scholarly journals Image versus imagination

2012 ◽  
pp. 83-96
Author(s):  
Martina Witt-Jauch
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Chaotic Sequence ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Cognitive Map ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Antonin Artaud ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Mind

While the 1962 French science fiction film La Jetée presents a straightforward narrative premise, it nonetheless details the story of a man who “becomes a human projectile to be pro-jeté through time,” as Paul Sandro claims. Incriminating the audience in a theatre of cruelty, the film moves through the past and future via the mental time-travel of the protagonist in a series of stills, which appear independent from the consciousness of the agent. In the course of events, the protagonist builds a cognitive map out of this chaotic sequence of memories that allows him to then create new spaces of thought. The first mention of the “theatre of cruelty” by Antonin Artaud in 1935, considered pain and terror to be the most important elements of any kind of play or film. The protagonist's situation of constantly chasing his own ghost and restoring his memory corresponds to these conditions and thus opens up new venues of considering cruelty, and in extension trauma, as an important third element in Chris Marker's film. His film La Jetée created a filmic embodiment of this interplay in both the redemptive yet productive powers of memory and the cyclical notion of time as it manifests itself in the mind of the protagonist and viewer.

Mental time travel? A neurocognitive model of event simulation

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

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

scholarly journals Decreased mental time travel to the past correlates with default-mode network disintegration under lysergic acid diethylamide

2016 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 344-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jana Speth ◽  
Clemens Speth ◽  
Mendel Kaelen ◽  
Astrid M Schloerscheidt ◽  
Amanda Feilding ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Default Mode Network ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Lysergic Acid ◽  
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Default Mode ◽  
The Past

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

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

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

Science Fiction and the Rules of Uncertainty

2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Guillermina De Ferrari
Keyword(s):  
Collective Action ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Failure Time ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Apocalyptic Literature ◽  
The Past ◽  
Moral Freedom ◽  
The Future ◽  
Specific Individual

A frequent trope in apocalyptic literature is a war between time and knowledge. Focusing on Rita Indiana’s “cli-fi” novel La mucama de Omicunlé (Omicunlé’s Maid), this essay explores the ambiguous role that uncertainty plays in apocalyptic literature. It argues that time travel seeks to revert the result of negative actions in the past, eliminating uncertainty retrospectively. And yet moral freedom, the mark of the human, requires uncertainty to function, which thwarts time travel as a messianic genre. Yet even in failure, time travel reminds us that impending disaster is contingent on specific individual and collective action, suggesting that the future could still perhaps be otherwise.

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

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

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

Everyday Thoughts in Time: Experience Sampling Studies of Mental Time Travel

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Baumeister
Keyword(s):  
Social Interaction ◽  
Conscious Experience ◽  
Experience Sampling ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
Subjective Experiences ◽  
Sampling Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Experience Of Time ◽  
Future Thought

Time is an important yet mysterious aspects of human conscious experience. We investigated time in everyday thoughts. Two community samples, contacted at random points for three (Study 1; 6,686 reports) and 14 days (Study 2; 2,361 reports), reported on their most recent thought. Both studies found that thoughts about the present and future were frequent, whereas thoughts about the past were rare. Thoughts about the present were common during social interaction, felt pleasant, but lacked to meaningfulness. Thoughts about the future included desires to satisfy goals and usually involved planning. Thoughts about the past were relatively unpleasant and involuntary. Subjective experiences of past and future thoughts often were similar and differed from present focus, consistent with views that memory and prospection use similar mental structures. Taken together, the present work provides unique insights into the conscious experience of time highlights the pragmatic utility of future thought.

Split Second Intersection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deep Bhattacharjee
Keyword(s):  
Black Hole ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Space Time ◽  
Practical Implementation ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Time Machine ◽  
Time Dimension ◽  
The Past ◽  
Available Technology

An arbitrary advanced civilization might have the technology to travel back and forth in time and that too within a large timescale like say ‘a thousand years’ into the past or future. But to us, in present day scenario, this ‘time travel’ seems impossible. Although many mathematical thesis have been published with sound theories about the structure and definitions’ of ‘time travels’ but still from an engineering feat, it’s practically impossible. Therefore, the time travel is a far more mathematical abstract concept and a source of science fiction for today’s physicists. However, theorists are not restrained by any limits or bounds and they likes to explore the plausibility of travelling through times and its fundamental overlying principles. Firstly, its necessary to develop a theory that is suitable for humans to travel in time like ‘without falling inside a black hole’ or ‘without any need of exotic matter’ or ‘without creating any paradoxes’ but we will consider ‘micro black hole and high gravity potentials’. So, to develop a more practical theory, its necessary that one needs to consider the factors which is not too hypothetical to be achieved by human beings at the present notion of technologies available to us. So, if such a theory can be achieved with a high degree of accuracy then the travelling through time will be possible by manipulating the circuits and machinery and creating a time machine after all at the end. However, travelling to future, although is theoretically plausible, travelling to past is always restricted due to the nature of ‘the birth of various paradoxes’ that may happen in due times. So, to extent the notion of casual loops without getting too far away with the absurdity of the physics, this paper will view the time from a new perspective and then it will aim to develop a theory so that its best fit within the current feats of technological challenges that we are facing today. Starting from the ‘relativity’ which first gives the scientific definition of ‘time travel’, ‘time’ as a whole has always been considered as 4th dimensions along with space and the other 3 spatial dimensions being orthogonal to them. But, what if there already exists an embedded 2-time dimension in our space-time and there is already existent ‘causal loops’ in our universe but what needs to be done is the action of a ‘temporal agent’ who can make the hidden 2nd dimensions of time prominent ‘from hiding’ and we are free to explore the ‘temporal loops’ in our space-time. This temporal agent can be any human beings with a high source of available technology or can be in any form of machinery like the ‘time machines’ which will allow the ‘embedded 2nd dimensions’ prominent from the hiding so that humans could explore the feats of ‘time travelling’. This paper is typically presented to deal with these ideas of 2nd time dimensions and causal loops in space-times where any object (or rather humans) can travel back and forth in time riding on these 2-time dimensions. My objective will always remain to focus ‘time’ from the perspectives of ‘2 dimensions’ in the form of a ‘circle’ rather than a linear straight line of 1 dimension and thereby manipulating the idea of this extra dimensions in such a way that, travelling through time can be achieved in practicality without getting washed away by too much abstract mathematics as theoretical physicists often likes to do. Its not quite easy to present time in such a form but I will try my best to do so and also keeping in mind that my theory is consistent with the current available technological challenges faced by experimental physicists and engineers in designing a time machine. A consistent theory is always necessary for practical implementation and that’s what I always intend to do and this paper is just the reflections of my ideas to provide an easy through to ‘time travel’ by focusing the extra hidden dimensions of time in nature. The possible outcome of these phenomena has been discussed thoroughly using logics & mathematics which will insight into a far more in-depth concept by taking us in exploring the 2-Time Dimensions in this universe and the related outcome or consequences of this more than 1 Time Dimensions. Moreover, this paper aims to provide the repetition or Looping of Timelines in a 2D Minkowski lightcone with the help of (exponential wavefunctions) which results in the occurring of same event in a synchronic pattern along with a desired property which will prove that, ‘N” past timelines are connected with “N+1+1……” future timelines and it is the law of nature to select the appropriate future timelines related to the past timelines which have the least degrees of errors in the “exponential wavefunctions” introduced in this paper. We will give an insight about the metric by taking time as ‘imaginary’ and how it solves the ‘singularity problem’ from Schwarzschild and Lemaitre metrics respectively. Then the concept of spatial divergence has been used.

Collective mental time travel: remembering the past and imagining the future together

Synthese ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 196 (12) ◽  
pp. 4933-4960 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kourken Michaelian ◽  
John Sutton
Keyword(s):  
Time Travel ◽  
Mental Time Travel ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future
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