ArticleFrontiers in human neuroscience2019
Language, Memory, and Mental Time Travel: An Evolutionary Perspective.
Article in Frontiers in human neuroscience, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 11 papers.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Representation of Autobiographical Memories Along a Sagittal Front-to-Back Mental Timeline: Evidence from Mandarin Speakers.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- Bridging consciousness to our narrative brain: evolutionary insights.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Modeling the neurocognitive dynamics of language across the lifespan.Human brain mapping · 2024Article
- Computational cross-species views of the hippocampal formation.Hippocampus · 2023Review
- Afterlife future thinking: imagining oneself beyond death.Memory & cognition · 2023Article
- Mental representation of autobiographical memories along the sagittal mental timeline: Evidence from spatiotemporal interference.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2021Article
- Mental time travel, language evolution, and human self-domestication.Cognitive processing · 2021Article
- Experience-Specific Dimensions of Consciousness (Observable in Flexible and Spontaneous Action Planning Among Animals).Frontiers in systems neuroscience · 2021Article
- Did Dog Domestication Contribute to Language Evolution?Frontiers in psychology · 2021Article
- Crossing the Rubicon: Behaviorism, Language, and Evolutionary Continuity.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Review
- Test-retest reliability analysis of resting-state EEG measures and their association with long-term memory in children and adults.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.)Article
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Abstract
Language could not exist without memory, in all its forms: working memory for sequential production and understanding, implicit memory for grammatical rules, semantic memory for knowledge, and episodic memory for communicating personal experience. Episodic memory is part of a more general capacity for mental travel both forward and backward in time, and extending even into fantasy and stories. I argue that the generativity of mental time travel underlies the generativity of language itself, and could be the basis of what Chomsky calls I-language, or universal grammar (UG), a capacity for recursive thought independent of communicative language itself. Whereas Chomsky proposed that I-language evolved in a single step well after the emergence of
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