In the second part of his presentation, Dr. Tomasz Michalik presented a justification of how we should work with the past and with history. How can we justify the presence of the past which by definition does not exist?
“The past does not exist but there are remnants, there are residues of the past that stimulate us to think. Anytime you talk about the past, it becomes a mental notion. It is something that in a way exists. […] As a cognitive scientist, it is important for me to think about the past in the context of the place it is located in, which is the mind and the rules of the mind.” The past exists as a mental object. Some cognitive research shows that the abstract concepts of time and the past, which is related to time, is understood as something very material, very concrete. Among various examples, he mentioned the fact that, depending on the language that people are using when they are reading and writing, they picture time on a different timeline, from the left to the right (e.g. in Polish) or from the right to the left (e.g. in Hebrew). Scholars then came up with the following question: “If we acquire the concept of temporal linearity as we learn to read, because our eyes move along the page, do blind people also perceive time in the same way?” Studies revealed that thanks to the Braille language, blind persons also acquire this time concept through the movement of their hand along the page. This example is an illustration of the concept of “embodied cognition”. This theory is based on the assumption that body and environment play an important role in thinking. “The human brain is a part of a broader system in which senses are relevant. […] According to embodied cognition, our thinking is related to the way our senses work, to the way we experience the world, both the physical one and the cultural one.” This explanation led to the following question in Dr. Michalik’s presentation: “Regarding people with disabilities, we can ask ourselves what happens to thinking if, for example, one of the senses works in a different way? Or if the cognitive system works in a different way?”
To illustrate this concept, he presented to the audience a research project he co-created on people with mild to moderate levels of intellectual disability. These persons function differently mentally and socially speaking and they usually have problems dealing with abstract concepts. Time being an abstract concept, how can they understand the past, which is strictly related to the concept of time? “You need to experience space in order to understand time. We decided to look at how such people with disabilities perceive this category which, for many of us, is simply obvious.” This project was implemented in co-operation with a school for children with special needs in Żary. Dr. Michalik also collaborated with his colleagues, archaeologists Kornelia Kajda and Dawid Kobiałka, who are very much involved in promoting archaeological heritage. “We believe that archaeology is everyone’s heritage and everyone should be invited to take advantage of it. If the past and time are abstract notions, we were interested to find out what education can be given to people with disabilities. Our project was a pilot study but I believe it was quite important. We had 14 participants, six women and eight men aged between 19 and 23 years old.” The study consisted of two parts. Based on different tasks and exercises, the first one aimed to answer the following questions: How do people with intellectual disabilities perceive the past? If there is a time scale, how far does the past go back? And finally, what conclusions about the past can they draw from archaeology? The second part was the evaluation of a visit to an archaeological site and in the local memory premises.
Because visual thinking is frequently employed in therapy or in work with people with intellectual disabilities, the first task was to say or draw something they associate with the past. The results were that they took the past for the present or the past for the future, or they gave images not related to any time association. One result gave the researchers joy when people drew dinosaurs. They could make an association between archaeology and dinosaurs. The second exercise consisted of evaluating their notion of time scales.
They were asked what something that happened a very long time ago, a long time ago, and not a long time ago meant to them. Answers were different and often referred to a personal experience, but most of the respondents didn’t go further than a couple of years. It means that, in some cases, people with mental disabilities don't think about the past in the scale of hundreds or thousands of years (and they probably don’t possess the concept of history). The purpose of the third study was to see what conclusions participants can draw concerning the past on the basis of traces and hints present in two different pictures representing different periods of time. In this experiment two groups participated: people with and without intellectual disabilities. It appeared that 80% of the respondents with intellectual disabilities didn’t say anything about the past or history. None of the hints were decoded (for example, traces of a dog as indicator that in the past, in this place, there was a dog). When they were asked to evaluate the visit of the strongholds and local museum in Bieniów with a specialized guide, only one drawing referred to history but represented people hunting. Their evaluations had no time reference. In conclusion, we can say that some people with intellectual