Time, Brain and Language

A Philosophical Comment on Kitazawa's Hypothesis concerning the Neural Basis of A-series Time Concepts

抄録

Kitazawa (2017) has proposed an interesting hypothesis about the processing of A-series time concepts—past, present, future—in the brain. The experiments on which it is based can be interpreted in two different ways; they are concerned with either our ability of processing linguistic expressions with different tenses or ability of imagining situations with different temporal specifications.

Time awareness has evolved from that involved in the primitive perception through the representation of immediate past and future to the highly detailed mental time travel performed by human beings. Language seems to be essential to human mental time travel, because mental time travel is an “episodic constructive process” that requires a developed form of imagination, which seems to be impossible without a language.

By considering the two different interpretations of the experiments, this paper tries to find out how our understanding of time expressions and imagining time in specific situations are related to each other.