People report having consistent idiosyncratic diets of imagined sensations when they re-experience the past, and pre-experience the future

Arnold, D. H.; Bouyer, L. N.; Saurels, B. W.; Schwarzkopf, D. S.

doi:10.64898/2025.12.12.694050

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bioRxiv · 10.64898/2025.12.12.694050

People report having consistent idiosyncratic diets of imagined sensations when they re-experience the past, and pre-experience the future

Arnold, D. H.·Bouyer, L. N.·Saurels, B. W.·Schwarzkopf, D. S.

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Abstract

To some extent, humans can re-experience the sensations of past events and pre-experience the future. These capacities are inter-related. But there are substantial individual differences. At the extremes, small minorities of people report that they either cannot have imagined experiences at all, or that their imagined sensations are as real to them as their actual experiences of the physical world. We wanted to know if such individual differences are uniform across different types of imagined experience (e.g. vision, audio, taste and smell), or if people generally have idiosyncratic patterns of different types (vision, audio, taste and smell) of imagined experiences. We find that people report having idiosyncratic diets of different types of imagined sensation, characterised by differences in salience. One person might have more salient imagined visual than taste experiences, while another reports the reverse. Moreover, these propensities are consistent across peoples attempts to re-experience the past, and to pre-experience the future, and they predict peoples experience and usage of different types of imagined sensation in their everyday lives.

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Arnold, D. H., Bouyer, L. N., Saurels, B. W., Schwarzkopf, D. S.. 2025-12-16. People report having consistent idiosyncratic diets of imagined sensations when they re-experience the past, and pre-experience the future. https://doi.org/10.64898/2025.12.12.694050

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