Scientists find evidence for 'chronesthesia,' or mental time travel - Polidicks

[img]http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/mentaltimetravel.jpg[/img] Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future. Image credit: Lars Nyberg, et al. ©2010 PNAS. [b] (PhysOrg.com) -- The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person's decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical "travel" occurs. [/b] The researchers, Lars Nyberg from Umea University in Umea, Sweden; Reza Habib from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; and Alice S. N. Kim, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, have published their results in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com. "In cognitive neuroscience, we know quite a bit (relatively speaking) about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined space," he said. "We know essentially nothing about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined time. When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were ‘there,’ as an observer or participant ('episodic memory'), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question we are asking is, how do you know that it happened at a time other than 'now'?" In their study, the researchers asked several well-trained subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times. The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future). Because mental time is a product of the human brain and differs from the external time that is measured by clocks and calendars, scientists also call this time “subjective time.” Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it. Some previous research has questioned whether the concept of subjective time is actually necessary for understanding similarities in brain activity during past and future thinking compared with thinking about the present. A few past studies have suggested that the brain’s ability for scene construction, and not subjective time, can account for the ability to think about past and future events. However, since scene construction was held constant in this study, the new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future. “Until now, the processes that determine contents and the processes that determine time have not been separated in functional neuroimaging studies of chronesthesia; especially, there have been no studies in which brain regions involved in time alone, rather than time together with action, have been identified,” Tulving said. “The concept of ‘chronesthesia’ is essentially brand new. (You find a few entries on it in Google, but not on Web of Science.) Therefore, I would say, the most important result of our study is the novel finding that there seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present. That is, we found some evidence for chronesthesia. Before we undertook this study it was entirely possible to imagine that we find nothing!” He added that, at this stage of the game, it is too early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future. “Our study, we hope, is the first swallow of the spring, and others will follow,” he said. “Our findings, as I alluded to above, are promising, but they have to be replicated, checked for validity and reliability, and, above all, extended to other conditions and situations, before we can start thinking about their implications and applications (of which it is easy to think of many).” [url=http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-scientists-evidence-chronesthesia-mental.html]Source[/url]

Cool stuff

So, we can make our brain comprehend 1 second as a 1 day and reverse?

Psst! I'm actually in yesterday right now. :smug:

Oh hey welcome to few years ago. Yeah the brain knows you'll be moving your arm before you need to.

I thought this was obvious as we could comprehend the passage of time and anticipate how conversations and situations play out. But yeah I suppose this is cool now we have evidence of it.

Damnit I knew that was World War III when I saw a mushroom cloud on my dreams. [sp]Yeah yeah I know the future we see in our dreams isn't the real future, I was making a joke[/sp]

[img]http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/4061/861d3a94ddd709323938144.gif[/img]

Does this explain why I see people die when I touch them? I'm not being serious. Sorry for not making that clear.

Reminds me of the Butterfly Effect.

Interesting. I'm kinda chronesthetic myself, as on occassion I see fleeting glimpses of my own future in my dreams. It's rather weak, and not very useful in the long run (I haven't glimpsed any significant future events yet), but it's cool to know I have it, though at times I wish it were more powerful. (it's kinda hard to prove I have it, as I can't control it or use it on a larger scale) To be fair, it ain't simply chronesthetic, but in a weirder catergory.

This is simply the ability to differentiate between past, future and present it has nothing to do with time travel jesus christ read at least 5 lines before posting.

[QUOTE=ironman17;26881493]Interesting. I'm kinda chronesthetic myself, as on occassion I see fleeting glimpses of my own future in my dreams. It's rather weak, and not very useful in the long run (I haven't glimpsed any significant future events yet), but it's cool to know I have it, though at times I wish it were more powerful. (it's kinda hard to prove I have it, as I can't control it or use it on a larger scale) To be fair, it ain't simply chronesthetic, but in a weirder catergory.[/QUOTE] I have something like this that happens to me almost [b]every day[/b]. I go on Wikipedia or Lifehacker and read about some random thing and the next day that same subject is brought up. Once I went on Wikipedia and decided to look at some morse code stuff. The next day some random guy asked me if I knew morse code.

[QUOTE=ironman17;26881493]Interesting. I'm kinda chronesthetic myself, as on occassion I see fleeting glimpses of my own future in my dreams. It's rather weak, and not very useful in the long run (I haven't glimpsed any significant future events yet), but it's cool to know I have it, though at times I wish it were more powerful. (it's kinda hard to prove I have it, as I can't control it or use it on a larger scale) To be fair, it ain't simply chronesthetic, but in a weirder catergory.[/QUOTE] no you dont

[QUOTE=Jad Hinto;26881467]Reminds me of the Butterfly Effect.[/QUOTE] The movie or the actual changing of a small event leading toward a larger one in the future?

[QUOTE=theseltsamone;26881463]Does this explain why I see people die when I touch them?[/QUOTE] ...not to alarm you or anything, but that sounds like some issues that reside solely with those amongst us who are majorly head fucked.

[QUOTE=bravehat;26882032]...not to alarm you or anything, but that sounds like some issues that reside solely with those amongst us who are majorly head fucked.[/QUOTE] yeah you do have issues

[QUOTE=Anteep2;26882184]yeah you do have issues[/QUOTE] Who me or him? cause that was decidedly vague.

[QUOTE=ironman17;26881493]Interesting. I'm kinda chronesthetic myself, as on occassion I see fleeting glimpses of my own future in my dreams. It's rather weak, and not very useful in the long run (I haven't glimpsed any significant future events yet), but it's cool to know I have it, though at times I wish it were more powerful. (it's kinda hard to prove I have it, as I can't control it or use it on a larger scale) To be fair, it ain't simply chronesthetic, but in a weirder catergory.[/QUOTE] It's called a deja vu. You dream something, and on a later occasion a situation get associated in a wrong way with that dream. It only seems as if you dreamt the future, but in fact you didn't.

[QUOTE=Str4t0s;26881325]So, we can make our brain comprehend 1 second as a 1 day and reverse?[/QUOTE] I think the bigger goal here is to essentially predict the future, by looking at everything that's happening and figuring out what might happen. But we could in theory also make days feel like hours, etc. Like how when you're having fun playing a game and it's suddenly 3am in the morning but you're sitting waiting and each minute feels like an hour. Oh, and working out how photographic memory works so we could improve our memory.

[QUOTE=Mingebox;26881458][img_thumb]http://img52.imageshack.us/img52/4061/861d3a94ddd709323938144.gif[/img_thumb][/QUOTE] :foxnews:

It's called reletivity.

[QUOTE=Zenreon117;26882508]It's called reletivity.[/QUOTE] Oh yeah! no wait that's wrong. This isn't time travel, it's imagining the future, it perceiving possible future courses of action, same goes for looking back to the past.

[QUOTE=doggyalt;26881888]no you dont[/QUOTE] That is called Deja Vu.

It's easy to disregard as deja vu, for those who are so narrow-minded that they can't conceive the possibility of things beyond their understanding. I'm open to things that aren't fully understood, that's how I stay alive. Since some of you aren't as open as I, i'd say you've doomed to stay closed for all eternity, at best. Ignorance is a pretty lethal lizard, after all.

[QUOTE=ironman17;26883078]It's easy to disregard as deja vu, for those who are so narrow-minded that they can't conceive the possibility of things beyond their understanding. I'm open to things that aren't fully understood, that's how I stay alive. Since some of you aren't as open as I, i'd say you've doomed to stay closed for all eternity, at best. Ignorance is a pretty lethal lizard, after all.[/QUOTE] I'm more open minded than you. :jerkbag:

Is there supposed to be snow in my brain? I didn't know this.

Actually they are just talking about the brain's ability to predict, aren't they?

[QUOTE=ironman17;26883078]It's easy to disregard as deja vu, for those who are so narrow-minded that they can't conceive the possibility of things beyond their understanding. I'm open to things that aren't fully understood, that's how I stay alive. Since some of you aren't as open as I, i'd say you've doomed to stay closed for all eternity, at best. Ignorance is a pretty lethal lizard, after all.[/QUOTE] Just the fact you just stated how open you are shows us your limit to your open-ness. Saying someone is ignorant without knowing for sure doesn't seem to be the best way to end your post about open-ness. Because they might be more open than you are. Or not.

[QUOTE=ironman17;26883078]It's easy to disregard as deja vu, for those who are so narrow-minded that they can't conceive the possibility of things beyond their understanding. I'm open to things that aren't fully understood, that's how I stay alive. Since some of you aren't as open as I, i'd say you've doomed to stay closed for all eternity, at best. Ignorance is a pretty lethal lizard, after all.[/QUOTE] There's being open minded and then being retarded. You are the latter, scientific consensus on deja vu is that you experiencing a situation which has happened before, but which never engaged your brain, but the second time you experience it it is very similar to the first and requires your mind to do some work, so your brain rakes through your memories for the original situation for any possible answer. Tadah, suddenly you remember an eerily similar situation to one you've "never experienced" leading you to the conclusion you dreamed. I had the same thing the other night on /b/ Then I realised all the threads were copy pasta.