Streaming Video:
Donald. wmv
version. Quicktime
version.
Burroughs. wmv
version. Quicktime
version.
Benson.
wmv version. Quicktime
version.
Parrill. wmv
version. Quicktime
version.
Brandt. wmv
version. Quicktime
version.
Waller. wmv
version. Quicktime
version.
Turner. wmv
version. Quicktime
version.
Date: Wednesday, March 7, 2007.
Location: Room 9, Inamori Center, Ground Floor, Crawford Hall
Time: 2 – 9:30 pm
Attendance: The mini-symposia are for invited participants only.
The Guest Lecture is also open to students and general academic
public, as a cognitive
science colloquium.
Schedule
2 – 3:30 pm: Mini-symposium I
- Merlin Donald: Cognitive Science, Case: Introduction to
the symposium: “Evolving Constructions of Time”
- Charles Burroughs, Art History, Case: “Time &
Memory: Medieval Constructions”
- Yanna Popova, Cognitive Science, Case: “Time and Self-projection”
- Open discussion
3:30 – 4 pm: Coffee break
4 – 5:30 pm
- Guest lecture by Professor Ciarán Benson, University
College, Dublin: “Emotions in the Maintenance
& Reproduction of Identities: From Cultural to Personal
Memory.”
- Discussion
5:30 – 7 pm: Break for light buffet dinner
7 - 9:30 pm: Mini-symposium II
- Fey Parrill, Cognitive Science, Case: “Time and the
Body: Representations of Time in Gesture & Signed Language”
- Per Aage Brandt, Cognitive Science, Case: “How Do
We At All Symbolize and Remember Times?”
- Sara Waller, Philosophy, Case: “Primates, Philosophy,
Time and Memory”
- Open plenary discussion
Background Themes
Cognitive researchers have long puzzled over how the human mind
constructs a representation of time. The proposed conference
will address this question from the perspectives of several
disciplines.
For one class of theorists, our experience of time is primary,
and given directly in the senses, or in what William James called
“the specious present.” For others, the perception
of time is constructed only in memory, and is a byproduct of
a class of memory supposedly found only in human beings, “episodic”
memory. For a third group of theorists, time is a highly abstract
representation constructed in culture. Although it may seem
obvious that there must be some truth in all three theories,
researchers in these different areas have not really communicated
with one another on a regular basis. It should prove useful
at this point to examine how and where these theories contradict
each another, support one another, or suggest new directions
to pursue.
The sensory/specious present model has proven popular with laboratory
researchers who focus on the relationships between experience
and objectively measurable physical events, and with brain researchers.
The theory that drives this research assumes that our sense
of time is constructed from elementary chunks or irreducible
“moments.” These are the atoms of time, from which
all representations of the temporal structure of events must
be built. This theory, first proposed in the 19th century, has
recently received support from neuroscience, engineering and
computational science. It postulates that time is represented
in the brain in a componential manner, computed from a fixed
base rate in certain neuroanatomically defined regions of the
brain. A complex neuronal circuit maintains a “count”
of base units of time, and this defines the apparent duration
of a given episode of experience. Although there is considerable
controversy over what the base rate might be, and where it is
generated, this class of theory invariably implies that the
length of experienced time is proportional to the number of
base units that occur within the measured “objective”
time period in question, and, as a corollary, that we cannot
perceive anything shorter in duration than one of these elementary
“moments.” Time thus always ticks by, much like
clock time, in multiples of base units, and there is little
room for cultural variation in this model. The main focus of
this kind of research is to locate and describe the internal
neuronal “clock” that emits the fixed base rate,
and sets the duration of a “moment.” There is also
interest in determining whether neurotransmitter chemicals can
slow down the internal clock, or speed it up, and in locating
the tracking circuits needed to mediate the conscious experience
of time passing.
The episodic memory model stems from a long tradition of research
on human memory. In contrast to the former approach, which implicitly
attributes a sense of time passing to many nonhuman species,
the memory model attributes an imaginative capability called
“time travel in memory” to the human species, and
no other. In essence, time travel is a defining human mental
capability, and forms the basis of autobiographical memory.
Endel Tulving is the major theorist behind this idea. The passage
of time is not necessarily perceived directly, but rather constructed
in memory, but this can be achieved only if the brain’s
memory system is equipped with a uniquely human imaginative
capacity to “travel” from present to past, or to
project experience into the future. Tulving ties this capability
to consciousness itself. In effect, one’s larger perception
of time comes from one’s ability to compare past experiences
with present ones, and project these into the future. This approach
allows for a small amount of cultural variation on the interpretative
level, but once again, cultural input is secondary, and the
research focus is on the fundamental mental mechanisms of imaginative
time travel. Such mechanisms are presumably found universally,
in all people and all cultures of the human species.
The approach that we shall call the “cultural” model
of time, supported much more widely in the humanities and social
sciences than any other model, places emphasis on how the worldview
of specific cultures can transform and modify the perception
of time in the members of that culture. Every aspect of time
– the apparent duration of events, their rate of passing,
their redundancy, indeed, the very experience of time itself,
is relative to a cultural worldview, and, to a large degree,
the product of that worldview. This approach has been validated
by focusing on cultural differences, and on the studying the
gradual unfolding of a time-sense in children. It allows a relatively
minor role in our experience of time for some kind of universal
biological clock or primitive memory record, but the larger
sense of time passing, and one’s ability to navigate the
virtual world, framed in virtual time, is deemed largely to
be a product of culture and possibly, to a significant degree,
of technology.
This conference will try something unique and truly cross-disciplinary:
a frank exchange of theoretical conceptions of time from all
three vantage points. In normal academic discourse, ideas as
disparate as these do not have the opportunity to collide. Can
these different classes of theory influence one another? Should
they? If so, how and where? How does our memory record of passing
time coalesce with our internal clock, if there is such a thing?
How might these be modified, or even fundamentally altered over
the long term, by culturally-programmed experience? And how
do our narrative accounts of experienced time map onto the representational
hierarchy that dictates our perception of time?
The symposium might influence scholars and scientists to build
a cognitive model of time that will explore such questions,
and lead to a unified theory that can account more fully for
our conception of time.
|