Episodic memory: mental time travel or a quantum `memory wave' function?

Where do we "go" when we recollect our past? When remembering a past event, it is intuitive to imagine some part of ourselves mentally "jumping back in time" to when the event occurred. I propose an alternative view, inspired by recent evidence from my lab and others, as well as by re-examining existing models of episodic recall, that suggests that this notion of mentally revisiting any specific moment of our past is at best incomplete and at worst misleading. Instead, I suggest that we retrieve information from our past by mentally casting ourselves back simultaneously to many time points from our past, much like a quantum wave function spreading its probability mass over many possible states. This revised conceptual model makes important behavioral and neural predictions about how we retrieve information about our past, and has implications for how we study episodic memory experimentally.