Thinking about Time Literally Moves Us

removed from bOObies,....somebody just tagged it "NOT bOObies" and I got petulant. That was silly. "Time" is NOT bOObies!
(added to current cult,....TIME is a cult object)

added to bOObies
(no reason,...artistic humor....)

What happens when you take LSD ? Or your sense of time-space becomes extremely profound/scary/juxtaposed. In other words, everything that ever is or was, has already been. This study would need to have so many controls that nothing could ever be said (concerning their data) other than in a hypothetical fashion. It is a profound idea that is contained in some of human history's greatest quotes. But the hypothesis works better, rather, as a concept describing what living in the past MIGHT do (walking backwards to your morning cup of coffee and shitting in it, think about that one for a moment) better than some inscrutable precept of perpetual human locomotion.

Sweetness

I've always understood time-space to be a single attribute (i.e. they can't readily be separated in how we observe them as processes in our "universe"), so it may make sense that a species with a hyper-developed sense of either quality has a propensity to associate mentally and manifest physically that association.

Extremely interesting about the Aymara- while most cultures surveyed place their frame of reference as their own physical bodies (let's face it, most animals we can observe move in a "forward" motion almost always) and use that as the point of reference, while the Aymara and like cultures use the "world" and environment as the thing that is moving with us merely passing through, which is why the allegory of time as an object we can see with our physical eyes (where sight might better be termed "perceive", "know" or "understand") is always in "front" of those bodies.

We may easily project that these others may possess more of an egalitarian culture, but it may have to deal anthropologically with their more recent tradition of hunting, etc, and accompanying spirituality than a cognizant notion of time-space and human perception, although most people's do have much of this worked out for themselves.

Notice how there were no mentions of groups that perceive time as up and down and therefore stand on their toes when thinking about it, although more than a few Afrikan cultures express that were literally built (on a pile?) on top of all living things that came before us.

What about if your perception is that the past, present and future are one big whole, inseparable? What if you have expanded your consciousness sufficiently to be aware of multiple dimensions of space time? Then how would you move then?

For most of my life, I have assumed that time was a constant, invented by Man, as an artificial structure to bring some semblance of order to our life. However, since velocity (near light speed), slows down time, it would appear that time is not a constant. Therefore, opening the door for theories regarding, time travel, and suggesting that the past, present, and future are not as well defined as we may think. I have no opinion on animal's ability regarding the past or future. Dreaming seems to me to be a way of traveling into the past, as we then remember and relive past events. Since this is a proven fact, why can't we dream the future?

yvesisaki, I respectfully disagree - what is behind one hasn't yet been seen, whereas what is in front of one has already been seen, if you see what I mean.

That's really interesting about how Aymaran people view the future/past. Their perception makes a lot more sense to me.

You go into the future facing away -- unable to know what will happen and you face towards the past, which is what you do know and can see.

I'm slightly confused. I read the article and it just seems that we don't do anything but if we use words correctly then we can state that it is something....it's neat on the cool (as I have agreed) but it seems so pointless to mention.

I've always said that the quintessential part of man's first time machine will be the human brain.

"The ability to subjectively travel through time, called chronesthesia, sets us apart from other animals, the researchers say."

We don't know that, we just assume that. We cannot read animals' minds and thoughts, we can't even read each other's minds and thoughts. Yes, some people do have telepathic gifts, but such gifts do not open another being's mind completely, they only give glimpses.

this is really cool...time n space are two areas i love watching for scientific discoveries in, they always amaze me and we're learning so much more about them day after day....and we know so little.

delia said it best.

Thinking about stuff gives me a headache.

The only thing you have more of is cerebral cortex and the only thing you do with it is talk to yourself.

But don't worry animals talk to themselves - and dream - as vividly as you ever have. They know where they've been and where they're going to and they have opinions about you.

How "off" are their judgments?

Thanks, Delia. As usual, you offer an interesting topic.

It has been established that dogs can "point" and have a sense of direction/destination. I wonder if that is separated cognitively from a "getting there" awareness. (and how would we demonstrate that or the lack of it?) To put it another way,...does a dog have a "noun" fixated sense of a target,....or a verb focused "I will be running toward that" temporal classification.
Just throwing that out there,....like a ball,...or a Frizbe.

Psychology is fun! :oD

To some extent other animals definitely do think about the past and future. We rely on it when working with mice on memory research; scientists were able to locate the specific areas of the brain that remember pain or fear after experiments with mice and mini-earthquakes (I'll find a link if I can...) Also, animals that store food obviously have some sense of the future as do dolphins. When it comes to chronesthesia, I think humans are hyper aware of our past and future and we are constantly mentally time traveling between them in our present - and also, we are not only thinking about ourselves in terms of past memories of future possibilities, but other people and in some cases, humanity.

Here's a bit more info: http://www.apa.org/monitor/oct03/mental.aspx

Excerpt: "Of course, Tulving noted, not all forms of memory--and there are many--are time-related. The "episodic" kind, involving recollection of past personal experience, is, he said. But the "semantic" kind, involving acquisition, retention and retrieval of facts, is not.

"You don't need mental time travel to remember a chemical formula or your mother's maiden name," he explained. "You can know a lot of things without mental time travel, but you can't remember events from your past, or anticipate your future, without it."

Tulving went on to explain how and why humans have adapted chronesthesia--a learned capability absent in other animals and human infants--to advance their survival."

This is really cool.

Who says animals have no memory of their past?

Besides animals sway about all day.