Time Travel Research Articles

A short natural history of mental time travels: a journey still travelled?

Tulving's introduction of episodic memory and the metaphor of mental time travel has immensely enriched our understanding of human cognition. However, his focus on human psychology, with limited consideration of evolutionary perspectives, led to the entrenched notion that mental time travel is uniquely human. We contend that adopting a phylogenetic perspective offers a deeper insight into cognition, revealing it as a continuous evolutionary process. Adherence to the uniqueness of pre-defined psychological concepts obstructs a more complete understanding. We offer a concise natural history to elucidate how events that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago have been pivotal for our ability to mentally time travel. We discuss how the human brain, utilizing parts with ancient origins in a networked manner, enables mental time travel. This underscores that episodic memories and mental time travel are not isolated mental constructs but integral to our perception and representation of the world. We conclude by examining recent evidence of neuroanatomical correlates found only in great apes, which show great variability, indicating the ongoing evolution of mental time travel in humans.This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

Mental time travel in animals: the 'when' of mental time travel.

While many aspects of cognition have been shown to be shared between humans and non-human animals, there remains controversy regarding whether the capacity to mentally time travel is a uniquely human one. In this paper, we argue that there are four ways of representing when some event happened: four kinds of temporal representation. Distinguishing these four kinds of temporal representation has five benefits. First, it puts us in a position to determine the particular benefits these distinct temporal representations afford an organism. Second, it provides the conceptual resources to foster a discussion about which of these representations is necessary for an organism to count as having the capacity to mentally time travel. Third, it enables us to distinguish stricter from more liberal views of mental time travel that differ regarding which kind(s) of temporal representation is taken to be necessary for mental time travel. Fourth, it allows us to determine the benefits of taking a stricter or more liberal view of mental time travel. Finally, it ensures that disagreement about whether some species can mentally time travel is not merely the product of unrecognized disagreement about which temporal representation is necessary for mental time travel. We argue for a more liberal view, on the grounds that it allows us to view mental time travel as an evolutionarily continuous phenomenon and to recognize that differences in the ways that organisms mentally time travel might reflect different temporal representations, or combinations thereof, that they employ. Our ultimate aim, however, is to create a conceptual framework for further discussion regarding what sorts of temporal representations are required for mental time travel.This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

Travelling beyond time: shared brain system for self-projection in the temporal, political and moral domains.

Mental time travel (MTT), a cornerstone of human cognition, enables individuals to mentally project themselves into their past or future. It was shown that this self-projection may extend beyond the temporal domain to the spatial and social domains. What about higher cognitive domains? Twenty-eight participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while self-projecting to different political, moral and temporal perspectives. For each domain, participants were asked to judge their relationship to various people (politicians, moral figures, personal acquaintances) from their actual or projected self-location. Findings showed slower, less accurate responses during self-projection across all domains. fMRI analysis revealed self-projection elicited brain activity at the precuneus, medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction and anterior insula, bilaterally and right lateral temporal cortex. Notably, 23.5% of active voxels responded to all three domains and 27% to two domains, suggesting a shared brain system for self-projection. For ordinality judgement (self-reference), 52.5% of active voxels corresponded to the temporal domain specifically. Self-projection activity overlapped mostly with the frontoparietal control network, followed by the default mode network, while self-reference showed a reversed pattern, demonstrating MTT's implication in spontaneous brain activity. MTT may thus be regarded as a 'mental-experiential travel', with self-projection as a domain-general construct and self-reference related mostly to time. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

Distinct mechanisms and functions of episodic memory.

The concept of episodic memory (EM) faces significant challenges by two claims: EM might not be a distinct memory system, and EM might be an epiphenomenon of a more general capacity for mental time travel (MTT). Nevertheless, the observations leading to these arguments do not preclude the existence of a mechanically and functionally distinct EM system. First, modular systems, like cognition, can have distinct subsystems that may not be distinguishable in the system's final output. EM could be such a subsystem, even though its effects may be difficult to distinguish from those of other subsystems. Second, EM could have a distinct and consistent low-level function, which is used in diverse high-level functions such as MTT. This article introduces the scenario construction framework, proposing that EM crucially rests on memory traces containing the gist of an episodic experience. During retrieval, EM traces trigger the reconstruction of semantic representations, which were active during the remembered episode, and are further enriched with semantic information, to generate a scenario of the past experience. This conceptualization of EM is consistent with studies on the neural basis of EM and resolves the two challenges while retaining the key properties associated with EM. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

Synthesizing the temporal self: robotic models of episodic and autobiographical memory.

Episodic memories are experienced as belonging to a self that persists in time. We review evidence concerning the nature of human episodic memory and of the sense of self and how these emerge during development, proposing that the younger child experiences a persistent self that supports a subjective experience of remembering. We then explore recent research in cognitive architectures for robotics that has investigated the possibility of forms of synthetic episodic and autobiographical memory. We show that recent advances in generative modeling can support an understanding of the emergence of self and of episodic memory, and that cognitive architectures which include a language capacity are showing progress towards the construction of a narrative self with autobiographical memory capabilities for robots. We conclude by considering the prospects for a more complete model of mental time travel in robotics and the implications of this modeling work for understanding human episodic memory and the self in time. This article is part of the theme issue 'Elements of episodic memory: lessons from 40 years of research'.

Truth in Time Travel: Subversions of Time in An Adventure

This article explores how Frances Lamont and Elizabeth Morison’s An Adventure (1913) disrupts temporal and spatial dichotomies through its supposed representations of time travel. An Adventure presents time as a shifting force that aligns with Bergsonian notions of temporality – specifically the concepts of objective and subjective time as defined in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1911) and “Time and Free Will” (1913). This article also considers how Freudian notions of “condensation” further outline the subjective rendering of time in An Adventure’s surreal journeys back in time to the French Revolution and how the narrative’s subjective presentation of time aligns with Ford Madox Ford’s later theories of literary impressionism, particularly his idea that modernist narratives are composed of “various unordered pictures”. This article ultimately argues that Lamont and Morison’s book benefited from the temporally minded scientific and social climate of the time and used the theoretical groundwork of thinkers like Henri Bergson, Ford Madox Ford and Sigmund Freud as starting points from which they could tell their tale as truth. Specifically, their formal construction of the text as scientific research seeks to consciously obscure the differentiation between fact and fable, effectively positing their nonlinear time slip as truth. If that truth is humored, Lamont and Morison are proposing a more radical conception of time than Bergson – a nonlinear conception of time – a proposition that sits in tension with their use of scientific diction and discourse.

Time Travel with Radiocarbon Dating

Time Travel with Radiocarbon Dating

Investigating the relative accuracy of GPS, GSM and CDR data for inferring spatiotemporal travel trajectories

AbstractThe potential of passively generated big data sources in transport modelling is well‐recognised. However, assessing their accuracy and suitability for policymaking remains challenging due to the lack of ground‐truth (GT) data for validation. This study evaluates the accuracy of inferring human mobility patterns from global positioning system (GPS), call detail records (CDR), and global system for mobile communication (GSM) data. Using outputs from an agent‐based simulation platform (MATSim) as ‘synthetic GT’ (SGT), synthetic GPS, CDR, and GSM data were generated, considering their positional disturbances and conventional spatiotemporal resolutions. Mobility information, including activity location, departure time, and trajectory distance, derived from the synthetic data, was compared with SGT to evaluate the accuracy of passive trajectory data at both disaggregate and aggregate levels. The results indicated a higher accuracy of GPS data in identifying stay locations at high resolution. But, GSM data at a lower resolution effectively accounted for over 80% of the variability in stay locations. Comparisons of departure time distribution and travel distance revealed higher measurement errors in GSM and CDR data than in GPS data. The proposed simulation‐based accuracy assessment framework will aid transport planners select the most suitable data for specific analyses and understand the potential margin of error involved.

Relation-aware interaction spatio-temporal network for 3D human pose estimation

3D human pose estimation is a fundamental task in analyzing human behavior, which has many practical applications. However, existing methods suffer from high time complexity and weak capability to acquire the relations at the human joint level and the spatio-temporal level. To this end, the Relation-aware Interaction Spatio-temporal Network (RISNet) is presented to achieve a better speed-accuracy trade-off in a parallel interactive architecture. Firstly, the Spatial Kinematics Modeling Block (SKMB) is proposed to encode spatially positional correlations among human joints, thereby capturing cross-joint kinematic dependencies in each frame. Secondly, the Temporal Trajectory Modeling Block (TTMB) is employed to further process the temporal motion trajectory of individual joints at several various frame scales. Besides, the bi-directional interaction modules across branches are presented to enhance modeling abilities at the spatio-temporal level. Experiments on Human 3.6M, HumanEva-I and MPI-INF-3DHP benchmarks indicate that the RISNet gains significant improvement compared to several state-of-the-art techniques. In conclusion, the proposed approach elegantly extracts critical features of body joints in the spatio-temporal domain with fewer model parameters and lower time complexity.

Pediatric Anesthesia: Giggle Gas, Time Travel, and Working with the Best Population

Pediatric Anesthesia: Giggle Gas, Time Travel, and Working with the Best Population

A Novel Flexible Sensor for Recording Temporal Shock Wave Displacement in Explosion Field

A Novel Flexible Sensor for Recording Temporal Shock Wave Displacement in Explosion Field

Things have changed but now they’ll stay the same: Generational differences and mental time travel for collective remembering of national historic events.

Things have changed but now they’ll stay the same: Generational differences and mental time travel for collective remembering of national historic events.

Detection rates and diel activity patterns of four understudied felids from Borneo.

Carnivore guilds are charismatic and have vital and irreplaceable roles in their native ecosystems, yet many of these species are threatened and remain understudied. Borneo is a biodiversity hotspot that hosts a rich diversity of endemic wildlife but is threatened by deforestation and habitat loss. Using cameras placed by the Smithsonian Institution in Sabah, Borneo, we assessed the detection rates and diel activity patterns of the native felid species. Across 51 camera trap sites between 2016 and 2019, felids were detected 55 times across a combined 9958 trap nights, including 20 independent detection events for Sunda leopard cats, 15 for Sunda clouded leopards, 12 for Borneo bay cats, and 5 for marbled cats, with no detections of flat-headed cats. Collectively, this demonstrates the challenge of sampling cryptic species that have declined due to habitat loss and conflict with humans. Despite this, we show that Borneo bay cats and marbled cats exhibited different diel activity patterns than Sunda cloud leopards, suggesting the smaller species use temporal displacement to avoid competition and predation. Sunda leopard cats exhibited broadly similar activity patterns to Sunda clouded leopard, potentially because the two species typically occupy different dietary and habitat niches. These results demonstrate the importance of devoting future research towards monitoring these species and understanding the mechanisms by which they co-exist.

What is autonoetic consciousness? Examining what underlies subjective experience in memory and future thinking

Autonoetic consciousness is the awareness that an event we remember is one that we ourselves experienced. It is a defining feature of our subjective experience of remembering and imagining future events. Given its subjective nature, there is ongoing debate about how to measure it. Our goal was to develop a framework to identify cognitive markers of autonoetic consciousness. Across two studies (N = 342) we asked young, healthy participants to provide written descriptions of two autobiographical memories, two plausible future events, and an experimentally encoded video. Participants then rated their subjective experience during remembering and imagining. Exploratory Factor Analysis of this data uncovered the latent variables underlying autonoetic consciousness across these different events. In contrast to work that emphasizes the distinction between Remember and Know as being key to autonoetic consciousness, Re-experiencing, and Pre-experiencing for future events, were consistently identified as core markers of autonoetic consciousness. This was alongside Mental Time Travel in all types of memory events, but not for imagining the future. In addition, our factor analysis allows us to demonstrate directly - for the first time - the features of mental imagery associated with the sense of autonoetic consciousness in autobiographical memory; vivid, visual imagery from a first-person perspective. Finally, with regression analysis, the emergent factor structure of autonoetic consciousness was able to predict the richness of autobiographical memory texts, but not of episodic recall of the encoded video. This work provides a novel way to assess autonoetic consciousness, illustrates how autonoetic consciousness manifests differently in memory and imagination and defines the mental representations intrinsic to this process.

Os cães ferais e seus impactos no meio ambiente

A feral dog is an animal that was domestic and began to live in a wild environment, either due to abandonment or escape. They have no food, water or veterinary care providers. In this way, they recover their wild instincts, depending on their own hunting and survival, which causes an impact on the environment, thus affecting animal and human health. The objective of this study was to review the impacts of wild dogs on environmental health and humans. The present work refers to a bibliographical review survey and analysis of works researched electronically through online databases. Veterinary medicine literature works in English and Portuguese, published between 1975 to 2023, were selected. Because they are large predators in nature, feral dogs have an impact on wildlife. They cause physical and temporal displacement, disturbance and response to stress in the fauna, harming the lives of the animals that live there, reducing the amount of functionally available environment that offers them food, reproduction and rest, in addition to water contamination and mortality of other species, whether direct (predation) or indirect (transmission of pathogens). These dogs compete for the same environment as those that live there, so animal activity decreases to avoid contact with dogs. They can participate in the transmission of various pathogens to humans and wild animals, such as giardiasis, distemper, parvovirus, leishmaniasis, toxoplasmosis, scabies, and they are a reservoir for rabies. They can cause accidents due to bites and risk hybridization with other species. The impacts of feral dogs should be better discussed and studied, and management strategies must be created, including programs to prevent the species from breeding in an unregulated manner. Preventive measures must be taken to avoid a greater impact in the future.

Do future actions matter more than past deeds? Temporal moral attribution in U.S. and Chinese school-age children.

This study examines how children attribute moral responsibilities to their past and future actions and what role culture plays in children's temporal moral attribution. A total of 346 U.S. and Chinese 6-7 and 8- to 9-year-old children were randomly assigned to a past or future condition, in which they answered questions about their moral/immoral actions in hypothetical scenarios described as occurring in the last week or the next week. Whereas U.S. 8- to 9-year-olds favored more praise and reward for their future good deeds than past ones, Chinese 8- to 9-year-olds favored more praise and reward for their past good deeds than future ones. Chinese children also moralized their actions to a greater extent than U.S. children, and children reasoned about their moral/immoral actions in line with their cultural beliefs. Interesting age differences also emerged, suggesting the continuing development of mental time travel and moral cognition across middle childhood. The findings shed new light on the important role of time in moral judgment that is constrained by development progressions in mental time travel and specific to the cultural context. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

“What is the truth?:” On teaching paradoxes, race, family, and the self with Octavia Butler’s Kindred

This article investigates the pedagogical power of teaching and learning alongside Octavia Butler’s Kindred. I examine the stories of students enrolled in a special topics undergraduate honors seminar centered on personal discovery, race, and family using grounded theory and narrative textual analysis. Students’ narratives reveal the ways Kindred and science fiction more generally offer opportunities for substantive culturally disruptive pedagogy (San Pedro, 2018) through sustained engagement with the mechanics of time travel, contending with impossible choices, and wrestling with contradictions and paradoxes. Learning from this course demonstrates the usefulness of Black feminist speculative pedagogy for building students’ capacity for naming what is (Ohman, 2021) and by extension disrupting and confronting the historical and contemporary legacies of racism and heteropatriarchy.

Structural and semantic features of Turkish language cultures (based on the material of the cartoon “Nasreddin Hodja: The Time Traveler”)

Structural and semantic features of Turkish language cultures (based on the material of the cartoon “Nasreddin Hodja: The Time Traveler”)

An Analysis of the Time Travel Device for Exploring Black-White Race Relations in Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred

The thesis focuses on Octavia E. Butler’s novel Kindred and employs close reading and textual analysis to explore the depiction of black-white race relations through the time travel device. It points out that Butler cleverly uses the method of temporal rescue to break the “grandmother paradox.” The dual-time setting allows Dana, while saving her white ancestors, to witness the harsh realities faced by her African American ancestors in American history. On this basis, the thesis reveals and critiques the historical roots of racial issues, highlighting the physiological and psychological experiences of racial injustice endured by African Americans, as well as the persistence and improvement of the legacy of slavery. It emphasizes the importance of African Americans confronting history to break the cycle of oppression and shape a more equitable future.

Spontaneous emergence of temporal structures in a continuously driven many-body system

Abstract The spontaneous emergence of temporal structures challenges the conventional understanding that systems governed by time-invariant laws remain unchanged over time. Recent experiments have observed this time translation symmetry breaking in quantum atomic systems that either exhibit strong atom-atom interactions or have low dissipation rates. While current theoretical frameworks reveal the importance of strong atom-atom interactions, they fall short in explaining this phenomenon observed in low-dissipation atomic systems. Here, we present a theoretical study on the spontaneous breaking of time translation symmetry in materials with low
dissipation rates. By constructing phase diagrams for a system of four-level atoms driven by a continuous-wave optical field, we identify the essential requirements for self-sustained temporal motions. These include a driven open system, nonlinear interactions, and sufficient degrees of freedom that facilitate competing processes. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the emergence of spontaneous time translation symmetry breaking in these materials.