Department of Psychology, University of Auckland Auckland, New Zealand.
Front Psychol. 2013 Jul 29;4:485. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00485. eCollection 2013.
A central component of mind wandering is mental time travel, the calling to mind of remembered past events and of imagined future ones. Mental time travel may also be critical to the evolution of language, which enables us to communicate about the non-present, sharing memories, plans, and ideas. Mental time travel is indexed in humans by hippocampal activity, and studies also suggest that the hippocampus in rats is active when the animals replay or pre play activity in a spatial environment, such as a maze. Mental time travel may have ancient origins, contrary to the view that it is unique to humans. Since mental time travel is also thought to underlie language, these findings suggest that language evolved gradually from pre-existing cognitive capacities, contrary to the view of Chomsky and others that language and symbolic thought emerged abruptly, in a single step, within the past 100,000 years.
思维漫游的一个核心组成部分是心理时间旅行，即回忆过去事件和想象未来事件的能力。心理时间旅行对于语言的进化也可能至关重要，语言使我们能够交流非当前的事物，分享记忆、计划和想法。人类的心理时间旅行由海马体活动来标记，研究还表明，当老鼠在空间环境（如迷宫）中重播或预演活动时，它们的海马体也会活跃起来。心理时间旅行可能起源于古代，与它是人类独有的观点相反。由于心理时间旅行也被认为是语言的基础，这些发现表明，语言是从先前存在的认知能力逐渐进化而来的，与乔姆斯基等人的观点相反，他们认为语言和符号思维是在过去 10 万年中突然出现的，是一个单一的步骤。
