Homo Sapiens -The "Time Travelers" -A Galaxy Classic

Brain researchers have recently discovered that when we perform mental activities such as adding numbers, comparing shapes, or identifying faces these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark. This "dark network," according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, comprises regions in the frontal, parietal and medial temporal lobes. Gilbert writes that "if you climbed into an MRI machine and lay there quietly, waiting for instructions from a technician, the dark network would be as active as a beehive. But the moment your instructions arrived and your task began, the bees would freeze and the network would fall silent. When we appear to be doing nothing, we are clearly doing something. But what?"

The answer, Gilbert says in his book Stumbling on Happiness, is time travel.

The human mind can move through time from past to present or present or past to future and in any gear. Our ability to imagine future events is a recent evolutionary development, and unparalleled in the animal kingdom. "We are a race of time travelers," Gilbert says "unfettered by chronology and capable of visiting the future or revisiting the past whenever we wish. If our neural time machines are damaged by illness, age or accident, we may become trapped in the present. Alzheimer’s disease, for instance, specifically attacks the dark network, stranding many of its victims in an endless now, unable to remember their yesterdays or envision their tomorrows."

Neuroscientists refer to the dark network it as the brain’s default mode, which is to say that we spend more of our time in other modes. Posted by Casey Kazan.

Daniel Gilbert Video on Evolution & the "Fat Brain"

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Comments

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Time travel?!

Not exactly, more like billions of prosseses thinking of what's coming next, came before etc.

[claudio]

Good article.
However the adaptation to different environment and situations is part of mental and brain capability that has always existed in the human kind.
Now the discovery that a particular brain area gets more interested to 'adaptation and changes' is brilliant but does NOT add much to this genetic capability itself.
Could the brain adapt to allow us to leave on a lifeless planet ??
likely yes.
There is NOT much 'travel' of the human kind by pushing this natural adaptation capacity....
Is this evolution ?? A matter of semantics and definitions.
Some have infered that we actually are 'sapiens-sapiens' (sapiens 2) evolved from the ancestor sapiens.....and so what ???
When our kind will lose this capability if at all possible we will be at our 'sunset'...no more evolution.

[shaw]

mind traveling to the past and future is a desease itself, it bring the brighter worries and anxieties of our past life and a false illusion of our future. So being in the present itself is relief in itself. But if we have control over our minds past future abs present are all good, but we have to control and prevent our past memories and future illusion from blocking us from the thing that matters, the present.

In fact it would make more sense to say that people with alzheumers are so stuck in that unconscious dark gap that their minds don't function in the conscious present.

[shaw]

mind traveling to the past and future is a desease itself, it bring the brighter worries and anxieties of our past life and a false illusion of our future. So being in the present itself is relief in itself. But if we have control over our minds past future abs present are all good, but we have to control and prevent our past memories and future illusion from blocking us from the thing that matters, the present.

In fact it would make more sense to say that people with alzheumers are so stuck in that unconscious dark gap that their minds don't function in the conscious present.