by the molecules involved in the creation of long-term memory.

“Many of us are accustomed, naively, to thinking that genes are the determinants of our behavior,” he said. “We are not accustomed to thinking that genes are also the servants of the mind.” The genes affected, he said, lead the brain’s 100 billion neurons to grow new synapses, or connections with other neurons. A typical neuron, he said, connects to about 1,200 others. But neurons that are subject to repeated stimuli have been found to have much denser networks, with up to 2,800 synapses.

The brain is especially susceptible to forming such new connections early in life, he said, when its structure is highly malleable, or plastic. “This is why almost all great musicians, all great basketball players, all great anything, all get started very early in life,” Kandel said.

“There are a lot of cells up there,” he said. “Each one of them connects to 1,000 other cells, so you’ve got more synapses than there are stars in the universe. When you finish counting those stars in the universe, I will be ready for the connectome.”