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 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.

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 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.

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? A neurocognitive model of event simulation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donna Rose Addis
Keyword(s):  
Predictive Coding ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Simulation System ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Event Representation ◽  
Conceptual Information ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
General Capacity

Mental time travel (MTT) is defined as projecting the self into the past and the future. Despite growing evidence of the similarities of remembering past and imagining future events, dominant theories conceive of these as distinct capacities. I propose that memory and imagination are fundamentally the same process – constructive episodic simulation – and demonstrate that the ‘simulation system’ meets the three criteria of a neurocognitive system. Irrespective of whether one is remembering or imagining, the simulation system: (1) acts on the same information, drawing on elements of experience ranging from fine-grained perceptual details to coarser-grained conceptual information and schemas about the world; (2) is governed by the same rules of operation, including associative processes that facilitate construction of a schematic scaffold, the event representation itself, and the dynamic interplay between the two (cf. predictive coding); and (3) is subserved by the same brain system. I also propose that by forming associations between schemas, the simulation system constructs multi-dimensional cognitive spaces, within which any given simulation is mapped by the hippocampus. Finally, I suggest that simulation is a general capacity that underpins other domains of cognition, such as the perception of ongoing experience. This proposal has some important implications for the construct of ‘MTT’, suggesting that ‘time’ and ‘travel’ may not be defining, or even essential, features. Rather, it is the ‘mental’ rendering of experience that is the most fundamental function of this simulation system, enabling humans to re-experience the past, pre-experience the future, and also comprehend the complexities of the present.

scholarly journals A palace fit for the future: Desirability in temporal work

2021 ◽  
pp. 147612702110120
Author(s):  
Siavash Alimadadi ◽  
Andrew Davies ◽  
Fredrik Tell
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Crucial Role ◽  
The Past ◽  
Renewal Program ◽  
The Future ◽  
Depth Study ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Future Outcomes ◽  
Pluralistic Contexts

Research on the strategic organization of time often assumes that collective efforts are motivated by and oriented toward achieving desirable, although not necessarily well-defined, future states. In situations surrounded by uncertainty where work has to proceed urgently to avoid an impending disaster, however, temporal work is guided by engaging with both desirable and undesirable future outcomes. Drawing on a real-time, in-depth study of the inception of the Restoration and Renewal program of the Palace of Westminster, we investigate how organizational actors develop a strategy for an uncertain and highly contested future while safeguarding ongoing operations in the present and preserving the heritage of the past. Anticipation of undesirable future events played a crucial role in mobilizing collective efforts to move forward. We develop a model of future desirability in temporal work to identify how actors construct, link, and navigate interpretations of desirable and undesirable futures in their attempts to create a viable path of action. By conceptualizing temporal work based on the phenomenological quality of the future, we advance understanding of the strategic organization of time in pluralistic contexts characterized by uncertainty and urgency.

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 The Ape That Lived to Tell the Tale. The Evolution of the Art of Storytelling and Its Relationship to Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elias Garcia-Pelegrin ◽  
Clive Wilkins ◽  
Nicola S. Clayton
Keyword(s):  
Theory Of Mind ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
The Self ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Present Condition ◽  
The Past ◽  
Time Space ◽  
The Future ◽  
Past Experiences

Engaging in the art of creating and telling stories is a defining behaviour of humankind. Humans have been sharing stories with each other, with and without words, since the dawn of recorded history, but the cognitive foundations of the behaviour can be traced deeper into our past. The emergence of stories can be strongly linked to Mental Time Travel (the ability to recall the past and imagine the future) and plays a key role in our ability to communicate past, present and future scenarios with other individuals, within and beyond our lifetimes. Stories are products engraved within the concept of time, constructed to elucidate the past experiences of the self, but designed with the future in mind, thus imparting lessons of such experiences to the receiver. By being privy to the experiences of others, humans can imagine themselves in a similar position to the protagonist of the story, thus mentally learning from an experience they might have never encountered other than in the mind's eye. Evolutionary Psychology investigates how the engagement in artistic endeavours by our ancestors in the Pleistocene granted them an advantage when confronted with obstacles that challenged their survival or reproductive fitness and questions whether art is an adaptation of the human mind or a spandrel of other cognitive adaptations. However, little attention has been placed on the cognitive abilities that might have been imperative for the development of art. Here, we examine the relationship between art, storytelling, Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind (i.e., the ability to attribute mental states to others). We suggest that Mental Time Travel played a key role in the development of storytelling because through stories, humans can fundamentally transcend their present condition, by being able to imagine different times, separate realities, and place themselves and others anywhere within the time space continuum. We argue that the development of a Theory of Mind also sparked storytelling practises in humans as a method of diffusing the past experiences of the self to others whilst enabling the receiver to dissociate between the past experiences of others and their own, and to understand them as lessons for a possible future. We propose that when artistic products rely on storytelling in form and function, they ought to be considered separate from other forms of art whose appreciation capitalise on our aesthetic preferences.

The Role of Past in the Simulation of Autobiographical Future Episodes

2010 ◽  
Vol 57 (6) ◽  
pp. 419-428 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nadia Gamboz ◽  
Maria A. Brandimonte ◽  
Stefania De Vito
Keyword(s):  
Young Adults ◽  
Episodic Memory ◽  
Recognition Task ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future Events ◽  
Delayed Recognition

Human beings’ ability to envisage the future has been recently assumed to rely on the reconstructive nature of episodic memory ( Schacter & Addis, 2007 ). In the present research, young adults mentally reexperienced and preexperienced temporally close and distant autobiographical episodes, and rated their phenomenal characteristics as well as their novelty. Additionally, they performed a delayed recognition task including remember-know judgments on new, old-remember, and old-imagine words. Results showed that past and future temporally close episodes included more phenomenal details than distant episodes, in line with earlier studies. However, future events were occasionally rated as already occurred in the past. Furthermore, in the recognition task, participants falsely attributed old-imagine words to remembered episodes. While partially in line with previous results, these findings call for a more subtle analysis in order to discriminate representations of past episodes from true future events simulations.

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