Mental time travel — transporting someone from the present through imagining a personal, positive future event — has been proven to help reduce alcohol, tobacco, and drug use.

Now, researchers at Virginia Tech’s Fralin Biomedical Research Institute at VTC have received a $990,000 grant from the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, part of the National Institutes of Health, to study a low-cost way to help patients with Type 2 diabetes better manage the disease by thinking about personal experiences that will occur in the future, a technique researchers call episodic future ...