Chronesthesia
Mental Time Travel
Mental Time Travel
LAND OF THE DEAD
"The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is 'grasped.' That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets; they are mysterious not only because we are unable to clearly see what is at their bottom." (C. G. Jung, Hans Schmid-Guisan, The Question of Psychological Types)
Mental Time Travel
In nature, we look up and see the past, stars and galaxies millions of years old; then we look down and see the past in the earth, in the bones of dinosaurs and the dust of ancestors, and fossils. Time is the raw material of creation.
Unfolding the Past
Shared biological origins span historical time, welding past, present, and future together. You bind with your ancestors and future descendants into one living unity.
Tracing ancestors as far back as possible brings great satisfaction and pleasure. Even documenting a few generations of your family can prove just as exciting and fulfilling as a more sketchy documentation across two or three centuries. The discovery of each previously unknown ancestor is its own thrill. So is discovering records rich with new information, which might have never come to light.
Wisdom Ear
Ancient mythology has much to teach us about grief and mortality. The Mesopotamian myth, the Descent of Inanna is the earliest written goddess tale.
It begins with listening: “From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.”
In Sumerian, the word for ear also means wisdom. Because she seeks wisdom, Inanna is called to listen to the Great Below, the realm of dream, death, depression, and the unconscious. Without knowledge of loss and mortality, engaged individuation, and compassionate mirroring, she is not whole.
Deep within the unconscious darkness something new is being born, and Inanna cries out from this pain of giving birth. She returns to life -- lost, humbled, and displaced. We descend into the redeeming darkness, making that walk, not because we want to, but because we must.
“All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.” (Perera, 1981)
In many ancient myths, descent is an integral part of the feminine mysteries of Life and Death. We are mortal and vulnerable. We live in a world of catastrophe and chaos, personal loss and social threat. We are thrown down by chaotic defensive furies, such as rage and greed. We are helped up by the dynamics of rebirth. Miraculously, we find our way to life again, not by mistake but endeavor, and trust in the power of nature.
Self-Referential Memory
Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts.
Genealogy and organic memory give us an awareness of ancestors and ancestry. We might, for example, pay particular attention to family members with similar dates of birth, conception, and date of passing. Ancestor devotion, complex kinship tracking systems, ancestral narratives, existence of a collective unconscious, the repository of ancestral wisdom, and origin myths are pervasive themes.
Semiotics & Symptomatics
Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future, and our sense of ancestral metamemory, including memory, physiological (unconscious) memories (spinal cord and ganglia) and embedded tissue memories, unconscious instincts, unconscious motivation, unconscious conceptualization, and aesthetic unconscious (art, myth, and dream).
Jung said, "The unconscious has no chance of coming into the conscious unless the conscious makes a hole for it to come through." And that hole or portal is our genealogy -- our family tree, a site of potential transformation.
We are each the sentinel who guards and keeps watch on our end of the lines that are anchored by the genealogies of gods and goddesses which have passed into the 'collective unconscious.' First and foremost our genealogical quest is informed by multidimensional, autonomous psyche.
Mute Signs & Voiceless Speech
We should be confidantes of our own mysteries and ancestors. We must cross our own Acheron, or river of woe and pain to reach that psychological underworld. We plunge from raw life into the encounter with the powers of darkness. We follow our chthonic serpentine lines back through primal generativity and fertility.
Our ancestors guide us on our journey, handing us along, one by one to their forebears. We ritualize the science and art of parting. We step into the mythological plot through the world of the afterlife immersed in our hordes of ancestors, without being fictionalized ourselves.
We retrieve the treasure, 'hard to attain,' whose presence we suspected in the dark prima materia -- self-knowledge. The treasure is variously symbolized in myth and fairy tale as a ring or golden egg, white feather, coat of many colors, fountain of youth, elixir of Life. We gain experiential knowledge of all known realms by
confronting, or identifying with subterrestrial, terrestrial and cosmic energies.
Jung suggested that the assimilation of the objective and subjective collective unconscious is achieved by realizing both the outer and inner meaning: 1. concrete actions and 2. subjective thinking and feeling as purely inner experience, or experience via the subject (inwardly lived). "Undeveloped, therefore archaic, symbolic, ambiguous, phenomenal, irrational, actus purus naturae, can only imperfectly be formulated and grasped intellectually, projected."
The symbolic unconscious content is "not exclusively valid either (1) for the outer or (2) for the inner realm, but for both together, that is, for their operating together." "The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is 'grasped.' That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets; they are mysterious not only because we are unable to clearly see what is at their bottom."
Paraphrasing Jung, genealogy helps us "to come to those hidden and unopenable symbols, in which the seed of life lies securely hidden like the tender seed in the hard shell." (Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Page 9)
Autonoetic Consciousness
Episodic memory is identified with autonoetic consciousness, which gives rise to remembering in the sense of self-recollection in the mental re-enactment of previous events at which one was present. While Jung's approach was largely scientific, he also spoke of “living” knowledge as opposed to “scientific” knowledge.
Autonoetic consciousness is distinguished from noetic consciousness, which gives rise to awareness of the past that is limited to feelings of familiarity or knowing. Noetic consciousness is identified not with episodic but with semantic memory, which involves general knowledge.
We all divide our experience into time categories; the difference is simply how. The transcendental future time perspective affects philosophical problems of personality, the process of self-knowledge, the formation of value orientations and life course of constructing identity.
Inroads in Mental Time;
Feeling & Conscious Awareness of Subjective Time
Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time. But is memory distorted, constructed, or confabulated? How can we know who we are if we don't know where we've been?
Remembering and knowing do not correspond with degrees of confidence in memory. Nor does remembering always control the memory response. The transcendental future is ’subjective time’ that can be called a belief in some future Utopia.
The latest dream of immortality is paradoxically couched under Transhumanism, an overcoming of limited organic nature with technology and designer bodies. The outer universe becomes subjective, from the outer reality the person emerges in what the scientists call reality. The outer universe become the subjective controllable reality.
People often have firm ideas related to a transcendental future but notions of 'new time after death' [or its absence] remain controversial, being rooted in faith. It is an aspect of worldview with behavioral imperatives, prohibitions, values, and consequences. The transcendental future encompasses different events that include divine judgment, reunion with loved ones, eternal life, achieving oneness with nature or cosmos.
Transcendence is existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level. It encompasses the time from the imaginal death of the physical body to infinity. It may include goals, such as reunion with deceased loved ones, reincarnation, eternal life, avoidance of damnation, and elimination of poverty, suffering, pain, and shame. It signifies belief in something larger than life, including immanent or transcendent beings beyond the self.
Out of Time
Transcendental future is a time perspective – a personality trait that describes how often a person imagines one’s afterlife with positive or negative attitude, intrusions, retrieval, shuffling, fluency, distinctiveness, and false recognition. Transcendental Future Time is one of the dimensions of subjective time and is related to individual beliefs about the time period after physical death. It partitions the psychological future into pre- and post-death time frames, transcending life and living.
An `extraordinary' time perspective, one that partitions the future into pre- and post-death time frames. The `transcendental-future' extends from the point of imagined death of the physical body to infinity, yet may influence present behavior. Related to numerous psychological variables, the transcendental-future is a component of, but not synonymous with, many religious beliefs. From the perspective of the transcendental-future, behaviors often seen as irrational, such as suicide, extreme heroism, and excessive tithing, are transformed into rational behaviors expected to lead to fulfillment of transcendental-future goals.
People think or imagine themselves in a transcendental future context with positive or negative thoughts. The importance of transcendental future to well-being has yet to be studied, but many issues have already been assessed in clinical hypnotherapy with its timeline excursions, spontaneous and suggested, past and future, and with ancestors.
Making Your Time Matter
At a certain point in anthropological time the human brain had developed to the
level that people became aware of time and of their own existence. Together with the ability to imagine one’s future a new kind of mental stress also appeared – awareness of the inevitability of death. To allay this stressor, our early ancestors came up with a myth – a belief that death must be survivable. Today the bigger part of people’s beliefs has been passed on to them by their ancestors through religion or philosophy.
Chronesthesia, or mental time travel, is a mental ability to be aware of one's past or future. Studies have been conducted to map out areas of the brain that may be responsible for mental time travel, which include the left hippocampus and posterior visuospatial regions which are are involved in past and future event construction, neural differentiation. The right hippocampus, right frontopolar cortex, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in future event construction.
The elaboration phase, unlike the construction phase, has overlap in the cortical areas comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network. The left hippocampus and the right middle occipital gyrus were significantly activated during past and future event construction, while the right hippocampus was significantly deactivated during past event construction. It was only activated during the creation of future events.
Episodic future thinking involves multiple component processes: retrieval and integration of relevant information from memory, processing of subjective time, and self-referential processing. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are the most activated areas when imagining future events that are relevant to one's personal goals than to unrelated ones. This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
We can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward. Chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect our life decisions and scripts. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel...the neural correlates of mental time travel and metaphorical "travel."
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
"The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is 'grasped.' That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets; they are mysterious not only because we are unable to clearly see what is at their bottom." (C. G. Jung, Hans Schmid-Guisan, The Question of Psychological Types)
Mental Time Travel
In nature, we look up and see the past, stars and galaxies millions of years old; then we look down and see the past in the earth, in the bones of dinosaurs and the dust of ancestors, and fossils. Time is the raw material of creation.
Unfolding the Past
Shared biological origins span historical time, welding past, present, and future together. You bind with your ancestors and future descendants into one living unity.
Tracing ancestors as far back as possible brings great satisfaction and pleasure. Even documenting a few generations of your family can prove just as exciting and fulfilling as a more sketchy documentation across two or three centuries. The discovery of each previously unknown ancestor is its own thrill. So is discovering records rich with new information, which might have never come to light.
Wisdom Ear
Ancient mythology has much to teach us about grief and mortality. The Mesopotamian myth, the Descent of Inanna is the earliest written goddess tale.
It begins with listening: “From the Great Above she opened her ear to the Great Below.”
In Sumerian, the word for ear also means wisdom. Because she seeks wisdom, Inanna is called to listen to the Great Below, the realm of dream, death, depression, and the unconscious. Without knowledge of loss and mortality, engaged individuation, and compassionate mirroring, she is not whole.
Deep within the unconscious darkness something new is being born, and Inanna cries out from this pain of giving birth. She returns to life -- lost, humbled, and displaced. We descend into the redeeming darkness, making that walk, not because we want to, but because we must.
“All descents provide entry into different levels of consciousness and can enhance life creatively. All of them imply suffering. All of them can serve as initiations. Meditation and dreaming and active imaginations are modes of descent. So too are depressions, anxiety attacks, and experiences with hallucinogenic drugs.” (Perera, 1981)
In many ancient myths, descent is an integral part of the feminine mysteries of Life and Death. We are mortal and vulnerable. We live in a world of catastrophe and chaos, personal loss and social threat. We are thrown down by chaotic defensive furies, such as rage and greed. We are helped up by the dynamics of rebirth. Miraculously, we find our way to life again, not by mistake but endeavor, and trust in the power of nature.
Self-Referential Memory
Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts.
Genealogy and organic memory give us an awareness of ancestors and ancestry. We might, for example, pay particular attention to family members with similar dates of birth, conception, and date of passing. Ancestor devotion, complex kinship tracking systems, ancestral narratives, existence of a collective unconscious, the repository of ancestral wisdom, and origin myths are pervasive themes.
Semiotics & Symptomatics
Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future, and our sense of ancestral metamemory, including memory, physiological (unconscious) memories (spinal cord and ganglia) and embedded tissue memories, unconscious instincts, unconscious motivation, unconscious conceptualization, and aesthetic unconscious (art, myth, and dream).
Jung said, "The unconscious has no chance of coming into the conscious unless the conscious makes a hole for it to come through." And that hole or portal is our genealogy -- our family tree, a site of potential transformation.
We are each the sentinel who guards and keeps watch on our end of the lines that are anchored by the genealogies of gods and goddesses which have passed into the 'collective unconscious.' First and foremost our genealogical quest is informed by multidimensional, autonomous psyche.
Mute Signs & Voiceless Speech
We should be confidantes of our own mysteries and ancestors. We must cross our own Acheron, or river of woe and pain to reach that psychological underworld. We plunge from raw life into the encounter with the powers of darkness. We follow our chthonic serpentine lines back through primal generativity and fertility.
Our ancestors guide us on our journey, handing us along, one by one to their forebears. We ritualize the science and art of parting. We step into the mythological plot through the world of the afterlife immersed in our hordes of ancestors, without being fictionalized ourselves.
We retrieve the treasure, 'hard to attain,' whose presence we suspected in the dark prima materia -- self-knowledge. The treasure is variously symbolized in myth and fairy tale as a ring or golden egg, white feather, coat of many colors, fountain of youth, elixir of Life. We gain experiential knowledge of all known realms by
confronting, or identifying with subterrestrial, terrestrial and cosmic energies.
Jung suggested that the assimilation of the objective and subjective collective unconscious is achieved by realizing both the outer and inner meaning: 1. concrete actions and 2. subjective thinking and feeling as purely inner experience, or experience via the subject (inwardly lived). "Undeveloped, therefore archaic, symbolic, ambiguous, phenomenal, irrational, actus purus naturae, can only imperfectly be formulated and grasped intellectually, projected."
The symbolic unconscious content is "not exclusively valid either (1) for the outer or (2) for the inner realm, but for both together, that is, for their operating together." "The core of the individual is a mystery of life, which dies when it is 'grasped.' That is also why symbols want to keep their secrets; they are mysterious not only because we are unable to clearly see what is at their bottom."
Paraphrasing Jung, genealogy helps us "to come to those hidden and unopenable symbols, in which the seed of life lies securely hidden like the tender seed in the hard shell." (Jung, Han Guisan Schmid, Page 9)
Autonoetic Consciousness
Episodic memory is identified with autonoetic consciousness, which gives rise to remembering in the sense of self-recollection in the mental re-enactment of previous events at which one was present. While Jung's approach was largely scientific, he also spoke of “living” knowledge as opposed to “scientific” knowledge.
Autonoetic consciousness is distinguished from noetic consciousness, which gives rise to awareness of the past that is limited to feelings of familiarity or knowing. Noetic consciousness is identified not with episodic but with semantic memory, which involves general knowledge.
We all divide our experience into time categories; the difference is simply how. The transcendental future time perspective affects philosophical problems of personality, the process of self-knowledge, the formation of value orientations and life course of constructing identity.
Inroads in Mental Time;
Feeling & Conscious Awareness of Subjective Time
Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time. But is memory distorted, constructed, or confabulated? How can we know who we are if we don't know where we've been?
Remembering and knowing do not correspond with degrees of confidence in memory. Nor does remembering always control the memory response. The transcendental future is ’subjective time’ that can be called a belief in some future Utopia.
The latest dream of immortality is paradoxically couched under Transhumanism, an overcoming of limited organic nature with technology and designer bodies. The outer universe becomes subjective, from the outer reality the person emerges in what the scientists call reality. The outer universe become the subjective controllable reality.
People often have firm ideas related to a transcendental future but notions of 'new time after death' [or its absence] remain controversial, being rooted in faith. It is an aspect of worldview with behavioral imperatives, prohibitions, values, and consequences. The transcendental future encompasses different events that include divine judgment, reunion with loved ones, eternal life, achieving oneness with nature or cosmos.
Transcendence is existence or experience beyond the normal or physical level. It encompasses the time from the imaginal death of the physical body to infinity. It may include goals, such as reunion with deceased loved ones, reincarnation, eternal life, avoidance of damnation, and elimination of poverty, suffering, pain, and shame. It signifies belief in something larger than life, including immanent or transcendent beings beyond the self.
Out of Time
Transcendental future is a time perspective – a personality trait that describes how often a person imagines one’s afterlife with positive or negative attitude, intrusions, retrieval, shuffling, fluency, distinctiveness, and false recognition. Transcendental Future Time is one of the dimensions of subjective time and is related to individual beliefs about the time period after physical death. It partitions the psychological future into pre- and post-death time frames, transcending life and living.
An `extraordinary' time perspective, one that partitions the future into pre- and post-death time frames. The `transcendental-future' extends from the point of imagined death of the physical body to infinity, yet may influence present behavior. Related to numerous psychological variables, the transcendental-future is a component of, but not synonymous with, many religious beliefs. From the perspective of the transcendental-future, behaviors often seen as irrational, such as suicide, extreme heroism, and excessive tithing, are transformed into rational behaviors expected to lead to fulfillment of transcendental-future goals.
People think or imagine themselves in a transcendental future context with positive or negative thoughts. The importance of transcendental future to well-being has yet to be studied, but many issues have already been assessed in clinical hypnotherapy with its timeline excursions, spontaneous and suggested, past and future, and with ancestors.
Making Your Time Matter
At a certain point in anthropological time the human brain had developed to the
level that people became aware of time and of their own existence. Together with the ability to imagine one’s future a new kind of mental stress also appeared – awareness of the inevitability of death. To allay this stressor, our early ancestors came up with a myth – a belief that death must be survivable. Today the bigger part of people’s beliefs has been passed on to them by their ancestors through religion or philosophy.
Chronesthesia, or mental time travel, is a mental ability to be aware of one's past or future. Studies have been conducted to map out areas of the brain that may be responsible for mental time travel, which include the left hippocampus and posterior visuospatial regions which are are involved in past and future event construction, neural differentiation. The right hippocampus, right frontopolar cortex, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in future event construction.
The elaboration phase, unlike the construction phase, has overlap in the cortical areas comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network. The left hippocampus and the right middle occipital gyrus were significantly activated during past and future event construction, while the right hippocampus was significantly deactivated during past event construction. It was only activated during the creation of future events.
Episodic future thinking involves multiple component processes: retrieval and integration of relevant information from memory, processing of subjective time, and self-referential processing. The ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are the most activated areas when imagining future events that are relevant to one's personal goals than to unrelated ones. This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
We can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward. Chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect our life decisions and scripts. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel...the neural correlates of mental time travel and metaphorical "travel."
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
The Remember/Know paradigm
autonoetic consciousness (remembering) and noetic consciousness (knowing).
Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts. Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future, and our sense of ancestral metamemory.
Self-Consciousness
Autonoetic consciousness is a component of episodic memory which involves the ability to mentally travel back and forward in time, mentally, including not just the facts of an event but all of one's self-reflective, personal, and emotional components -- to consciously consider the self across time. Autonoetic consciousness and the self are intimately linked, grounding, supporting and enriching mutual development and cohesiveness -- roles of self-awareness, representational abilities, and temporal cognition.
Metacognition
Metacognition has always been defined very broadly: 1) as an implicit process, where awareness need not be involved; 2) as introspection, consciousness, and self-reflection. Three formal levels of metacognition are anoetic metacognition, noetic metacognition, and autonoetic metacognition.
Varieties of consciousness -- anoetic, noetic, and autonoetic -- correspond to different memory systems – procedural, semantic and episodic. Judgements bound to the current time, or made in the presence of stimuli, are classified as anoetic. Noetic judgements refer to or relate to internal representations, and are made in the absence of external stimuli. Autonoetic metacognition requires us to make judgements about internal representations, and have awareness that the self is intimately involved.
Autonoetic Consciousness
relating to or characterized by the capacity to be aware of one’s own existence as an entity in time <Among the capacities thought to be uniquely human are autonoetic consciousness, the aspect of self-awareness that allows us to imagine our own experiences in different places at other times … — R. Shayna Rosenbaum et al., Science, 23 Nov. 2007>
It [episodic memory] makes possible mental time travel through subjective time, from the present to the past, thus allowing one to re-experience, through autonoetic awareness, one’s own previous experiences. — Endel Tulving, Annual Review of Psychology, 2002>
Autonoetic consciousness is the capacity that allows adult humans to mentally represent and to become aware of their protracted existence across subjective time. — Mark A. Wheeler et al., Psychological Bulletin, May 1997
Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts. Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future, and our sense of ancestral metamemory.
Episodic memory is identified with autonoetic consciousness, which gives rise to remembering in the sense of self-recollection in the mental re-enactment of previous events at which one was present. Autonoetic consciousness is distinguished from noetic consciousness, which gives rise to awareness of the past that is limited to feelings of familiarity or knowing. Noetic consciousness is identified not with episodic but with semantic memory, which involves general knowledge.
Inroads in mental Time; Feeling and Conscious Awareness of Subjective Time. Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time. But is memory distorted, constructed, or confabulated? How can we know who we are if we don't know where we've been?
Remembering and knowing do not correspond with degrees of confidence in memory. Nor does remembering always control the memory response. The transcendental future is ’subjective time’ that can be called a belief. Our research showed that people have firm ideas related to a transcendental future.
Transcendental future could also be a time perspective – a personality trait that describes how often a person imagines one’s afterlife with positive or negative attitude, intrusions, retrieval, shuffling, fluency, distinctiveness, and false recognition. Confabulation (verb: confabulate) is a memory disturbance, defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive; self-delusion.
People think or imagine themselves in a transcendental future context with positive or negative thoughts. The importance of transcendental future to well-being has yet to be studied, but many issues have already been assessed in clinical hypnotherapy with its timeline excursions, spontaneous and suggested, past and future, and with ancestors.
At a certain point in anthropological time the human brain had developed to the
level that people became aware of time and of their own existence. Together with the ability to imagine one’s future a new kind of mental stress also appeared – awareness of the inevitability of death. To allay this stressor, our early ancestors came up with a myth – a belief that death must be survivable. Today the bigger part of people’s beliefs has been passed on to them by their ancestors through religion or philosophy.
Chronesthesia, or mental time travel, is a mental ability to be aware of one's past or future. Studies have been conducted to map out areas of the brain that may be responsible for mental time travel, which include the left hippocampus and posterior visuospatial regions are involved in past and future event construction, neural differentiation. The right hippocampus, right frontopolar cortex, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in future event construction.
The elaboration phase, unlike the construction phase, has overlap in the cortical areas comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network. In this study, it was also found that the left hippocampus and the right middle occipital gyrus were significantly activated during past and future event construction, while the right hippocampus was significantly deactivated during past event construction. It was only activated during the creation of future events.
Episodic future thinking involves multiple component processes: retrieval and integration of relevant information from memory, processing of subjective time, and self-referential processing. Ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are the most activated areas when imagining future events that are relevant to one's personal goals than to unrelated ones. This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
We can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward. Chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect our life decisions and scripts. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel...the neural correlates of mental time travel and metaphorical "travel."
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
autonoetic consciousness (remembering) and noetic consciousness (knowing).
Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts. Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future, and our sense of ancestral metamemory.
Self-Consciousness
Autonoetic consciousness is a component of episodic memory which involves the ability to mentally travel back and forward in time, mentally, including not just the facts of an event but all of one's self-reflective, personal, and emotional components -- to consciously consider the self across time. Autonoetic consciousness and the self are intimately linked, grounding, supporting and enriching mutual development and cohesiveness -- roles of self-awareness, representational abilities, and temporal cognition.
Metacognition
Metacognition has always been defined very broadly: 1) as an implicit process, where awareness need not be involved; 2) as introspection, consciousness, and self-reflection. Three formal levels of metacognition are anoetic metacognition, noetic metacognition, and autonoetic metacognition.
Varieties of consciousness -- anoetic, noetic, and autonoetic -- correspond to different memory systems – procedural, semantic and episodic. Judgements bound to the current time, or made in the presence of stimuli, are classified as anoetic. Noetic judgements refer to or relate to internal representations, and are made in the absence of external stimuli. Autonoetic metacognition requires us to make judgements about internal representations, and have awareness that the self is intimately involved.
Autonoetic Consciousness
relating to or characterized by the capacity to be aware of one’s own existence as an entity in time <Among the capacities thought to be uniquely human are autonoetic consciousness, the aspect of self-awareness that allows us to imagine our own experiences in different places at other times … — R. Shayna Rosenbaum et al., Science, 23 Nov. 2007>
It [episodic memory] makes possible mental time travel through subjective time, from the present to the past, thus allowing one to re-experience, through autonoetic awareness, one’s own previous experiences. — Endel Tulving, Annual Review of Psychology, 2002>
Autonoetic consciousness is the capacity that allows adult humans to mentally represent and to become aware of their protracted existence across subjective time. — Mark A. Wheeler et al., Psychological Bulletin, May 1997
Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts. Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future, and our sense of ancestral metamemory.
Episodic memory is identified with autonoetic consciousness, which gives rise to remembering in the sense of self-recollection in the mental re-enactment of previous events at which one was present. Autonoetic consciousness is distinguished from noetic consciousness, which gives rise to awareness of the past that is limited to feelings of familiarity or knowing. Noetic consciousness is identified not with episodic but with semantic memory, which involves general knowledge.
Inroads in mental Time; Feeling and Conscious Awareness of Subjective Time. Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time. But is memory distorted, constructed, or confabulated? How can we know who we are if we don't know where we've been?
Remembering and knowing do not correspond with degrees of confidence in memory. Nor does remembering always control the memory response. The transcendental future is ’subjective time’ that can be called a belief. Our research showed that people have firm ideas related to a transcendental future.
Transcendental future could also be a time perspective – a personality trait that describes how often a person imagines one’s afterlife with positive or negative attitude, intrusions, retrieval, shuffling, fluency, distinctiveness, and false recognition. Confabulation (verb: confabulate) is a memory disturbance, defined as the production of fabricated, distorted or misinterpreted memories about oneself or the world, without the conscious intention to deceive; self-delusion.
People think or imagine themselves in a transcendental future context with positive or negative thoughts. The importance of transcendental future to well-being has yet to be studied, but many issues have already been assessed in clinical hypnotherapy with its timeline excursions, spontaneous and suggested, past and future, and with ancestors.
At a certain point in anthropological time the human brain had developed to the
level that people became aware of time and of their own existence. Together with the ability to imagine one’s future a new kind of mental stress also appeared – awareness of the inevitability of death. To allay this stressor, our early ancestors came up with a myth – a belief that death must be survivable. Today the bigger part of people’s beliefs has been passed on to them by their ancestors through religion or philosophy.
Chronesthesia, or mental time travel, is a mental ability to be aware of one's past or future. Studies have been conducted to map out areas of the brain that may be responsible for mental time travel, which include the left hippocampus and posterior visuospatial regions are involved in past and future event construction, neural differentiation. The right hippocampus, right frontopolar cortex, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in future event construction.
The elaboration phase, unlike the construction phase, has overlap in the cortical areas comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network. In this study, it was also found that the left hippocampus and the right middle occipital gyrus were significantly activated during past and future event construction, while the right hippocampus was significantly deactivated during past event construction. It was only activated during the creation of future events.
Episodic future thinking involves multiple component processes: retrieval and integration of relevant information from memory, processing of subjective time, and self-referential processing. Ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are the most activated areas when imagining future events that are relevant to one's personal goals than to unrelated ones. This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
We can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward. Chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect our life decisions and scripts. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel...the neural correlates of mental time travel and metaphorical "travel."
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
Inroads in mental Time; Feeling Subjective Time
Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time.
Chronesthesia. Episodic memory. Mental time travel. First suggested by Endel Tulving in the 1980s, mental time travel refers to the ability to be aware in the present of both one’s past and one’s future.
A process that involves episodic thinking, travel to the past involves the memory of autobiographical events. I recall celebrating New Year’s Eve in Times Square this year. I had a lot to drink.
Travel to the future is the recall and integration of relevant information from memory coupled with the projection and processing of self-reference in subjective time. I will celebrate New Year’s Eve in Times Square again this year. But I won’t drink as much.
Brain bases?
As for hard scientific evidence of chronesthesia's existence, there's "zero, none, very little--it's just an idea," said Tulving. But, he said, emerging imaging research promises to help shed light on its brain mechanisms and has already suggested that higher-order thinking regions, such as the prefrontal cortex, are involved.
He admonished, however, that no function--chronesthesia or any other--"holds a particular seat in the brain; it's all over the place."
In addition, said Tulving, thought experiments and studies in developmental psychology and psychopharmacology, to name just a few areas, could begin to build a research base on what "pastness" has in common with "futureness."
After all, he said, "The kind of culture that Homo sapiens have created over the past 40,000 years or so can be produced only by individuals whose intelligence includes conscious awareness of the future in which they and their progeny will continue to live and survive."
For Tulving, awareness of past and future comes down to the perception of self in subjective time. We presume we were present in Times Square on New Year’s Eve because we can remember the time, the place, the sum of our sensory data and even our emotions from a given moment. We then assume we can be present at a future point in history because we can use relevant episodic memory to conceive of a time, place, emotions and sensory information familiar to us and associated with that time.
We think in cycles. And while much of the pattern is due to our conditioning from the calendar, some of it is simply hard-wired into our DNA. We look back not in a line but in a circle. We can project forward because we know the wheel will come around again.
Which takes us back to January. And the timing of this post.
While looking forward to the future has been a part of the human condition pretty much since there was a human condition, celebrating the new year in January is a relatively new phenomenon (and writing about it near the end of the month? sheer procrastination).
- See more at: http://www.vaultofthoughts.com/2014/01/27/from-janus-to-mnemosyne/#sthash.BMnrAf3z.dpuf
Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time.
Chronesthesia. Episodic memory. Mental time travel. First suggested by Endel Tulving in the 1980s, mental time travel refers to the ability to be aware in the present of both one’s past and one’s future.
A process that involves episodic thinking, travel to the past involves the memory of autobiographical events. I recall celebrating New Year’s Eve in Times Square this year. I had a lot to drink.
Travel to the future is the recall and integration of relevant information from memory coupled with the projection and processing of self-reference in subjective time. I will celebrate New Year’s Eve in Times Square again this year. But I won’t drink as much.
Brain bases?
As for hard scientific evidence of chronesthesia's existence, there's "zero, none, very little--it's just an idea," said Tulving. But, he said, emerging imaging research promises to help shed light on its brain mechanisms and has already suggested that higher-order thinking regions, such as the prefrontal cortex, are involved.
He admonished, however, that no function--chronesthesia or any other--"holds a particular seat in the brain; it's all over the place."
In addition, said Tulving, thought experiments and studies in developmental psychology and psychopharmacology, to name just a few areas, could begin to build a research base on what "pastness" has in common with "futureness."
After all, he said, "The kind of culture that Homo sapiens have created over the past 40,000 years or so can be produced only by individuals whose intelligence includes conscious awareness of the future in which they and their progeny will continue to live and survive."
For Tulving, awareness of past and future comes down to the perception of self in subjective time. We presume we were present in Times Square on New Year’s Eve because we can remember the time, the place, the sum of our sensory data and even our emotions from a given moment. We then assume we can be present at a future point in history because we can use relevant episodic memory to conceive of a time, place, emotions and sensory information familiar to us and associated with that time.
We think in cycles. And while much of the pattern is due to our conditioning from the calendar, some of it is simply hard-wired into our DNA. We look back not in a line but in a circle. We can project forward because we know the wheel will come around again.
Which takes us back to January. And the timing of this post.
While looking forward to the future has been a part of the human condition pretty much since there was a human condition, celebrating the new year in January is a relatively new phenomenon (and writing about it near the end of the month? sheer procrastination).
- See more at: http://www.vaultofthoughts.com/2014/01/27/from-janus-to-mnemosyne/#sthash.BMnrAf3z.dpuf
Chronesthesia, or mental time travel, is a mental ability first hypothesized by Endel Tulving in the 1980s. This refers to the ability to be aware of one's past or future. The mechanisms of mental time travel are not yet fully understood since there is a level of obscurity and complexity when trying to measure if or when someone underwent mental time travel or not. However, studies have been conducted to map out areas of the brain that may be responsible for mental time travel.
Moving through timeJanuary 21, 2010Although we can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
University of Aberdeen psychological scientists Lynden Miles, Louise Nind and Neil Macrae conducted a study to measure this in the lab. They fitted participants with a motion sensor while they imagined either future or past events. The researchers found that thinking about past or future events can literally move us: Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward.
These findings reported online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future. Image credit: Lars Nyberg, et al. ©2010 PNAS.(PhysOrg.com) -- The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person's decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical "travel" occurs.
The researchers, Lars Nyberg from Umea University in Umea, Sweden; Reza Habib from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; and Alice S. N. Kim, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, have published their results in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
"In cognitive neuroscience, we know quite a bit (relatively speaking) about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined space," he said. "We know essentially nothing about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined time. When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were ‘there,’ as an observer or participant ('episodic memory'), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question we are asking is, how do you know that it happened at a time other than 'now'?"
In their study, the researchers asked several well-trained subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.
The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future).
Because mental time is a product of the human brain and differs from the external time that is measured by clocks and calendars, scientists also call this time “subjective time.” Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it.
Some previous research has questioned whether the concept of subjective time is actually necessary for understanding similarities in brain activity during past and future thinking compared with thinking about the present. A few past studies have suggested that the brain’s ability for scene construction, and not subjective time, can account for the ability to think about past and future events. However, since scene construction was held constant in this study, the new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future.
“Until now, the processes that determine contents and the processes that determine time have not been separated in functional neuroimaging studies of chronesthesia; especially, there have been no studies in which brain regions involved in time alone, rather than time together with action, have been identified,” Tulving said. “The concept of ‘chronesthesia’ is essentially brand new. (You find a few entries on it in Google, but not on Web of Science.) Therefore, I would say, the most important result of our study is the novel finding that there seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present. That is, we found some evidence for chronesthesia. Before we undertook this study it was entirely possible to imagine that we find nothing!”
He added that, at this stage of the game, it is too early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future.
“Our study, we hope, is the first swallow of the spring, and others will follow,” he said. “Our findings, as I alluded to above, are promising, but they have to be replicated, checked for validity and reliability, and, above all, extended to other conditions and situations, before we can start thinking about their implications and applications (of which it is easy to think of many).”
More information: Lars Nyberg, et al. “Consciousness of subjective time in the brain.” PNAS Early Edition. DOI:10/1073/pnas.1016823108
Copyright 2010 PhysOrg.com.
Moving through timeJanuary 21, 2010Although we can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
University of Aberdeen psychological scientists Lynden Miles, Louise Nind and Neil Macrae conducted a study to measure this in the lab. They fitted participants with a motion sensor while they imagined either future or past events. The researchers found that thinking about past or future events can literally move us: Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward.
These findings reported online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future. Image credit: Lars Nyberg, et al. ©2010 PNAS.(PhysOrg.com) -- The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person's decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical "travel" occurs.
The researchers, Lars Nyberg from Umea University in Umea, Sweden; Reza Habib from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; and Alice S. N. Kim, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, have published their results in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
"In cognitive neuroscience, we know quite a bit (relatively speaking) about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined space," he said. "We know essentially nothing about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined time. When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were ‘there,’ as an observer or participant ('episodic memory'), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question we are asking is, how do you know that it happened at a time other than 'now'?"
In their study, the researchers asked several well-trained subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.
The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future).
Because mental time is a product of the human brain and differs from the external time that is measured by clocks and calendars, scientists also call this time “subjective time.” Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it.
Some previous research has questioned whether the concept of subjective time is actually necessary for understanding similarities in brain activity during past and future thinking compared with thinking about the present. A few past studies have suggested that the brain’s ability for scene construction, and not subjective time, can account for the ability to think about past and future events. However, since scene construction was held constant in this study, the new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future.
“Until now, the processes that determine contents and the processes that determine time have not been separated in functional neuroimaging studies of chronesthesia; especially, there have been no studies in which brain regions involved in time alone, rather than time together with action, have been identified,” Tulving said. “The concept of ‘chronesthesia’ is essentially brand new. (You find a few entries on it in Google, but not on Web of Science.) Therefore, I would say, the most important result of our study is the novel finding that there seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present. That is, we found some evidence for chronesthesia. Before we undertook this study it was entirely possible to imagine that we find nothing!”
He added that, at this stage of the game, it is too early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future.
“Our study, we hope, is the first swallow of the spring, and others will follow,” he said. “Our findings, as I alluded to above, are promising, but they have to be replicated, checked for validity and reliability, and, above all, extended to other conditions and situations, before we can start thinking about their implications and applications (of which it is easy to think of many).”
More information: Lars Nyberg, et al. “Consciousness of subjective time in the brain.” PNAS Early Edition. DOI:10/1073/pnas.1016823108
Copyright 2010 PhysOrg.com.
What makes mental time travel possible?Psychologist Endel Tulving offered a theory on our uniquely human ability to act today based on our past and future.
By BRIDGET MURRAY
Monitor Staff
October 2003, Vol 34, No. 9
Print version: page 62
Remembering, to most of us, means recalling a past occurrence. But to Endel Tulving, PhD, the mechanisms of memory evoke the future as well. The reason? Memory allows us to mentally travel backward in time as well as into the future, explained Tulving, a University of Toronto professor emeritus and visiting professor in cognitive neuroscience at Washington University, in a presidential invited address at APA's 2003 Annual Convention in Toronto.
Tulving's theory stems from extensive memory research he's conducted since the 1950s at Toronto, Yale University and the Toronto-based Rotman Research Institute--and, he said, others' research supports it too. He proposed an official term for, and definition of, what makes such mental time travel possible:
Chronesthesia--A hypothetical brain/mind ability or capacity, acquired by humans through evolution, that allows them to be constantly aware of the past and the future.
Of course, Tulving noted, not all forms of memory--and there are many--are time-related. The "episodic" kind, involving recollection of past personal experience, is, he said. But the "semantic" kind, involving acquisition, retention and retrieval of facts, is not.
"You don't need mental time travel to remember a chemical formula or your mother's maiden name," he explained. "You can know a lot of things without mental time travel, but you can't remember events from your past, or anticipate your future, without it."
Tulving went on to explain how and why humans have adapted chronesthesia--a learned capability absent in other animals and human infants--to advance their survival. And he urged other psychologists to help build a research base on its workings.
Time travel's benefits
Over time, said Tulving, people discovered that recalling past events helped them learn what to avoid and how to behave in the future--its key feature, he said. In social relationships, for example, it enabled them to distinguish friends from foes; in the occupational and food-gathering arenas, it helped them to develop tools that worked well and to discard ones that didn't.
The higher-order process of chronesthesia, he explained, allows people to update information critical to surviving, thriving and dealing with changes in their world. In addition, it aids semantic memory by attaching personal stories to facts, giving people's experiences temporal and emotional dimensions, which make them more believable.
Nothing makes such benefits of chronesthesia more apparent than studying people who have suffered brain damage that impairs their mental time travel ability but does not affect other cognitive functions, said Tulving. He related the case of an amnesiac man, "K.C.," who had sustained multiple brain lesions, including hippocampal lesions, in a motorcycle accident.
The patient could solve math problems, but he couldn't remember ever taking a math class, or, for that matter, couldn't recall how he came to Tulving's office for an interview. Similarly, the patient knew from semantic memory that his family owned a lake house two hours away. But he had no memory of ever visiting it, and no idea when he'd likely return there.
The patient was missing the "human ability to project our own past into the future," said Tulving. That ability, he believes, has enabled us to create and pass down a wealth of cultural knowledge through the generations, including how to:
By BRIDGET MURRAY
Monitor Staff
October 2003, Vol 34, No. 9
Print version: page 62
Remembering, to most of us, means recalling a past occurrence. But to Endel Tulving, PhD, the mechanisms of memory evoke the future as well. The reason? Memory allows us to mentally travel backward in time as well as into the future, explained Tulving, a University of Toronto professor emeritus and visiting professor in cognitive neuroscience at Washington University, in a presidential invited address at APA's 2003 Annual Convention in Toronto.
Tulving's theory stems from extensive memory research he's conducted since the 1950s at Toronto, Yale University and the Toronto-based Rotman Research Institute--and, he said, others' research supports it too. He proposed an official term for, and definition of, what makes such mental time travel possible:
Chronesthesia--A hypothetical brain/mind ability or capacity, acquired by humans through evolution, that allows them to be constantly aware of the past and the future.
Of course, Tulving noted, not all forms of memory--and there are many--are time-related. The "episodic" kind, involving recollection of past personal experience, is, he said. But the "semantic" kind, involving acquisition, retention and retrieval of facts, is not.
"You don't need mental time travel to remember a chemical formula or your mother's maiden name," he explained. "You can know a lot of things without mental time travel, but you can't remember events from your past, or anticipate your future, without it."
Tulving went on to explain how and why humans have adapted chronesthesia--a learned capability absent in other animals and human infants--to advance their survival. And he urged other psychologists to help build a research base on its workings.
Time travel's benefits
Over time, said Tulving, people discovered that recalling past events helped them learn what to avoid and how to behave in the future--its key feature, he said. In social relationships, for example, it enabled them to distinguish friends from foes; in the occupational and food-gathering arenas, it helped them to develop tools that worked well and to discard ones that didn't.
The higher-order process of chronesthesia, he explained, allows people to update information critical to surviving, thriving and dealing with changes in their world. In addition, it aids semantic memory by attaching personal stories to facts, giving people's experiences temporal and emotional dimensions, which make them more believable.
Nothing makes such benefits of chronesthesia more apparent than studying people who have suffered brain damage that impairs their mental time travel ability but does not affect other cognitive functions, said Tulving. He related the case of an amnesiac man, "K.C.," who had sustained multiple brain lesions, including hippocampal lesions, in a motorcycle accident.
The patient could solve math problems, but he couldn't remember ever taking a math class, or, for that matter, couldn't recall how he came to Tulving's office for an interview. Similarly, the patient knew from semantic memory that his family owned a lake house two hours away. But he had no memory of ever visiting it, and no idea when he'd likely return there.
The patient was missing the "human ability to project our own past into the future," said Tulving. That ability, he believes, has enabled us to create and pass down a wealth of cultural knowledge through the generations, including how to:
- Plant seeds.
- Provide the dead with grave goods--weapons, ornaments, utensils and the like that are buried with the dead for their use in the afterworld.
- Make and keep records.
- Formally educate the young (to benefit them in the future).
- Create gods and invent ways of pleasing them.
- Explore the stars.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person’s decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as “chronesthesia,” or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences.
If we suspend our past beliefs about time and accept that the brain is capable of reaching into the future, the next question becomes “how does it do this?” Chronesthesia or mental time travel is little known to people and the neuroscientists are busy with studying those parts of the brain that are responsible for these conscious experiences.
Last year a group of researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of Chronesthesia in which the metaphorical travel occurs.
They found out that Chronesthesia consists of two independent sets of processes: 1) those that determine the contents of any act of such travel: what happens, who are the actors, where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie– everything that you see on the screen; and 2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place–-past, present, or future.
When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were there, as an observer or participant (“episodic memory”), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question that is raised here is, “how do you know that it happened at a time other than ‘now’?”
The researchers asked several subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.
The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future). Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it. The new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future. There seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present.
It may be early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future. But their findings may be extended to other conditions, situations and probable implications or applications.
Many scientific discoveries were once considered outlandish and more suited to science fiction. Future research is greatly needed to explore the exact reasons for Chronesthesia, especially if it is going to be experienced in a trained manner. There may be a kind of relationship between physical and neural processes that are taking place in our neural systems. I remember an explanation that may help to understand the potential connections.
Modern quantum physics has demonstrated that light particles seem to know what lies ahead of them and will adjust their behavior accordingly, even though the future event hasn’t occurred yet. For example, in the classic “double slit experiment,” physicists discovered that light particles respond differently when they are observed. But in 1999, researchers pushed this experiment to the limits by asking “what if the observation occurred after the light particles were deployed.” Surprisingly, they found the particles acted the same way, as if they knew they were going to be observed in the future even though it hadn’t happened yet.
Such trippy time effects seem to contradict common sense and trying to make sense of them may give the average person a headache, but physicists have just had to accept it. So although humans perceive time as linear, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is so. And as futurists, we shouldn’t let out preconceived beliefs and biases influence what we study, even if these preconceived beliefs reflect our basic assumptions about how time and space work.
Does all of time really co-exist simultaneously? Is the way we experience time (with one moment following another) just an illusion? Are all moments of time hanging around together? Is our consciousness threading its way through moments of time? Are there an infinite number of variations of each possible moment? And if there are, what is the true nature of “parallel universes” just as what we’ve seen in the science fiction movies such as Dr. Who? And above all, how a conscious experience of Chronesthesia may help us finding appropriate answers for mentioned questions?
We may not be enough sure about the practical aspects of Chronesthesia in the coming future, but there is one way to perceive them. It’s our intuition (or imagination). We can tune our mind into a talent we haven’t fully mastered with, but would love to, and we can attract it to us.
Sources:
http://phys.org/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-chronesthesia-mental.html
www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/stories/research-shows-evidence-of-mental-time-travel
http://www.wfs.org/content/new-possibilities-chronesthesia
If we suspend our past beliefs about time and accept that the brain is capable of reaching into the future, the next question becomes “how does it do this?” Chronesthesia or mental time travel is little known to people and the neuroscientists are busy with studying those parts of the brain that are responsible for these conscious experiences.
Last year a group of researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of Chronesthesia in which the metaphorical travel occurs.
They found out that Chronesthesia consists of two independent sets of processes: 1) those that determine the contents of any act of such travel: what happens, who are the actors, where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie– everything that you see on the screen; and 2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place–-past, present, or future.
When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were there, as an observer or participant (“episodic memory”), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question that is raised here is, “how do you know that it happened at a time other than ‘now’?”
The researchers asked several subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.
The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future). Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it. The new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future. There seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present.
It may be early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future. But their findings may be extended to other conditions, situations and probable implications or applications.
Many scientific discoveries were once considered outlandish and more suited to science fiction. Future research is greatly needed to explore the exact reasons for Chronesthesia, especially if it is going to be experienced in a trained manner. There may be a kind of relationship between physical and neural processes that are taking place in our neural systems. I remember an explanation that may help to understand the potential connections.
Modern quantum physics has demonstrated that light particles seem to know what lies ahead of them and will adjust their behavior accordingly, even though the future event hasn’t occurred yet. For example, in the classic “double slit experiment,” physicists discovered that light particles respond differently when they are observed. But in 1999, researchers pushed this experiment to the limits by asking “what if the observation occurred after the light particles were deployed.” Surprisingly, they found the particles acted the same way, as if they knew they were going to be observed in the future even though it hadn’t happened yet.
Such trippy time effects seem to contradict common sense and trying to make sense of them may give the average person a headache, but physicists have just had to accept it. So although humans perceive time as linear, it doesn’t necessarily mean it is so. And as futurists, we shouldn’t let out preconceived beliefs and biases influence what we study, even if these preconceived beliefs reflect our basic assumptions about how time and space work.
Does all of time really co-exist simultaneously? Is the way we experience time (with one moment following another) just an illusion? Are all moments of time hanging around together? Is our consciousness threading its way through moments of time? Are there an infinite number of variations of each possible moment? And if there are, what is the true nature of “parallel universes” just as what we’ve seen in the science fiction movies such as Dr. Who? And above all, how a conscious experience of Chronesthesia may help us finding appropriate answers for mentioned questions?
We may not be enough sure about the practical aspects of Chronesthesia in the coming future, but there is one way to perceive them. It’s our intuition (or imagination). We can tune our mind into a talent we haven’t fully mastered with, but would love to, and we can attract it to us.
Sources:
http://phys.org/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-chronesthesia-mental.html
www.mnn.com/health/fitness-well-being/stories/research-shows-evidence-of-mental-time-travel
http://www.wfs.org/content/new-possibilities-chronesthesia
'Chronesthesia'
Mental Time Travel
Autonoetic consciousness. Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts. Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future. Episodic memory is identified with autonoetic consciousness, which gives rise to remembering in the sense of self-recollection in the mental re-enactment of previous events at which one was present. Autonoetic consciousness is distinguished from noetic consciousness, which gives rise to awareness of the past that is limited to feelings of familiarity or knowing. Noetic consciousness is identified not with episodic but with semantic memory, which involves general knowledge.
Inroads in mental Time; Feeling and Conscious Awareness of Subjective Time. Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time. But is memory distorted, constructed, or confabulated? How can we know who we are if we don't know where we've been?
Remembering and knowing do not correspond with degrees of confidence in memory. Nor does remembering always control the memory response.
The transcendental future is ’subjective time’ that can be called a belief. Our research showed that people have firm ideas related to a transcendental
future. Transcendental future could also be a time perspective – a personality trait that describes how often a person imagines one’s afterlife with positive or negative attitude, intrusions, retrieval, shuffling, fluency, distinctiveness, and false recognition.
People think or imagine themselves in a transcendental future context with positive or negative thoughts. The importance of transcendental future to well-being has yet to be studied, but many issues have already been assessed in clinical hypnotherapy with its timeline excursions, spontaneous and suggested, past and future, and with ancestors.
At a certain point in anthropological time the human brain had developed to the
level that people became aware of time and of their own existence (Allik and
Tulving 2003). Together with the ability to imagine one’s future a new kind of
mental stress also appeared – awareness of the inevitability of death (Suddendorf
and Corballis 2007). To allay this stressor, our early ancestors came up with a
myth – a belief that death must be survivable (Newberg et al. 2001). Today the
bigger part of people’s beliefs has been passed on to them by their ancestors
through religion or philosophy (Giovannoli 2001).
Chronesthesia, or mental time travel, is a mental ability first hypothesized by Endel Tulving in the 1980s. This refers to the ability to be aware of one's past or future. While many may describe it as uniquely human, others now argue that this ability can transcend to include non-human animals such as birds. The mechanisms of mental time travel are not yet fully understood since there is a level of obscurity and complexity when trying to measure if or when someone underwent mental time travel or not. However, studies have been conducted to map out areas of the brain that may be responsible for mental time travel.
Addis D. et al. conducted an fMRI study to examine neural regions mediating construction and elaboration of past and future events.[4] The left hippocampus and posterior visuospatial regions are involved in past and future event construction, neural differentiation. The right hippocampus, right frontopolar cortex, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in future event construction.
The elaboration phase, unlike the construction phase, has overlap in the cortical areas comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network. In this study, it was also found that the left hippocampus and the right middle occipital gyrus were significantly activated during past and future event construction, while the right hippocampus was significantly deactivated during past event construction. It was only activated during the creation of future events.
Episodic future thinking involves multiple component processes: retrieval and integration of relevant information from memory, processing of subjective time, and self-referential processing.[5] D'Argembeau et al.'s study found that the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are the most activated areas when imagining future events that are relevant to one's personal goals than to unrelated ones. This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
Moving through timeJanuary 21, 2010Although we can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
University of Aberdeen psychological scientists Lynden Miles, Louise Nind and Neil Macrae conducted a study to measure this in the lab. They fitted participants with a motion sensor while they imagined either future or past events. The researchers found that thinking about past or future events can literally move us: Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward.
These findings reported online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future. Image credit: Lars Nyberg, et al. ©2010 PNAS.(PhysOrg.com) -- The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person's decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical "travel" occurs.
The researchers, Lars Nyberg from Umea University in Umea, Sweden; Reza Habib from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; and Alice S. N. Kim, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, have published their results in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
"In cognitive neuroscience, we know quite a bit (relatively speaking) about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined space," he said. "We know essentially nothing about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined time. When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were ‘there,’ as an observer or participant ('episodic memory'), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question we are asking is, how do you know that it happened at a time other than 'now'?"
In their study, the researchers asked several well-trained subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.
The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future).
Because mental time is a product of the human brain and differs from the external time that is measured by clocks and calendars, scientists also call this time “subjective time.” Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it.
Some previous research has questioned whether the concept of subjective time is actually necessary for understanding similarities in brain activity during past and future thinking compared with thinking about the present. A few past studies have suggested that the brain’s ability for scene construction, and not subjective time, can account for the ability to think about past and future events. However, since scene construction was held constant in this study, the new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future.
“Until now, the processes that determine contents and the processes that determine time have not been separated in functional neuroimaging studies of chronesthesia; especially, there have been no studies in which brain regions involved in time alone, rather than time together with action, have been identified,” Tulving said. “The concept of ‘chronesthesia’ is essentially brand new. (You find a few entries on it in Google, but not on Web of Science.) Therefore, I would say, the most important result of our study is the novel finding that there seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present. That is, we found some evidence for chronesthesia. Before we undertook this study it was entirely possible to imagine that we find nothing!”
He added that, at this stage of the game, it is too early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future.
“Our study, we hope, is the first swallow of the spring, and others will follow,” he said. “Our findings, as I alluded to above, are promising, but they have to be replicated, checked for validity and reliability, and, above all, extended to other conditions and situations, before we can start thinking about their implications and applications (of which it is easy to think of many).”
More information: Lars Nyberg, et al. “Consciousness of subjective time in the brain.” PNAS Early Edition. DOI:10/1073/pnas.1016823108
Copyright 2010 PhysOrg.com.
Mental Time Travel
Autonoetic consciousness. Our ancestors are our past and our transcendental future. Autonoetic consciousness is the human ability to mentally place ourselves in the past, in the future, or in counterfactual situations, and to analyze our own thoughts. Our sense of self affects our behavior, in the present, past and future. Episodic memory is identified with autonoetic consciousness, which gives rise to remembering in the sense of self-recollection in the mental re-enactment of previous events at which one was present. Autonoetic consciousness is distinguished from noetic consciousness, which gives rise to awareness of the past that is limited to feelings of familiarity or knowing. Noetic consciousness is identified not with episodic but with semantic memory, which involves general knowledge.
Inroads in mental Time; Feeling and Conscious Awareness of Subjective Time. Mental time travel, or chronesthesia, is the brain's use of memory to think about the past, present, and future... a form of consciousness that allows individuals to think about the subjective time in which they live and that makes it possible for them to “mentally travel” in such time. But is memory distorted, constructed, or confabulated? How can we know who we are if we don't know where we've been?
Remembering and knowing do not correspond with degrees of confidence in memory. Nor does remembering always control the memory response.
The transcendental future is ’subjective time’ that can be called a belief. Our research showed that people have firm ideas related to a transcendental
future. Transcendental future could also be a time perspective – a personality trait that describes how often a person imagines one’s afterlife with positive or negative attitude, intrusions, retrieval, shuffling, fluency, distinctiveness, and false recognition.
People think or imagine themselves in a transcendental future context with positive or negative thoughts. The importance of transcendental future to well-being has yet to be studied, but many issues have already been assessed in clinical hypnotherapy with its timeline excursions, spontaneous and suggested, past and future, and with ancestors.
At a certain point in anthropological time the human brain had developed to the
level that people became aware of time and of their own existence (Allik and
Tulving 2003). Together with the ability to imagine one’s future a new kind of
mental stress also appeared – awareness of the inevitability of death (Suddendorf
and Corballis 2007). To allay this stressor, our early ancestors came up with a
myth – a belief that death must be survivable (Newberg et al. 2001). Today the
bigger part of people’s beliefs has been passed on to them by their ancestors
through religion or philosophy (Giovannoli 2001).
Chronesthesia, or mental time travel, is a mental ability first hypothesized by Endel Tulving in the 1980s. This refers to the ability to be aware of one's past or future. While many may describe it as uniquely human, others now argue that this ability can transcend to include non-human animals such as birds. The mechanisms of mental time travel are not yet fully understood since there is a level of obscurity and complexity when trying to measure if or when someone underwent mental time travel or not. However, studies have been conducted to map out areas of the brain that may be responsible for mental time travel.
Addis D. et al. conducted an fMRI study to examine neural regions mediating construction and elaboration of past and future events.[4] The left hippocampus and posterior visuospatial regions are involved in past and future event construction, neural differentiation. The right hippocampus, right frontopolar cortex, and the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are involved in future event construction.
The elaboration phase, unlike the construction phase, has overlap in the cortical areas comprising the autobiographical memory retrieval network. In this study, it was also found that the left hippocampus and the right middle occipital gyrus were significantly activated during past and future event construction, while the right hippocampus was significantly deactivated during past event construction. It was only activated during the creation of future events.
Episodic future thinking involves multiple component processes: retrieval and integration of relevant information from memory, processing of subjective time, and self-referential processing.[5] D'Argembeau et al.'s study found that the ventral medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex are the most activated areas when imagining future events that are relevant to one's personal goals than to unrelated ones. This shows that these brain regions play a role in personal goal processing, which is a critical feature of episodic future thinking.
Moving through timeJanuary 21, 2010Although we can't technically travel through time (yet), when we think of the past or the future we engage in a sort of mental time travel. This uniquely human ability to psychologically travel through time arguably sets us apart from other species. Researchers have recently looked at how mental time travel is represented in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled.
University of Aberdeen psychological scientists Lynden Miles, Louise Nind and Neil Macrae conducted a study to measure this in the lab. They fitted participants with a motion sensor while they imagined either future or past events. The researchers found that thinking about past or future events can literally move us: Engaging in mental time travel (a.k.a. chronesthesia) resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward.
These findings reported online in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggest that chronesthesia may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. "The embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation," explains Miles and colleagues.
Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future. Image credit: Lars Nyberg, et al. ©2010 PNAS.(PhysOrg.com) -- The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person's decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical "travel" occurs.
The researchers, Lars Nyberg from Umea University in Umea, Sweden; Reza Habib from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; and Alice S. N. Kim, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, have published their results in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
"In cognitive neuroscience, we know quite a bit (relatively speaking) about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined space," he said. "We know essentially nothing about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined time. When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were ‘there,’ as an observer or participant ('episodic memory'), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question we are asking is, how do you know that it happened at a time other than 'now'?"
In their study, the researchers asked several well-trained subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.
The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future).
Because mental time is a product of the human brain and differs from the external time that is measured by clocks and calendars, scientists also call this time “subjective time.” Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it.
Some previous research has questioned whether the concept of subjective time is actually necessary for understanding similarities in brain activity during past and future thinking compared with thinking about the present. A few past studies have suggested that the brain’s ability for scene construction, and not subjective time, can account for the ability to think about past and future events. However, since scene construction was held constant in this study, the new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future.
“Until now, the processes that determine contents and the processes that determine time have not been separated in functional neuroimaging studies of chronesthesia; especially, there have been no studies in which brain regions involved in time alone, rather than time together with action, have been identified,” Tulving said. “The concept of ‘chronesthesia’ is essentially brand new. (You find a few entries on it in Google, but not on Web of Science.) Therefore, I would say, the most important result of our study is the novel finding that there seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present. That is, we found some evidence for chronesthesia. Before we undertook this study it was entirely possible to imagine that we find nothing!”
He added that, at this stage of the game, it is too early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future.
“Our study, we hope, is the first swallow of the spring, and others will follow,” he said. “Our findings, as I alluded to above, are promising, but they have to be replicated, checked for validity and reliability, and, above all, extended to other conditions and situations, before we can start thinking about their implications and applications (of which it is easy to think of many).”
More information: Lars Nyberg, et al. “Consciousness of subjective time in the brain.” PNAS Early Edition. DOI:10/1073/pnas.1016823108
Copyright 2010 PhysOrg.com.