Moving through time: Can it be done in a mental way?
Researchers have recently looked at how time travel is represented psychologically in the sensorimotor systems that regulate human movement. Technically we may not have a means for moving through time (yet), but when we think of the past or the future, our brains engage in a sort of mental time travel. It turns out our perceptions of space and time are tightly coupled. This natural ability to mentally travel through time differentiates us from other species.
Recently a group of researchers at the University of Aberdeen conducted a study to measure this ability in the lab. They fitted participants with a motion sensor while the participants imagined either future or past events. The researchers found that thinking about past or future events can literally move us: Engaging in mental time travel resulted in physical movements corresponding to the metaphorical direction of time. Those who thought of the past swayed backward while those who thought of the future moved forward. These findings suggest that mental time travel may be grounded in processes that link spatial and temporal metaphors (e.g., future= forward, past= backward) to our systems of perception and action. The researchers claim that the embodiment of time and space yields an overt behavioral marker of an otherwise invisible mental operation.
It seems that there is an intact time travel machine just inside our sculls that could be explored by cognitive scientists in the future. Until then, we may develop our own time travel machine as the futurists. I remember an article written by Mr. Oliver W. Markley titled: “mental time travel” for Futures in 2007. He had introduced innovatively a futures research method using focused imagination in the ‘‘theater of the mind’’ to visualize and explore contingent future patterns. It was a practical approach for wise choice-making, and represents a clear way to improve conventional scenario forecasting, strategic planning and marketing research methods—especially when dealing with just in time (JiT) business environments.
Questions
The questions to be proactively explored in mental time travel can take many forms, depending on the purpose of the researcher and/or client. For instance:
- What may happen if “X” (a decision or policy option) is chosen, versus is not chosen and implemented?
- Which of two policy options or possible decisions looks and feels better, “X” or “Y”?
- In a future involving a specific scenario, what significant impacts are likely, but perhaps are as yet unrecognized?
In fact Markley was going to present a working set of ideas and methodological guidelines to enable professional futurists and other professionals. He had also considered a set of somatic, affective, cognitive, general and specific sensations in his proposed method. Markley and other similar researchers believe that it is important to experience bodily, mentally and emotionally affective or cognitive impressions of a work team, a client organization, a competitor, a society or a system.
Research on mental time travel is probably both multi-faceted and open-ended. Multi-faceted as it embraces a range of different sciences and technologies such as: cognitive science, computer science, futures studies, and even philosophy of mind, and open-ended as human’s psych has an evolutionary nature and everyday something new is discovered in this field. Fascinating scientific evidences touch our minds drastically as what we understand from the time is an outcome of our comprehension regarding the environmental conditions.
Albert Einstein once said: "When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute, and it's longer than any hour." Einstein was describing one of the most profound implications of his Theory of General Relativity - that the perception of time is subjective. It is simple: time flies when we are enjoying ourselves, but seems to drag on when we are doing something tedious.
The subjective experience of time can also be manipulated experimentally. Researchers have found that visual stimuli which appear to be approaching are perceived to be longer in duration than when viewed as static or moving away. Similarly, participants presented with a stream of otherwise identical stimuli, but including one oddball, or "deviant", stimulus, tend to perceive the deviant stimulus as lasting longer than the others. The underlying neural mechanisms of this are unknown, but neuroimaging study of this phenomenon implicates the involvement of brain structures which are thought to be required for cognitive control and subjective awareness.
This was just a glimpse on the complex world of neural system and mental capabilities that the humans have just as one of evolving (not evolved) species living on this plant and many other findings are in the way. Obviously mind is not limited as technology and everything is possible in the world of theory even moving through time.
Notes:
1. “Moving through time”. January 21st, 2010. www.physorg.com/news183297421.html
2. “Does time dilate during a threatening situation?”. January 23, 2010. http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2010/01/
3. Markley, Oliver W. “Mental time travel: A practical business and personal research tool for looking ahead”, Futures 40 (2008) 17–24, doi:10.1016/j.futures.2007.06.006
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Comments
Why time travelers are never observed
Moving through time using our unique human mental faculties is a process that outsiders can never observe. If the time traveler is able to shift their perspective into the past, for example, the laws of physics dictate the time line continues to contain infinite "forks in the road." On one fork, I shifted my consciousness to the past and continued what I was doing in that moment in the past. In another fork, I chose to remain in the present and therefore didn't time travel, giving nobody the opportunity to observe me time traveling.
I won't hog space on your blog giving examples of why timer travelers are never observed. Suffice to say the paradoxes of causality will always prevent the time traveler from being observed, and prevent the transference of extensive memories from the human brain as it existed in Time A from which consciousness transferred to Time B.
As an aside, one aspect of mental time travel that fascinates me is the ability to get out of unpleasant situations. Although the ability to control mental passage from the present to the past is "hit and miss" I do believe our minds use time travel as an "escape pod" by which to retrieve our consciousness (which is all that matters, really) out of a life threatening or impossibly unpleasant present situation. The consequence is one moment we think something is going to end our existence, and the next moment we find ourselves somewhere (perhaps of unconscious choosing) in the past, memories intact to that point in time. At that moment we have this sense of having experienced a waking dream, or daydream, perhaps a premonition of some future event, or perhaps we just feel slight disorientation but cannot remember we just time traveled from some other time caused by a life threatening or traumatic occurrence. In that respect we cannot even enjoy the indulgence of absolutely knowing we time traveled.
I do suspect nature has built in a mechanism for transference of memories through what I will call the micro Einstein Rosen Bridge in our brains, but this is more a gut feeling than measurable fact. It's like forgetting information that was memorized; ever had the feeling you remember something, "it's at the tip of my tongue" but no matter how hard you try, you cannot retrieve the memory? Then suddenly, you may think or vocalize the fact, days, weeks or months later! It was always there; you just couldn't retrieve it. I suspect this is the case with ALL memories from the past, present and future in every possible timeline. There is just too much and one must develop a mental retrieval mechanism to access specific memories. The question is what constitutes a specific memory in an infinite jungle of timelines spanning trillions of linear years?
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