Mental Time Travel
We humans can effortlessly transport ourselves mentally to other places and other times. We remember specific events, imagine possible future ones, and even invent fictional ones. Experimental psychologists have typically studied this power in the context of memory, asking people to imagine earlier events in their lives, or providing information and then asking people to recall it. More recently, though, the focus has shifted to the imagining of future events, revealing a continuity between so-called episodic memory and what has been termed episodic foresight. In both cases, there is a constructive element—even memory for specific episodes deviates substantially from what actually happened. Because of the constructive nature of both episodic foresight and episodic memory, mental time travel blends naturally into fiction.
Chapter 5 begins with memory, and especially so-called episodic memory, which involves the conscious reliving of past episodes. In chapter 6 I extend this focus to the more general notion of mental time travel, which includes the imagining of possible future episodes. In chapter 7 I develop the theme that mental time travel is critical to language. Indeed one of the so-called design features of language, as specified by the American linguist Charles Hockett, is displacement—the capacity to refer to events removed from the here and now.1 Language may therefore have evolved primarily to enable humans to share their memories, plans, and stories, enhancing social cohesion and creating a common culture. At the same time, the very mechanisms that create cohesion within groups can instill antagonisms between them—as the American writer and civil rights activist James Arthur Baldwin once put it, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”
This section heralds a departure from the conventional view of language as an independent biological capacity, and suggests instead that language is deeply bound to culture. The “language fortress” describe in chapter 4 is part of the cultural fortress that we humans have created.