Time past, time future intricately connected in the brain: study

[M. Howard]

http://www.physorg.com/news86928742.html

Human memory, the ability to recall vivid mental images of past experiences, has been studied extensively for more than a hundred years. But until recently, there's been surprisingly little research into cognitive processes underlying another form of mental time travel -- the ability to clearly imagine or "see" oneself participating in a future event.

Now, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have used advanced brain imaging techniques to show that remembering the past and envisioning the future may go hand-in-hand, with each process sparking strikingly similar patterns of activity within precisely the same broad network of brain regions.

"In our daily lives, we probably spend more time envisioning what we're going to do tomorrow or later on in the day than we do remembering, but not much is known about how we go about forming these mental images of the future," says Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.

"Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories."

Scheduled for advance online publication Jan. 1 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the study sheds new light on how the human mind relies on the vivid recollection of past experiences to prepare itself for future challenges, suggesting that envisioning the future may be a critical prerequisite for many higher-level planning processes.

Other study co-authors are Jason M. Watson, a Washington University doctoral graduate now assistant professor of psychology at the University of Utah; and Kathleen McDermott, an associate professor of psychology in Arts & Sciences and of radiology in the School of Medicine at Washington University.

McDermott, principal investigator for the University's Memory and Cognition Lab, where the research is based, suggests that the findings are notable for two reasons.

First, the study clearly demonstrates that the neural network underlying future thought is not isolated in the brain's frontal cortex, as some have speculated. Although the frontal lobes play a well-documented role in carrying out future-oriented executive operations, such as anticipation, planning and monitoring, the spark for these activities may well be the very process of envisioning oneself in a specific future event, an activity based within and reliant upon the same neurally distributed network used to retrieve autobiographical memories.

Second, within this neural network, patterns of activity suggest that the visual and spatial context for our imagined future often is pieced together using our past experiences, including memories of specific body movements and visual perspective changes – data stored as we navigated through similar settings in the past.

These findings, McDermott suggests, offer strong support for a relatively recent theory of memory, which posits that remembering the past and envisioning the future draw upon many of the same neural mechanisms. Previous speculation has been based largely on the anecdotal observation of very young children, cases of severe depression and brain damaged persons with amnesia.

"There's a little known and not that well investigated finding that if you have an amnesic person who can't remember the past, they're also not at all good about thinking about what they might be doing tomorrow or envisioning any kind of personal future," McDermott explains. They comprehend time and can consider the future in the abstract sense (e.g., that global warming is a concern for the future), but they cannot vividly envision themselves in a specific future scenario.

"The same is true with very small children -- they don't remember particularly what happened last month and they can't really tell you much of anything about what they envision happening next week. This is also the case with suicidally depressed people. So, there's this theory that it all goes hand-in-hand, but nobody has looked closely enough to explain exactly how or why this occurs."

In this study, researchers relied on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to capture patterns of brain activation as college students were given 10 seconds to develop a vivid mental image of themselves or a famous celebrity participating in a range of common life experiences.

Presented with a series of memory cues, such as getting lost, spending time with a friend or attending a birthday party, participants were asked to recall a related event from their own past; to envision themselves experiencing such an event in their future life; or, to picture a famous celebrity -- specifically former U.S. President Bill Clinton -- participating in such an event.

The "Clinton-Imagine" task was introduced to help researchers establish a baseline level of brain activity for a cognitive event that was in many ways similar to the other two tasks but did not involve the mental projection of oneself through time. Bill Clinton was chosen because pre-testing showed he was easy for participants to visualize in a variety of situations.

Comparing images of brain activity in response to the "self-remember" and "self-future" event cues, researchers found a surprisingly complete overlap among regions of the brain used for remembering the past and those used for envisioning the future – every region involved in recollecting the past was also used in envisioning the future.

During the experiment, participants were not required to describe details or explain the origin of mental images elicited by the memory cues, but in post-testing questionnaires most indicated that they tended to place future-oriented images in the context of familiar places (e.g. home, school) and familiar people (e.g. family, friends), which would require the reactivation of those images from neural networks responsible for the storage and retrieval of autobiographical memories.

Conversely, the neural networks associated with personal mental time travel showed significantly less activity when participants imagined scenarios involving Bill Clinton. The reason, researchers suggest, is that participants had no personal memories of direct interaction with Clinton, and thus, any images of him had to be derived from neural networks responsible for semantic memory – our context-free general knowledge of the world. In fact, participants later reported that their mental images of Clinton tended to be less vivid (e.g. "I see Bill Clinton at a party in the White House, alongside several faceless senators").

"Results of this study offer a tentative answer to a longstanding question regarding the evolutionary usefulness of memory," McDermott concludes. "It may just be that the reason we can recollect our past in vivid detail is that this set of processes is important for being able to envision ourselves in future scenarios. This ability to envision the future has clear and compelling adaptive significance."

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

 

[Laura]

"It may just be that the reason we can recollect our past in vivid detail is that this set of processes is important for being able to envision ourselves in future scenarios. This ability to envision the future has clear and compelling adaptive significance."

Yes indeedy. And this is the same ability that enables a person to feel empathy and connectedness. It also seems to be the ability that psychopaths lack. As was written above:

They comprehend time and can consider the future in the abstract sense (e.g., that global warming is a concern for the future), but they cannot vividly envision themselves in a specific future scenario.

It's also interesting that the lack of ability to remember/project into the future is related to children since some researchers have compared the internal states of psychopathy to the internal states of a child.

Some of the psychopath's behavior may be fairly well accounted for if we grant a limitation of emotional capacity. Additional factors merit consideration. The psychopath seems to go out of his way to make trouble for himself and for others. In carelessly marrying a -jezebel-, in more or less inviting detection of a theft (or at least in ignoring the probability of detection), in attempting gross intimacies with a debutante in the poorly sheltered alcove just off a crowded ballroom, in losing his hospital parole or failing to be with his wife in labor just because he did not want to leave the crap game at midnight (or at 3 A.M.), in such actions there seems to be not only a disregard for consequences but an active impulse to show off, to be not discreet but conspicuous in making mischief. Apparently he likes to flaunt his outlandish or antisocial acts with bravado.
When negative consequences are negligible or slight (both materially and emotionally), who does not like to cut up a little, to make a bit of inconsequential fun, or perhaps playfully take off on the more sober aspects of living? Dignity might otherwise become pompousness; learning, pedantry; goodness, self-righteousness. The essential difference seems to lie in how much the consequences matter. It is also important to remember that inclination and taste are profoundly shaped by capacity to feel the situation adequately. A normal man's potential inclination to give the pretty hatcheck girl $100.00 would probably not reach awareness in view of his knowledge that this would result in his three children's not having shoes or in his having to humiliate himself by wheedling from a friend a loan he will never repay.

If, as we maintain, the big rewards of love, of the hard job well done, of faith kept despite sacrifices, do not enter significantly in the equation, it is not difficult to see that the psychopath is likely to be bored. Being bored, he will seek to cut up more than the ordinary person to relieve the tedium of his unrewarding existence. If we think of a theater half-filled with ordinary pubertal boys who must sit through a performance of King Lear or of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, we need ask little of either imagination or memory to bring to mind the restless fidgeting, the noisy intercommunication of trivialities, the inappropriate guffaws or catcalls, and perhaps the spitballs or the mischievous application of a pin to the fellow in the next seat.

Apparently blocked from fulfillment at deep levels, the psychopath is not unnaturally pushed toward some sort of divertissement. Even weak impulses, petty and fleeting gratifications, are sufficient to produce in him injudicious, distasteful, and even outlandish misbehavior. Major positive attractions are not present to compete successfully with whims, and the major negative deterrents (hot, persistent shame, profound regret) do not loom ahead to influence him. If the 12-year-old boys could enjoy King Lear or the Ninth Symphony as much as some people do, they would not be so reckless or unruly. If the son of a family long honored in the community (and husband of a wife at her wits' end) felt about going to jail and about being widely known as a jailbird, as most people do, he could not, after dozens of brief incarcerations, drop in on somewhat similar acquaintances (just back at work after their own periods of detention) and gaily twit them with such greetings as, "What kind of a bird can't fly?"

In a world where tedium demands that the situation be enlivened by pranks that bring censure, nagging, nights in the local jail, and irritating duns about unpaid bills, it can well be imagined that the psychopath finds cause for vexation and impulses toward reprisal. Few, if any, of the scruples that in the ordinary man might oppose and control such impulses seem to influence him. Unable to realize what it meant to his wife when he was discovered in the cellar flagrante delicto with the cook, he is likely to be put out considerably by her reactions to this. His having used the rent money for a midnight long-distance call to an old acquaintance in California (with whom he bantered for an hour) also brings upon him censure or tearful expostulation. Considering himself harassed beyond measure, he may rise from the dining room table in a petty tantrum, curse his wife violently, slap her, even spit on her, and further annoyed by the sudden weeping of their 6-year-old daughter, throw his salad in the little girl's face before he strides indignantly from the room.

His father, from the patient's point of view, lacks humor and does not understand things. The old man could easily take a different attitude about having had to make good those last three little old checks written by the son. Nor was there any sense in raising so much hell because he took that dilapidated old Chevrolet for his trip to Memphis. What if he did forget to tell the old man he was going to take it? It wouldn't hurt him to go to the office on the bus for a few days. How was he (the patient) to know the fellows were going to clean him out at stud or that the little bitch of a waitress at the Frolic Spot would get so nasty about money? What else could he do except sell the antiquated buggy? If the old man weren't so parsimonious he'd want to get a new car anyway!

And why did he (the father) have to act so magnanimous and hurt about settling things last Saturday night down at the barracks? You'd think from his attitude that it was the old man himself who'd had to put up with being cooped in there all those hours with louse-infested riff-raff! Well, he'd thanked his father and told him how sorry he was. What else could a fellow do? As for that damned old Chevrolet, he was sick of hearing about it. His grudge passing with a turn of thought, he smiles with half-affectionate, playfully cordial feelings toward the old man as he concludes, "I ought to tell him to take his precious old vehicle and stick it up his _____!"

Lacking vital elements in the appreciation of what the family and various bystanders are experiencing, the psychopath finds it hard to understand why they continually criticize, reproach, quarrel with, and interfere with him. His employer, whom he has praised a few hours before, becomes a pettifogging tyrant who needs some telling off. The policeman to whom he gave tickets for the barbecue last week (because he is such a swell guy) turns out to be a stupid oaf and a meddler who can't mind his own business but has to go and arrest somebody just because of a little argument with Casey in the Midnight Grill about what happened to a few stinking dollar bills that were lying on the bar.

Adolescents who feel a need to kick over the traces often seek to do so in unconventional, spectacular, daring and sometimes shocking acts that often are motivated primarily by impulses of defiance. Similar impulses of defiance no doubt contribute to the psychopath's behavior. Figures representing authority or respectability naturally irk him. They are smug and meddlesome in his eyes and tempt him to show them what he really can do. If he cannot actually remember his parents, on the eve of a whipping, telling him "this is going to hurt me more than it does you," he, like all people, gets the idea. Through the damage he does to himself he has a way of getting back at or disciplining them, along with his wife, his friends, and all sorts of self-righteous people who volunteer to "do him good" and to meddle.46

It is not necessary to assume great cruelty or conscious hatred in him commensurate with the degree of suffering he deals out to others. Not knowing how it hurts or even where it hurts, he often seems to believe that he has made a relatively mild but appropriate reprimand and that he has done it with humor. What he believes he needs to protest against turns out to be no small group, no particular institution or set of ideologies, but human life itself. In it he seems to find nothing deeply meaningful or persistently stimulating, but only some transient and relatively petty pleasant caprices, a terribly repetitious series of minor frustrations, and ennui.

Like many teenagers, saints, history-making statesmen, and other notable leaders or geniuses, he shows unrest; he wants to do something about the situation. Unlike these others, as Lindner has so well and convincingly stressed, he is a "rebel without a cause."188 Reacting with something that seems not too much like divine discontent or noble indignation, he finds no cause in the ordinary sense to which, he can devote himself with wholeheartedness or with persistent interest. In certain aspects his essential life seems to be a peevish bickering with the inconsequential. In other aspects he suggests a man hanging from a ledge who knows if he lets go he will fall, is likely to break a leg, may lose his job and his savings (through the disability and hospital expenses), and perhaps may injure his baby in the carriage just below. He suggests a man in this position who, furthermore, is not very tired and who knows help will arrive in a few minutes, but who, nevertheless, with a charming smile and a wisecrack, releases his hold to light a cigarette, to snatch at a butterfly, or just to thumb his nose at a fellow passing in the street below. [...]

Karl Menninger, in Man Against Himself,207 picturesquely developed the argument that antisocial behavior sometimes represents an indirect search for punishment, a veiled but essentially self-destructive activity. The hypothesis of an active "death instinct" advanced by Freud is, in this dramatic study, applied to many types of disorder.8,87 In localized symptoms, as well as in broad maladjustments, self-damaging impulses are interpreted as fulfilling their negative purpose.

In the patients presented here the general pattern of life seems to be more complex. Although thefts are sometimes committed, checks forged, and frauds perpetrated under circumstances that invite or even assure detection, similar deeds are also frequently carried out with shrewdness and foresight that are difficult to account for by such an interpretation. It is also characteristic for the real psychopath to resent punishment and protest indignantly against all efforts to curtail his activities by jail sentences or hospitalization. He is much less willing than the ordinary person to accept such penalties. In the more circumscribed symptoms of acting out, in many of the disorders referred to by Fenichel79 as impulse neuroses, the unconscious but purposive quest for punishment might more plausibly be conceived of as a major or regular influence.247 The validity of such an assumption, however, whether or not it is plausible, must be determined by what actual evidence can be produced to establish it, and not by mere surmises and inferences about what may or may not be in the unconscious.

 

[Ruth]

It's also interesting that the lack of ability to remember/project into the future is related to children since some researchers have compared the internal states of psychopathy to the internal states of a child.

I wonder if this 'childishness' doesn't 'protect' them in some way?

It reminds me of something I read on the domestication of animals (can't remember where). Where it said that humans tended to find attractive (and end up domesticating) animals that had the roundest (most babylike?) eyes in canines. It acted kind of like a selection process of sorts. Baby animals with the roundest eyes were selected and given advantage over others and naturally got to pass on their genes to future generations.

I wonder if this behavoural abberation of psychopaths doesn't give them an advantage or sorts, even if its just an excuse to continue to abuse?