In an earlier discussion of these problems (Neisser, 1988), I introduced the concept of the "temporally extended self." It was that self which filled out the full set of five, keeping company with the ecological, interper-sonal, private, and conceptual selves. Temporal extension was a usefully vague idea, innocent of the later distinctions that now seem so im-portant - between remembering and remembered selves, for example, or between narratives and other ways of knowing the past. It does not even distinguish between the past and the future! (People are "temporally extended" in both directions: into the past via memory and into the fu-ture via anticipation.) For those very reasons, however, it may still have its uses. Hirst's amnesics, with inadequate self-narratives and no remem-bered selves, are still keenly aware of being extended in time. They know there was a yesterday, though they have forgotten it; they know all too well that there will be a tomorrow, in which they will be just as amnesic as they are today.
All of us know about yesterday and today and tomorrow. We have known it for a long time - perhaps since we were 2 or 3 years old, though it didn't seem important then. Knowing it, each of us is a special kind of self: a human self, to introduce one last and redundant category. The ecological and interpersonal selves established by perception are vital to us, but they are limited to the here and now. To be human, I think, means also to know that we have a past and a future. Of course it means much more than that: self-concepts and moral decisions and private conscious-ness and many other things are patiently waiting for the next volume of this series to come out. Nevertheless the sense of being in time, of living through time, has a special and central status in human lives. Dan Al-bright (chap. 2 of this volume) puts it better than I ever could. "Our lives would be intolerable," he says, "without some predicate, some ballast of identity, to provide a context for the wisps of thought and action that constitute our instantaneous selves. We may be small in space, but.. . we are each of us giants in the dimension of time."
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