Image: thebraintumourcharity.org
The Story
The best-supported clinical explanation is network disruption. A tumor may impair memory or executive systems before surgery; resection, tissue injury, swelling, or treatment may add postoperative deficits. Confusing past and future is especially plausible when autobiographical recall, temporal ordering, and self-projection are affected together. The exact pattern depends on lesion location and the person’s recovery.
- Prefrontal systems help organize autobiographical information and support the mental placement of the self in past and future situations.
- A person may retain fragments or factual content while losing the temporal context that identifies an experience as past rather than future.
- Tumor treatment can affect several cognitive functions at once, including attention, memory, executive functioning, and processing speed.
Deeper Insight
A narrower interpretation emphasizes a specific failure of temporal consciousness rather than ordinary forgetfulness. In this view, the person may know facts and generate coherent material but lose the internal tags that distinguish personal past, present, and anticipated future. Related cases involving fornix or limbic circuitry suggest that disrupted connections—not only damage to a single named lobe—may be decisive.
- Confabulation may reflect distorted temporal consciousness: experiences or imagined events are assigned incorrectly to personal past, present, or future.
- Fornix and related memory pathways may be important for temporal ordering, even when conventional memory-content deficits do not fully explain the error.
- Memory disturbance can follow surgery affecting structures not traditionally treated as the main amnesia network, such as the septum pellucidum region.
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Featured · Analysis · academic.oup.com
An asymmetry in past and future mental time travel
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2021, 315–325 doi:10.1093/scan/nsaa163 Advance Access Publication Date: 31 December 2020 Original Manuscript ## An asymmetry in past and future mental time travel ## following vmPFC damage #### Elisa Ciaramelli,1,2 Filomena Anelli,1,3 and Francesca Frassi
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Distorted Temporal Consciousness and Preserved Knowing Consciousness in Confabulation: A Case Study
# Distorted Temporal Consciousness and Preserved Knowing Consciousness in Confabulation: A Case Study Behavioural Neurology. Published: 2011-01-01. 18 citations. ## Authors - Valentina La Corte (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique): h-index 19; 1,149 citations; corresponding author - Nathal
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Into the future with little past: exploring mental time travel in a patient with damage to the mammillary bodies/fornix.
Into the future with little past: Exploring mental time travel in a patient with damage to the mammillary bodies/fornix Jacqui Tedder 1, Laurie Miller 2,3, Sicong Tu 2,4,5, Michael Hornberger 2, 4,6 and Suncica Lah 1,2 1 School of Psychology, University of Sydney, Sydney NSW Australia 2ARC Centre of
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