Can rats imagine the future? Neuroscientist David Redish presents evidence that rodents engage in mental time travel , constructing representations of places they have not yet visited , and argues this forces us to rethink the boundaries of animal cognition. Subscribe for more from the Convergent Science Network podcast series. David Redish joins Paul Verschure and Tony Prescott at the BCBT summer school to discuss his research on what he calls the cognitive rat. Using advanced neural decoding methods applied to hippocampal place cells, Redish demonstrates that rats generate self-consistent representations of locations they are not currently occupying , neural signatures of deliberation, imagination, and possibly insight. The conversation traces the intellectual lineage from Tolman's cognitive maps through the discovery of place cells to modern d ...