A crucial aspect of the human mind is the ability to project the self along the time line to past and future. It has been argued that such self-projection is essential to re-experience past experiences and predict future events. In-depth analysis of a novel paradigm investigating mental time shows that the speed of this “self-projection” in time depends logarithmically on the temporal-distance between an imagined “location” on the time line that participants were asked to imagine and the location of another (...) imagined event from the time line. This logarithmic pattern suggests that events in human cognition are spatially mapped along an imagery mental time line. We argue that the present time-line data are comparable to the spatial mapping of numbers along the mental number line and that such spatial maps are a fundamental basis for cognition. (shrink)

Immediate experience localizes the self within the limits of the physical body. This spatial unity has been challenged by philosophical and mystical traditions aimed to isolate concepts of mind and body. A more direct challenge of the spatial unity comes from a well-defined group of experiences called 'autoscopic phenomena' , in which the subject has the impression of seeing a second own body in an extrapersonal space. AP are known to occur in many human cultures and have been described in (...) healthy, as well as neurological and psychiatric populations. In this article we investigate the phenomenology of AP as described in the writings of the ecstatic Kabbalah of the thirteenth century, and search for similarities and differences with respect to AP from these and other populations. The article discusses potential common research areas between cognitive science and the science of religious experience. (shrink)