Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind

Abstract

Episodic memory, enabling conscious recollection of past episodes, can be distinguished from semantic memory, which stores enduring facts about the world. Episodic memory shares a core neural network with the simulation of future episodes, enabling mental time travel into both the past and the future. The notion that there might be something distinctly human about mental time travel has provoked ingenious attempts to demonstrate episodic memory or future simulation in nonhuman animals, but we argue that they have not yet established a capacity comparable to the human faculty. The evolution of the capacity to simulate possible future events, based on episodic memory, enhanced fitness by enabling action in preparation of different possible scenarios that increased present or future survival and reproduction chances. Human language may have evolved in the first instance for the sharing of past and planned future events, and, indeed, fictional ones, further enhancing fitness in social settings.

How do episodic and semantic memory contribute to episodic foresight in young children?

“…The ability to mentally travel forward in time has been referred to as: episodic future thinking (Atance and O’Neill, 2001), prospection (Buckner and Carroll, 2007; Gilbert and Wilson, 2007), simulation (Tulving, 1985; Schacter and Addis, 2007; Atance, 2008; Schacter et al, 2008), projection (Okuda et al, 2003), mental time travel into the future (Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997; Klein, 2013), episodic simulation of future events (Schacter et al, 2007), episodic foresight (Suddendorf, 2010) and, more recently, future-oriented cognition (Osvath and Martin-Ordas, in press). Although these different terms refer to different degrees or types of future cognition, they all share the idea that future thinking entails imagining a personal future event.…”

“…The adaptive function of episodic memory is suggested to lie not only in record-keeping of the past, but in what it can offer to present and future fitness (Suddendorf and Corballis, 1997, 2007; Dudai and Carruthers, 2005; Tulving, 2005; Buckner and Carroll, 2007; Schacter et al, 2007; Klein, 2013). For example, when I try to imagine my next job interview, I might retrieve memories of previous job interviews so I can avoid certain (embarrassing) situations.…”

Possible evolutionary and developmental mechanisms of mental time travel (and implications for autism)

“…Although mammals and corvids show some signs of mental time travel, (as evidenced, for example, by episodic memory or forward planning; see [1, 2, 3, 4] a for greater discussion of non-human animal abilities), humans have functionally superior mental abilities that allow them to consciously think and act upon events (either intentionally or unintentionally) in the past and future [1]. We will suggest that this ability probably had some evolutionary advantage, perhaps through its relation to the increase in the size of hunter-gather social networks (and cooperative hunting practices) that became connected over vast distances, thereby placing demands for social-cognitive abilities and past or future thinking—beyond the ‘ here-and-now’ [5].…”

FMRI contributions to addressing autobiographical memory impairment in temporal lobe pathology

“…However, these systems are highly interdependent [12] in relation to the self. Turning back to episodic AM, some authors consider that it is a uniquely human system [13] (but see [14] for a different standpoint). Moreover, Tulving's Serial Parallel Independent model places this memory system at the apex of a pyramid, which implies the highest memory achievement in evolution [15] .…”