A Philosopher Refutes the ‘Stuck in Time’ Hypothesis of Amnesia

Image: Momento, obviously

Try to imagine it: just seeing the present. Every experience is immediately lost to you, leaving a temporal wake of just darkness and void, maybe some fuzzy shapes. How would you formulate a future then, make plans and evaluate possible outcomes? It’s easy to see how this circumstance might lead to something like being “stuck” in the present: nothing behind you, and a corresponding inability to put together what’s in front of you. Maybe it would be more like drifting aboard a small raft on an open sea, traveling hundreds of miles in the cradle of some current, but with the reward just more of the same blue against blue, and the same raft. It’s hard to imagine emptyness being more anxiety-inducing.

The stuck-in-time notion is something of an established thing within psychology, thanks in some large part to a famous patient named Kent Cochrane. Cochrane wound up with brain damage after a motorcycle accident in 1981, leaving him with not totally absent but severely imparied episodic memory, which is what might be called “timeline memory” or the memory a person has of events that are tied to specific times. You may remember how to write a particular computer program—you have that skill—but that’s a different sort of memory than you have of actually sitting down one day to write the program. The latter is episodic memory and it’s distinct from the prior, implicit memory: knowing vs. remembering.

Amnesia inhibits remembering, and that’s where Cochrane was at when introduced in the 1980s to Endel Tulving, the pioneering cognitive neuroscientist and experimental psychologist.

Cochrane told Tulving that his mind felt “blank”: no future, no past. His experiences led to a general belief that amnesiacs experience time differently than those with intact episodic memories. This seems reasonable, but a new paper out by philosopher Carl F. Craver, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, in the journal Neuropsychologia calls this established idea into question. Craver and his colleagues also interviewed Cochrane, albeit very late in his life, and found something quite different: the patient retained “temporal consciousness.” Cochrane could place events in his life onto a timeline and could also demonstrate some basic, functional knowledge about time concepts; he used time in his regular decision-making and had a clear understanding of the movement of future events into the past.

Moreover, Cochrane did not appear to be motivated by what one might expect from someone pathologically “living for the day.” His decisions, according to a battery of cognitive tests, were based on future outcomes and he scored very low for “self-indulgent pleasure seeking” personality traits, the opposite of what one might expect for someone “trapped” in the present. More specifically, Cochrane was able to pass up smaller, immediate rewards for larger, future rewards. 

“There are sets of claims that sound empirical, like ‘These people are stuck in time,’ said Craver in a WUSTL press release. “But if you ask, ‘Have you actually tested what they know about time?’ the answer is no.”

Cochrane, whose brain was said to be the most studied in the world, died this past spring. Craver notes that his paper, first published in March, marks the last of its kind released during the subject’s lifetime. “These findings open up a whole new set of questions about people with amnesia,” Craver said. “Things that we previously thought were closed questions are now wide open.”