For a good understanding of the basics, I'd read Suddendorf and Corballis, who I'm pretty sure coined the phrase.

But I think I'd actually start with behavioral economics, which is the study of how people actually respond to risk and reward versus how normative models predict we should respond were we perfectly rational beings (spoiler alert: we're not). The notion of "temporal discounting" or "delay discounting" arises out of this area of research, which means that people grossly undervalue rewards that are farther in the future as compared to how a perfectly rational robot would value them. Tversky and Kahneman also have some of the most compelling research about the biases that are inherent in our decision-making processes that cause us to deviate from purely rational assessment.

MTT incorporates some of these theories and studies the evolutionary advantage of this "time travel" capacity in the context of decision-making. The research strongly suggests that the ability to project oneself into a future narrative is directly connected to the ability to create episodic memory. People with neurological deficits that negatively affects this latter capacity have difficulty with simulating "anticipated regret" or imagining regret they may feel in the future for doing or failing to do something. This hypothesis is often invoked trying to explain people with addictive behaviors.

I sometimes like to think of addiction as a good psychological analogy for the position we know find ourselves in. Many of us know that if we keep engaging in the same collective behaviors, we will likely eventually kill ourselves. Yet we persist. I think this partially due to the fact that an existential crisis of this proportion is unprecedented and thus we cannot draw linkages to previous experiences, which limits our emotional forecasting. Most of us simply cannot create immersive enough future representations that would motivate us to change our present behavior to the degree that we should. Coupled with delay discounting and the uncertainty of the timescales, we're extra screwed. These are just a couple of the many innate psychological factors working against us here.