RESEARCH PROGRAM // STATUS: FORMATIVE

Take the experience seriously without taking the explanation for granted.

The Temporal Adjacency Project is a long-term interdisciplinary investigation of liminal environments, memory, spatial cognition, consciousness, and the subjective experience of time.

It begins with a recurring observation: some environments make another temporal context feel unusually close to the present. The project's first responsibility is not to explain that sensation. It is to describe it accurately.

THE RESEARCH PROBLEM

Existing language may not fully distinguish remembering the past from experiencing the past as subjectively near. Temporal adjacency may overlap with nostalgia, episodic memory, déjà vu, mental time travel, and environmental uncanniness. The question is whether some experiences contain an additional structure: a temporary reduction in the perceived distance between present consciousness and another temporal context.

WHY LIMINAL ENVIRONMENTS?

Liminal environments combine recognition and uncertainty. A corridor implies a destination. A classroom implies occupants. A virtual environment implies movement and interaction. When the expected destination, occupants, activity, or context are absent, the environment becomes familiar but unresolved.

Digital environments intensify the problem. A fictional room may evoke nostalgia despite never having existed. An obsolete interface may feel autobiographically significant to someone who never used it.

What is the mind recognizing when familiarity exists without memory?

RESEARCH TRAJECTORY

Phase I — Phenomenological description
Interviews, experience logs, visual elicitation, field observation, digital exposure, and qualitative analysis.

Phase II — Construct development
A provisional temporal-adjacency instrument tested against nostalgia, absorption, familiarity, autobiographical memory, and déjà vu.

Phase III — Experimental investigation
Comparisons across occupied and empty, contemporary and obsolete, real and constructed, autobiographical and neutral environments.

Phase IV — Cognitive and neuroscientific extension
Collaboration examining memory retrieval, scene construction, navigation, prediction, attention, self-reference, and bodily response.

Phase V — Philosophy of time
Inquiry into psychological time, physical time, temporal ontology, presentism, eternalism, and the experienced present.

Phase VI — Relationship to physics
Only after the psychological phenomenon is characterized will the program compare subjective temporality with established physical accounts of time.

RESEARCH PRINCIPLES

Experience deserves investigation.
Do not explain too soon.
Skepticism must work in both directions.
The method must match the claim.
The null result is welcome.
Wonder and rigor are not enemies.
Follow the phenomenon rather than defend a discipline.

Phenomenological evidence supports claims about experience. Psychological evidence supports psychological claims. Physical claims require physical evidence and mathematical coherence.

Extraordinary experiences should be investigated without requiring extraordinary conclusions.