Thomas Suddendorf > Quotes

“What appears to be lacking, even in great apes, is a motivation to find means to exchange what is on each other’s minds.”
― Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals

“reason the current gap between animal and human minds seems so large and so baffling, then, may be because we have destroyed the missing links. By displacing and absorbing our hominin cousins, we might have burned the bridges across the gap, only to find ourselves on the other side of the divide, wondering how we got here. In this sense, our exceedingly mysterious and unique status on Earth may be largely our own, rather than God’s, creation.”
― Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals

“To imagine new events you need an open-ended system capable of combining old information into new scenarios. If mental time travel evolved for this purpose, then the price of this flexibility is that we may at times reconstruct past events creatively rather than faithfully—which explains some of the typical errors of episodic memory.”
― Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals

“Evolution works only on how memory influences fitness, not for how accurately memory reflects the past per se.”
― Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals

“Our brain comprises about 2 percent of our body mass but consumes some 25 percent of our energy.”
― Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals

“In all six domains we repeatedly find two major features that set us apart: our open-ended ability to imagine and reflect on different situations, and our deep-seated drive to link our scenario-building minds together.”
― Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals

“researchers commonly distinguish the following memory systems: memory for how to do things (procedural memory), memory for facts (semantic memory), and memory for events (episodic memory).”
― Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals

“The main benefit of memory for past events may be that it allows us to imagine future events.”
― Thomas Suddendorf, The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals