Mental time travel comprises the mental reconstruction of personal events from the past (episodic memory) and the mental construction of possible events in the future. CiteSeerX - Scientific documents that cite the following paper: Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind Suddendorf T(1), Corballis MC. In this paper, we review neuroscientific evidence for the continuity of mental time travel into the past and future, and consider what, if anything, might be uniquely human about mental time travel. Episodic memory is part of a more general capacity for mental travel both forward and backward in time, and extending even into fantasy and stories. In this review and perspective article, we delineate a novel approach to understand the evolution, characteristics and function of human and animal mental time travel. The Information Effect. Mental Time Travel as a Source of Knowledge. PDF (116.6 KB) 10. PDF (432 KB) 9.

We go on to suggest that human language may have evolved primarily for the communication of episodes, whether from the past or the imagined future, or indeed in the form of fiction. This article contains the argument that the human ability to travel mentally in time constitutes a discontinuity between ourselves and other animals. Evolution of Phenomena, Misc in Philosophy of Biology. This general capacity to generate and reflect on mental scenarios has been compared to a theatre in the mind that depends on the working together of a host of components. Our language skills embrace mental time travel by the use of tenses and recursive thinking; when we say “A year from now, he will have retired,” we’re imagining a future time in which some event — which has not yet happened — will lie in the past… Mental time travel may have been “a pre-requisite to the evolution …

DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975 Corpus ID: 8983700.

The human body moves forward in time at the rate of one second per second whether we like it or not. PDF (233.4 KB) 11. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0301 Corpus ID: 2576267. Metamemory and the Process Problem. Figure 1 shows a widely accepted taxonomy of human memory systems (e.g., Miyashita 2004; Squire 1992) and illustrates how this can serve as a basis for a parallel taxonomy of adaptation to the future. In 2016, he was awarded the Rutherford Medal for foundational research on the nature and evolution of the human mind, including cerebral asymmetries, handedness, mental imagery, language, and mental time travel. Different cultures have solved these problems in different ways. This article contains the argument that the human ability to travel mentally in time constitutes a discontinuity between ourselves and other animals. We maintain that the emergence of mental time travel in evolution was a crucial step towards our current success. III. The recounting of mental time travel places a considerable and, perhaps, uniquely human burden on communication, since there must be ways of referring to different points in time—past, present and future—and to locations other than that of the present.

The Puzzle of Conscious Episodic Memory. PDF (119.8 KB) 7. To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Memory … }, author={Thomas Suddendorf and Michael C. Corballis}, journal={The Behavioral and brain sciences}, year={2007}, volume={30 3}, … Soc. Mental time travel comprises the mental reconstruction of personal events from the past (episodic