Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time.
| Autor | Merino-Rajme, Carla |
| Cargo | Resena de libro |
Carlos Montemayor, Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time, Brill, Leiden, 2013, xiv + 154 pp.
In Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time, Carlos Montemayor puts forward a novel model of temporal perception. The book is divided into four chapters and a conclusion. The core of the discussion begins in the second chapter, where we are offered a characterization and comparison of periodic and interval clocks (the first chapter outlines the main proposals of the book). Montemayor goes on to offer an interesting discussion of a number of psychological experiments that support the idea that biological organisms use both types of clocks. The circadian clock and the stopwatch are, respectively, the periodic and the interval clocks found across a wide variety of biological organisms. The literature review offered in this chapter is enjoyable, illuminating, and worthwhile. In the next chapter, Montemayor argues that the outputs of these biological clocks have metric structure and meet the criteria required to be analog representations of time. By appealing to empirical studies on simultaneity windows, the final chapter presents a two-phase model of temporal representation. The model purports to explain how the outputs of the clocks could be exploited by an organism in order to successfully navigate its environment and experience temporal phenomena. This ambitious model is the main philosophical contribution of the book and will be the focus of the following discussion.
The proposed model is "two-phased" because it postulates two presents, the sensorial present and the phenomenal present. As we will see below, Montemayor argues that each of these notions captures important features of our consciousness of the present moment. In doing so, Montemayor also takes these notions to recover crucial aspects of William James's famous specious present.
The main idea behind the sensorial present is as follows. There are all kinds of reasons why signals coming from the same source can take longer or shorter to be sensed by an organism. A light signal, for instance, will arrive much faster than a sound signal leaving a common source at the same time. Moreover, stimuli from different sensory modalities may exhibit different processing times. The sensorial present allows the organism to respond appropriately to its environment by integrating stimuli--coming from different sensory modalities and typically arriving at different times--into a single representation that takes them all as being simultaneous. This integration mechanism itself involves two further levels: an intra-modal level and a cross-modal level.
At the intra-modal level, there are integration systems that serve to determine whether or not stimuli are simultaneous. Each sensory modality has its own integration system and is characterized by a simultaneity window: stimuli from the same sensory modality that arrive within this window are considered to be simultaneous. For instance, while auditory stimuli arriving less than 3 to 5 milliseconds apart are represented as simultaneous, visual stimuli arriving within a window ten times larger than this are still considered to be simultaneous. Importantly, only the organism's cognitive subsystems, and not the organism as a whole, use the outputs of these intra-modal integration mechanisms.
At the cross-modal level, there is a further integration system that serves to represent stimuli coming from different sensory modalities as being simultaneous. This system takes as inputs the outputs delivered by the intra-modal systems. This cross-modal system also exhibits a characteristic integration window. In this case, the window is much larger than the intra-modal windows: stimuli as far apart as 250...
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