scholarly journals Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind

2009 ◽  
Vol 364 (1521) ◽  
pp. 1317-1324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Suddendorf ◽  
Donna Rose Addis ◽  
Michael C. Corballis
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Social Settings ◽  
The World ◽  
Survival And Reproduction ◽  
Conscious Recollection ◽  
Future Events

Episodic memory, enabling conscious recollection of past episodes, can be distinguished from semantic memory, which stores enduring facts about the world. Episodic memory shares a core neural network with the simulation of future episodes, enabling mental time travel into both the past and the future. The notion that there might be something distinctly human about mental time travel has provoked ingenious attempts to demonstrate episodic memory or future simulation in non-human animals, but we argue that they have not yet established a capacity comparable to the human faculty. The evolution of the capacity to simulate possible future events, based on episodic memory, enhanced fitness by enabling action in preparation of different possible scenarios that increased present or future survival and reproduction chances. Human language may have evolved in the first instance for the sharing of past and planned future events, and, indeed, fictional ones, further enhancing fitness in social settings.

Mental time travel sickness and a Bayesian remedy

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jay Hegdé
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Bayesian Estimation ◽  
Estimation Theory ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Past Experience ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Combining Information

AbstractMental time travel is a principled, but a narrow and computationally limiting, implementation of foresight. Future events can be predicted with sufficient specificity without having to have episodic memory of specific past events. Bayesian estimation theory provides a framework by which one can make predictions about specific future events by combining information about various generic patterns in the past experience.

scholarly journals Is mental time travel real time travel?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Michael Barkasi ◽  
Melanie G. Rosen
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Direct Realism ◽  
Similar Argument ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events

Episodic memory (memories of the personal past) and prospecting the future (anticipating events) are often described as mental time travel (MTT). While most use this description metaphorically, we argue that episodic memory may allow for MTT in at least some robust sense. While episodic memory experiences may not allow us to literally travel through time, they do afford genuine awareness of past-perceived events. This is in contrast to an alternative view on which episodic memory experiences present past-perceived events as mere intentional contents. Hence, episodic memory is a way of coming into experiential contact with, or being again aware of, what happened in the past. We argue that episodic memory experiences depend on a causal-informational link with the past events being remembered, and that, assuming direct realism about episodic memory experiences, this link suffices for genuine awareness. Since there is no such link in future prospection, a similar argument cannot be used to show that it also affords genuine awareness of future events. Constructivist views of memory might challenge the idea of memory as genuine awareness of remembered events. We explain how our view is consistent with both constructivist and anti-causalist conceptions of memory. There is still room for an interpretation of episodic memory as enabling genuine awareness of past events, even if it involves reconstruction.

The mental time travel continuum: on the architecture, capacity, versatility and extension of the mental bridge into the past and future

2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 421-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Prescott Breeden ◽  
Dorothea Dere ◽  
Armin Zlomuzica ◽  
Ekrem Dere
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Memory Model ◽  
Processing Capacity ◽  
High Complexity ◽  
The Past ◽  
Decision Making Processes ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Working Memory Model

AbstractMental time travel (MTT) is the ability to remember past events and to anticipate or imagine events in the future. MTT globally serves to optimize decision-making processes, improve problem-solving capabilities and prepare for future needs. MTT is also essential in providing our concept of self, which includes knowledge of our personality, our strengths and weaknesses, as well as our preferences and aversions. We will give an overview in which ways the capacity of animals to perform MTT is different from humans. Based on the existing literature, we conclude that MTT might represent a quantitative rather than qualitative entity with a continuum of MTT capacities in both humans and nonhuman animals. Given its high complexity, MTT requires a large processing capacity in order to integrate multimodal stimuli during the reconstruction of past and/or future events. We suggest that these operations depend on a highly specialized working memory subsystem, ‘the MTT platform’, which might represent a necessary additional component in the multi-component working memory model by Alan Baddeley.

scholarly journals I remember. Differences between the Neanderthal and modern human mind

10.4312/dp.25 ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 402
Author(s):  
Simona Petru
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Personal Time ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
Grave Goods

Modern humans remember things they experience as personal events. An important reason for this personal perception of time is episodic memory, which enables mental time travel. This type of memory could not have been fully evolved in Neanderthals and they might not have imagined their personal past and future. Thus, their archaeological record does not contain durable objects which would be preserved from one generation to another. Their burials also do not include convincing grave goods that indicate a belief that personal time continues after death.

The meaning of “time” in episodic memory and mental time travel

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 323-323 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Friedman
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Temporal Memory ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Anticipation Time

AbstractThe role of time in episodic memory and mental time travel is considered in light of findings on humans' temporal memory and anticipation. Time is not integral or uniform in memory for the past or anticipation of the future. The commonalities of episodic memory and anticipation require further study.

scholarly journals An asymmetry in past and future mental time travel following vmPFC damage

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisa Ciaramelli ◽  
Filomena Anelli ◽  
Francesca Frassinetti
Keyword(s):  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Subjective Time ◽  
Healthy Controls ◽  
Focal Lesions ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Self Reference

Abstract The role of ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) in mental time travel toward the past and the future is debated. Here, patients with focal lesions to the vmPFC and brain-damaged and healthy controls mentally projected themselves to a past, present or future moment of subjective time (self-projection) and classified a series of events as past or future relative to the adopted temporal self-location (self-reference). We found that vmPFC patients were selectively impaired in projecting themselves to the future and in recognizing relative-future events. These findings indicate that vmPFC damage hinders the mental processing of and movement toward future events, pointing to a prominent, multifaceted role of vmPFC in future-oriented mental time travel.

Mental time travel in the rat: Dissociation of recall and familiarity

2007 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 322-323
Author(s):  
Madeline J. Eacott ◽  
Alexander Easton
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Neural Basis ◽  
The Past

AbstractWe examine and reject the claim that the past-directed aspect of mental time travel (episodic memory) is unique to humans. Recent work in our laboratory with rats has demonstrated behaviours that resemble “remember, know” judgements about past occasions. Similar to human episodic memory, we can also demonstrate a dissociation in the neural basis of recollection and familiarity in nonhumans.

Differential Impairment of Remembering the Past and Imagining Novel Events after Thalamic Lesions

2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (10) ◽  
pp. 3037-3051 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julia Weiler ◽  
Boris Suchan ◽  
Benno Koch ◽  
Michael Schwarz ◽  
Irene Daum
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Future Thinking ◽  
Generation Task ◽  
Dorsal Thalamus ◽  
The Past ◽  
Memory Problems ◽  
Trace Back ◽  
Spatio Temporal

Vividly remembering the past and imagining the future (mental time travel) seem to rely on common neural substrates and mental time travel impairments in patients with brain lesions seem to encompass both temporal domains. However, because future thinking—or more generally imagining novel events—involves the recombination of stored elements into a new event, it requires additional resources that are not shared by episodic memory. We aimed to demonstrate this asymmetry in an event generation task administered to two patients with lesions in the medial dorsal thalamus. Because of the dense connection with pFC, this nucleus of the thalamus is implicated in executive aspects of memory (strategic retrieval), which are presumably more important for future thinking than for episodic memory. Compared with groups of healthy matched control participants, both patients could only produce novel events with extensive help of the experimenter (prompting) in the absence of episodic memory problems. Impairments were most pronounced for imagining personal fictitious and impersonal events. More precisely, the patients' descriptions of novel events lacked content and spatio-temporal relations. The observed impairment is unlikely to trace back to disturbances in self-projection, scene construction, or time concept and could be explained by a recombination deficit. Thus, although memory and the imagination of novel events are tightly linked, they also partly rely on different processes.

scholarly journals I remember. Differences between the Neanderthal and modern human mind

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 ◽  
pp. 402-415
Author(s):  
Simona Petru
Keyword(s):  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Human Mind ◽  
Modern Human ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Archaeological Record ◽  
Modern Humans ◽  
Personal Time ◽  
Perception Of Time ◽  
Grave Goods

Modern humans remember things they experience as personal events. An important reason for this personal perception of time is episodic memory, which enables mental time travel. This type of memory could not have been fully evolved in Neanderthals and they might not have imagined their personal past and future. Thus, their archaeological record does not contain durable objects which would be preserved from one generation to another. Their burials also do not include convincing grave goods that indicate a belief that personal time continues after death.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document