Mental time travel
Mental time travel-:
The ability to travel mentally through time sets humans apart from many other species, yet little is known about this core cognitive capacity. In particular, what shapes the passage of the mind's journey through time?
A core facet of conscious experience is that one's mind periodically wanders from the here-and-now. From memories of lost loves to expectations about forthcoming vacations, mental time travel (MTT) makes it possible to revisit the past and pre-experience the future. Present across cultures and emerging early in childhood, MTT is believed to serve a pivotal function in human cognition. When confronted with complex and challenging judgments, simulating future outcomes (i.e., prospection) based on prior experience (i.e., retrospection) is a tactic that optimizes decision-making and behavioural selection. That the past informs the future in this way (i.e., recollection-guides-simulation) is evidenced from research demonstrating that retrospection and prospection rely on largely overlapping neural structures and cognitive operations.
However, remarkably little is known about the actual process of MTT and how it impacts people's behaviour. In this respect, one emerging possibility is that MTT may be represented in the sensory-motor systems that regulate human movement (i.e., MTT is embodied). Put simply, travelling mentally in time may initiate associated bodily movements through space. Initial evidence for such a thought-action coupling during MTT was reported in a study in which spontaneous fluctuations in the direction and magnitude of postural sway were assessed while participants engaged in either retrospective or prospective mental imagery. The results revealed that the temporal locus of MTT did indeed influence the direction of people's movements — whereas retrospection was accompanied by significant backwards sway, prospection yielded postural movement in an anterior direction.
SANTINO-: (born April 20, 1978)
Santino was a misanthrope with a habit of pelting tourists with rocks. As his reputation for mischief grew, he had to devise increasingly clever ways to ambush his wary victims. Santino learned to stash his rocks just out of sight and casually stand just a few feet from them to throw off suspicion. At the very moment that passersby were fooled into thinking that he meant them no harm, he grabbed his hidden projectiles and launched his attack.
Santino, you see, is not human. He’s a chimpanzee at Furuvik Zoo in Sweden. His crafty stone-throwing escapades have made him a global celebrity, and also caught the attention of researchers studying how animals, much like humans, might be able to plan their behaviour.
Santino is one of a handful of animals that scientists believe are showing a complex cognitive ability called episodic memory. Episodic memory is the ability to recall past events that one has the sense of having personally experienced. Unlike semantic memory, which involves recalling simple facts like “bee stings hurt,” episodic memory involves putting yourself at the heart of the memory; like remembering the time you swatted at a bee with a rolled-up newspaper and it got angry and stung your hand.
If an animal can imagine itself interacting with the world in the past via episodic memory – like Santino recalling a failed attack when a human spotted him holding a rock, or you remembering swatting at a bee – it stands to reason that the animal might also be able to imagine itself in the future in a similar scenario, and thus plan its behaviour. Santino might opt to hide his rocks, and you might decide to stop antagonizing bees. The ability to represent oneself and one’s actions in the mind’s eye – both in the past [and] in the future – is what scientists refer to as “mental time travel.”
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