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What Makes Us Human?
Saskia Gedin, Martin Lindström & Hugo Härmark
Mental Time Travel
Causal Belief
Mental Time Travel - Saskia Gedin
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Causal Belief - Martin Lindström
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The capacity for mental time travel gives us the ability to relive past events as well as imagine future situations in great detail. It is our episodic memory that allows us to do so. It has been suggested that humans are the only species that have the capacity for mental time travel, although we cannot be sure of this. We do know, however, that mental time travel has given humans an advantage of survival in the past since we have effectively been able to share episodic information and cautions for the future with each others through language.
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https://www.researchgate.net/publication/224826436_Memory_time_and_language
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https://www.brainpickings.org/2014/07/01/mental-time-travel-dan-falk/
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Causal belief refers to the ability to understand and predict cause and effect relationships, and humans are the only species on the planet that exhibits this understanding. Causal belief is to thank for our many complex tools, which is one of the traits that makes humans unique. But could causal belief also have caused language to evolve? One thing is for sure: language is crucial to teach others to make tools, and verbs like "go", "hit" and "throw" would have no meaning without causal belief. Is there really one theory that explains all these complex processes, and could that be what ultimately makes us human?
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The Deep Social Mind
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