Once in a while everybody comes to a moment where we ask "what is human?” What really makes us to be called a human? How this "human" thing is any different from any other living things on this Earth? The interesting part for this question is there is actually no right or wrong answers. Everybody has a different view of things and understands things in their own way of thinking. So the answer to these questions is infinitely many. But here's what I think and I believe it's one of those infinitely many answers. The definitive characteristic of humanity is the ability to remember the past and imagine the future.
You must be wondering what this ability is called, it’s
called the chronesthesia. It is a
ability in our minds/brains, acquired by humans through evolution that allows us to be constantly be aware of the past and the future. We use our episodic memory to construct our personal events from the past and also predict future.
Mental time travel allows us to remember our past.For us, remembering something means to recall our past occurrences. It is one of
the most useful things that humans have. Just think about it, if we don’t have the
ability to remember the past we won’t know who we are. We won’t remember our
childhood, our precious memories that were shared with the loved ones. Also
it could be just the basic things like when we were born, in what family we
grew up or other important things that happened in the past. But the key
feature of remembering the past is remembering the mistakes and avoiding them.
If we can’t remember the mistakes we made then we can’t learn from it and can
never avoid it in our future life.
The benefit of recalling
the past events is like I said avoiding the mistakes we made before. In social
relationships, it can help us to distinguish friends from foes, not to hangout
with the wrong group of people and in love relationships not to get hurt easily.
In the occupational and food-gathering arenas, it
helps us to develop tools that work well and to discard ones that don’t. Also the process of chronesthesia allows people to update information critical to surviving, thriving and dealing with changes in the world. It gives people experiences temporal and emotional dimensions, which make us more believable.
This one PhD, Endel Tulving, said that " 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." One of Tulving's patient, who had sustained multiple brain lesions, including hippocampal lesions, in a motorcycle accident. The patient could solve math problems, but he couldn't remember ever taking a math class, or he couldn't even recall how he came to Tulving's office for an interview. The patient was missing the " human ability to project our own past into the future," said Tulving. This ability, he believes, has enabled us to create and pass down a wealth of cultural knowledge through the generations, including how to: plant seeds, make and keep records, formally educate the young...
Mental time travel also allows us to predict our future. The most flexible memory, episodic memory, is part of a more general faculty of mental time travel that allows us not only to go back in time, but also to foresee, plan, and shape virtually any specific future event. Planning the future is a simple thing. It means to plan tomorrow or next week or it could be next month. We, humans, plan and predict our future everyday, for example plan what to do tomorrow, for students, we plan what homeworks or projects we do tomorrow or we plan on what class we should take to go to certain university. Everybody plans their birthdays before it happens, that's an example of planning the future. Or pregnant women, predict the date of their birth and buy clothes and toys for the soon-to-be born baby.
After reading this, you must be wondering are humans alone in their ability to reminisce about the past and imagine the future. Scientists reviewed comparative studies and found out that some food-storing birds have the access to information about what they have stored where and when. This has raised the possibility of mental time travel in animals. But that such data do not provide convincing evidence for mental time travel in nonhuman animals. So in light of the current lack of evidence, however, they maintain that mental time traveling is a uniquely human characteristic.
In life, there is hundreds of different qualities that humans differ from other living things. In my opinion, the ability of mental time traveling is one of the most important qualities that humans have. It helps us to rise our cultures, religions, arts and tools we use daily.
This one PhD, Endel Tulving, said that " 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." One of Tulving's patient, who had sustained multiple brain lesions, including hippocampal lesions, in a motorcycle accident. The patient could solve math problems, but he couldn't remember ever taking a math class, or he couldn't even recall how he came to Tulving's office for an interview. The patient was missing the " human ability to project our own past into the future," said Tulving. This ability, he believes, has enabled us to create and pass down a wealth of cultural knowledge through the generations, including how to: plant seeds, make and keep records, formally educate the young...
Mental time travel also allows us to predict our future. The most flexible memory, episodic memory, is part of a more general faculty of mental time travel that allows us not only to go back in time, but also to foresee, plan, and shape virtually any specific future event. Planning the future is a simple thing. It means to plan tomorrow or next week or it could be next month. We, humans, plan and predict our future everyday, for example plan what to do tomorrow, for students, we plan what homeworks or projects we do tomorrow or we plan on what class we should take to go to certain university. Everybody plans their birthdays before it happens, that's an example of planning the future. Or pregnant women, predict the date of their birth and buy clothes and toys for the soon-to-be born baby.
After reading this, you must be wondering are humans alone in their ability to reminisce about the past and imagine the future. Scientists reviewed comparative studies and found out that some food-storing birds have the access to information about what they have stored where and when. This has raised the possibility of mental time travel in animals. But that such data do not provide convincing evidence for mental time travel in nonhuman animals. So in light of the current lack of evidence, however, they maintain that mental time traveling is a uniquely human characteristic.
In life, there is hundreds of different qualities that humans differ from other living things. In my opinion, the ability of mental time traveling is one of the most important qualities that humans have. It helps us to rise our cultures, religions, arts and tools we use daily.
That is a really good point; i hadn't even thought about cronesthesia. But yeah, most animals can't really remember things. Dogs have barely enough of a memory to be trained, and cats have an attention span of like, 13 seconds.
ReplyDelete