As psychologist Endel Tulving points out, episodic memory is a form of
mental "time travel" allowing us to reexperience the effects of a partic-
ular scene on us. This is used in particular to assess other people's
behavior, to reevaluate their character, to provide a new description of
our own behavior and its consequences, and for similar purposes.^33
Decoupled cognition appears very early in children's development
when they start to "pretend-play," using a variety of objects as though
they were other objects (e.g., a bar of soap as a car, a puppet as a per-
son, etc.). Now doing this requires a subtle mechanism that tells you
which aspects of the real environment should be bracketed off, as it
[130] were, and which still count as true in the imagined scenario. Psycholo-
gist Alan Leslie demonstrated spectacular examples of this capacity.
Children pretend-pour pretend-tea out of an empty teapot into sev-
eral cups. (They are careful to align the spout of their teapot with the
cup, because in the pretend-scenario liquids fall downward as they do
in the real world. This aspect of the scenario is handled by intuitive
physics as if there were real liquid in the pot.) Then an experimenter
knocks over one of the cups, laments the fact that the pretend-tea is
spilled all over the table, and asks the child to refill the empty cup.
Now three-year-olds faced with this situation, that is, with two (actu-
ally) empty cups only one of which is also (pretend-)empty, do not
make mistakes and pretend-fill only the pretend-empty one, not the
actually empty one that is still pretend-full. This kind of virtuoso per-
formance is in fact involved in all situations of pretense. The child's
cognitive system can handle the nonactual assumptions of the situa-
tion and run inferences of the intuitive ontology that make sense in
that imagined context but not in the real context.^34
Decoupling is also necessary to produce external representations,
another universal capacity in humans. Toys, statues, rock paintings
and finger drawings in the sand are not the same as what they repre-
sent. To make sense of them, our inference systems must block cer-
tain inferences—the path through the forest is one inch wide on the
drawing but it is not that narrow in actual fact—and maintain oth-
ers—that the path in the sand turns left means that the actual one
turns left too. So the interpretation of external representations can be
subtle. Indeed, in many cases we intuitively consider that what exter-
nal representations stand for depends much more on their creators'
intentions than on what they look like. Psychologist Paul Bloom
showed that very young children share this subtle assumption. For
them two strictly identical drawings are in actual fact representations
RELIGION EXPLAINED