Revealing the Architecture of Thinking. Humanizing AI.
Decades of research into the architecture of human cognition, revealing the temporal patterns behind every thought, decision, connection, and action. This is the foundation that now allows us to build cognition-aware AI.
The Science Behind MindTime
Past Thinkers
seek certainty, structure, and meaning from what has come before. They value experience, reliability, and depth.
Present Thinkers
Prioritize relevance, continuity, and action in the now. They bring pragmatism and momentum to ideas.
Future Thinkers
Are inspired by what could be. They embrace emergence, innovation, and visionary possibilities.
Each person uses all three, but in different proportions. MindTime reveals this mix with precision. This clarity unlocks cognition-aware applications in communication, leadership, and AI.
Discover the MindTime Map
Where Time Becomes Mind.
Step inside the MindTime framework with its creator, John Furey. In this short talk, he walks you through the cognitive map that illustrates each person’s thinking, in time.
Precision in 60 Seconds
A full cognitive profile from just three vectors completed in as little as a minute.
Using just three carefully designed vectors, MindTime captures a person’s cognitive pattern with reliable accuracy in under 60 seconds. This method provides high-fidelity, first-party insight without relying on behavioral inference or personal tracking.
Science-Backed and Field-Tested
Built on 25 years of research and real-world application.
MindTime has been tested and applied in many contexts. It is peer-reviewed and published in leading scientific journals. Validated through academic studies and integrated into many programs, the framework has proven itself and now powers the next evolution in intelligent systems.
A Priori Insight Advantage
The fastest way to access authentic, predictive audience understanding.
MindTime uncovers thinking styles before behavior happens. It enables true first-party intelligence without tracking. This a priori insight captures how people think before they act. It is uniquely positioned to deliver predictive insights that are not biased by historical behavior or digital surveillance. This capability is essential for building ethical, cognition-aware AI.
Peer reviewed Articles
MindTime’s cognitive framework is grounded in rigorous scientific inquiry. Over the past three decades, our framework has been validated in peer-reviewed psychology journals, presented at leading academic conferences, and tested across diverse populations. These publications represent the foundation of a science designed not just to describe behavior, but to explain how we think, decide, and relate. This is the groundwork for a new era of human-aligned systems.
According to the theory of MindTime, the ability of human beings to dissociate from the present moment and engage in mental time travel gave rise to the development of three distinct thinking perspectives: Past, Present, and Future thinking, and the extent to which individuals utilize the three thinking perspectives, in combination, influences the types of task environments they prefer. In this study, we took a profile approach and examined the extent to which individuals manifest different patterns of thinking styles based on their thinking perspective profile. Six hundred and eighty-three graduate students enrolled in an online university participated in the study.
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This manuscript introduces a theory of individual differences based on the arguably unique ability of human beings to engage in mental time travel (Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997). The Theory of MindTime posits that the ability to engage in mental time travel gave rise to the development of three distinct patterns of thinking: Past thinking, Future thinking, and Present thinking, and that measurable individual differences exist in the extent to which each of the three thinking perspectives are utilized
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Based on recent advances in cognitive and comparative psychology, we posit that the arguably unique human ability to decouple primary mental representations from the present moment and place them into different temporal localities (i.e., form secondary mental representations of objects) as well as the ability to form higher-order mental representations of secondary representations (meta-representations) gave rise to the development of three distinct patterns of thinking: Future thinking, Past thinking, and Present thinking. Moreover, we posit that measurable individual differences exist in the extent to which each of the three thinking perspectives are utilized and that such differences influence the manifestation and expression of personality and well-being.
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According to the Theory of MindTime (Fortunato & Furey, 2009; Furey, 1994; Furey & Stevens, 2004), (a) three distinct patterns of thinking – Past thinking, Present thinking, and Future thinking – evolved in concert with the ability of Homo Sapiens to engage in mental time travel (e.g. Suddendorf & Corballis, 1997) and (b) measurable individual differences exist in the extent to which people utilize the three thinking perspectives. In this manuscript, we compare and contrast the three thinking perspectives with the constructs of time perspective and time orientation.
Download your free copyHuman Understanding Is the Foundation of Every Great Innovation
In a world of models built on noise, MindTime listens to thought itself. Rooted in how people truly think, it brings clarity to complexity and insight to the soul of behavior. This clarity now powers Clarissimo and the cognition-aware AI systems of tomorrow.
MindTime is the human science behind how we think. Built on 25 years of research, it reveals the hidden architecture of thought; past, present, and future. It empowers people to understand one another in profoundly meaningful ways though a powerful framework for trust, collaboration, and human-aligned technology.
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