When I think about them, it seems like it all happened yesterday. When we talk about wartime, everything comes to my mind, in front of my mind

— 1992–97 Tajik civil war combatant.

Most people tend to think of the past as behind us, and the future in front. But for war survivors the violent past often seems to be in front. Moreover, the violent past seems like it happened yesterday, regardless of when it occurred.

Why does this happen? Do not assume this experience of time is caused by trauma! Some people are traumatized by war, but most are not.

Rather than trauma, the explanation for what war does to a war survivor’s sense of time lies in ordinary cognitive processes we use to understand both time and self. We may not be aware of these largely nonconscious processes, but we use them everyday. They shape our thought.

To research how war survivors’ use these nonconscious processes, I developed a paradigm called the spatiotemporal self. Although my research is about time and war, my intention is that this paradigm will be of interest to social scientists researching all kinds of topics.

Visual Perspective and the Spatiotemporal Self

At the heart of the spatiotemporal self is the visual perspective we use as we think about both time and ourselves. How we see determines what we see, and what we see determines what we think.

To illustrate the power of the visual perspective on our thought, watch this video of a stuntman jumping off a roof. Imagine you are this stunt man.

There are two camera angles in the video. In the first you are going to be looking out your own eyes, using a first-person visual perspective. You start to jump. The camera angle then changes. Here you see yourself as an object from an external point of view, using a third-person visual perspective. Finally, before you land the camera angle returns to the first-person visual perspective:

Did you see how different the first- and third-person visual perspectives of the self are? The difference is dramatic. That same difference is found in what we think when we use these two visual perspectives.

Incidentally, do not confuse visual perspective with narrative perspective! They are quite different.

Time

The spatiotemporal self uses three core time concepts — temporal span (T-span), sequence time (S-time), and most importantly, the internal and external variants of deictic time (D-time).

What we call “time” is a set of concepts, perceptions and interpretations that are clearly distinguishable but nonetheless related to each other. Or to put it differently, time is a mosaic of overlapping cognitive processes that reflect cultural, maturational, and evolutionary phenomena.

The self has four levels that emerged in evolution, from oldest to newest: the protoself, core self, minimal self, and narrative self. We share the protoself and core self with other animals.