New Clues To How the Brain Maps Time (quantamagazine.org) 79
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from Quanta Magazine: Our brains have an extraordinary ability to monitor time. A driver can judge just how much time is left to run a yellow light; a dancer can keep a beat down to the millisecond. But exactly how the brain tracks time is still a mystery. Researchers have defined the brain areas involved in movement, memory, color vision and other functions, but not the ones that monitor time. Indeed, our neural timekeeper has proved so elusive that most scientists assume this mechanism is distributed throughout the brain, with different regions using different monitors to keep track of time according to their needs.
Over the last few years, a handful of researchers have compiled growing evidence that the same cells that monitor an individual's location in space also mark the passage of time. This suggests that two brain regions — the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, both famous for their role in memory and navigation — can also act as a sort of timer.
Over the last few years, a handful of researchers have compiled growing evidence that the same cells that monitor an individual's location in space also mark the passage of time. This suggests that two brain regions — the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex, both famous for their role in memory and navigation — can also act as a sort of timer.
Re: But how does a... (Score:1)
No, you're just not smart enough to comprehend what is going on.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's just turning into one of these WTF threads that you see all to often when there's a major election coming up. A few months after the election it will be quiet again when it comes to political threads unless something major happens.
Deal with it.
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What's wrong with a hugbox?
I can't imagine a Beowulf cluster of them, that's what.
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Republucan map time since they have no brain?
They use bible passages. Less accurate but more satisfying.
Yeah Yeah (Score:4, Insightful)
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Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.
Time is assumed to be one of the dimensions we live in, what if it's only visible from our perspective in our universe but not visible at all from an outside observer? To an outside observer our universe may be just an instant flash and impossible to measure in their notion of time.
Re: As my physics teacher once said (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not 'assumed' any more than distance is assumed. Our universe has parameters. Light travels at a constant speed, or at a constant distance, or at a constant time - it's all the same, just different perspectives. Distance is a function of time or light, or lightspeed is a function of distance - these are just words the apes trip on as they're trying to understand reality in the terms of forests, railroads, and stars.
The relativity of time and learning (Score:5, Interesting)
It seems to me that the relativity of time seems to decrease with age and experience. In School five minutes could be an eternity while when you were having fun it went in a flash.
But now when I'm older it seems to me that I have a reasonable time awareness most of the time, waking up when it's time to wake up, knowing that it's time to stop doing what I'm doing when it's time to do something else and so on.
Overall it seems to me that the brain has now linked tasks to time awareness even without really thinking of it. Only rarely when the task at hand requires a very high level of attention it's easy to lose track of time.
The Slashdot quote of the moment seems to fit this subject too: "Promptness is its own reward, if one lives by the clock instead of the sword."
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I found that my own perception of time improved remarkably after I stopped wearing a watch all the time. When I was 18 my watch was stolen, and I never bothered to get a new one. This was before mobile phones, nowadays I still don't wear a watch but I do carry a phone most of the time - although my perception of time is still pretty good. As you say, that could be age/experience rather than more practice when I was younger.
Hour wait for the next bus (Score:2)
I can't see how going without a watch entirely is practical when you have to catch a bus at a particular minute, and if you miss one, it's an hour wait for the next. Or did you already have a car and enough income to fuel and insure it by 18?
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Correct, I had a car that was cheap to buy and to run, and had a part-time job that was enough to cover it. If I needed the exact time, I was usually surrounded by people with watches OR by clocks on a wall, VCR, microwave oven, etc.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
I have heard it suggested that our perception of longer time periods is proportional to the amount of time we have experienced, so if you are 10 years old, a year is 10% of your life, and a long long time, whereas when you are 50 years old, a year is only 2% of your life, so a year flashes by and you are surprised that it's Christmas again.
Shorter periods are still variable, so waiting for a dentist with a toothache takes a long time, but eating ice cream is over in a flash (unless you have a toothache!).
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getting the measure of it (Score:3)
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If the brain's ability to keep track of time is based on neural activity (I can't help but compare it a bit to ancient computer games that used the CPU clock to determine speed ...), that could be linked to the way time seems to slow down if you find yourself in a suddenly dangerous situation, with the brain going into a momentary overdrive to find a solution before it's too late.
Space Time - Continue ... Ummmm? (Score:1)
Considering time is directly linked to movement through space it's not surprising our brains use the same area to measure and remember both.
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Simple answer (Score:2)
When your are sitting on a turned on oven burner, your brain maps time slow. When you are on holiday or otherwise enjoying yourself, your brain maps time fast.
ObXKCD (Score:1)
https://www.xkcd.com/1524/
Perhaps there is no time for brains to map (Score:2)
Physicists and philosophers have not been any more successful, really
"most scientists assume this mechanism is distributed throughout the brain, with different regions using different monitors to keep track of time according to their needs"
Or maybe this mechanism is distributed throughout everything, all at once, and keeping track of time is just a perceived phenomenological need. ...or whatever that means.... string cheese, anyone?
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Can't believe I wasted my extra valuable time reading that..
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Can't believe I wasted my extra valuable time reading that..
Ah, but if you RTFA, you'll find that what you were wasting was just extra valuable fourth-dimensional-mindspace....
Old old story (Score:2)
> Our brains have an extraordinary ability to monitor time.
If you can't manage seeing speed, either you get eaten or you starve because you cannot eat - talking reptiles, insects, even much lower. You are prey or looking for prey (redundant - not sure for what that's good).
Glad somebody is figuring out the how's after all that time it exists..
Down to the millisecond??? Dubious (Score:2)
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It is a requirement
No it isn't.
plenty of drummers do it
No they don't.
it is not even debatable.
Sure it is, unless you've actually got some evidence and aren't just shooting your mouth off.
Re:Down to the millisecond??? Dubious (Score:5, Informative)
Here's some information on the accuracy of drummers, with and without a click track: http://musicmachinery.com/2009... [musicmachinery.com]
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Yes - my reading of it is that if we have an external time source (the click track) we can keep time with that to very high precision, but if we're left to keep time on our own, we tend to drift all over the place.
Re:Down to the millisecond??? Dubious (Score:5, Interesting)
Well Duh! (Score:1)
Of course the same area tracks time and space. The space-time continuum is 4 dimensional. Would you expect a different brain region to track the X axis and one to track the Y axis? :-)
Simple experiment (Score:1)
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even more weird (Score:4, Informative)
...is our brain's ability to portray simultaneity.
If you touch a person's toe and nose at the same time, the speed-of-travel for that signal and significantly different distances that signal travels SHOULD result in a noticeable lag between the two, but doesn't; even when blindfolded, a person feels them at the same time.
How is this possible?
At first glance, one might assume the brain is 'pausing' the nose-signal to wait for the toe-signal. But how does it know to DO this, when it doesn't know that a toe signal is even coming?
The best theory I've heard so far is that EVERY sensory input is delayed for the amount of time it would take the furthest signal to reach the brain, and then assembled into a coherent stream-of-time order as if time-stamped (but AFAIK there's no trace of a time-stamp signal in nerve signals).
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Nerve impulses travel 200 mph (320 feet per second.) The nerve impulse to get from your toe to your spinal column takes less than 1/100th of a second. I am skeptical that humans can distinguish the difference in 1/100th of a second from touch.
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Science news seems to believe we can tell the difference of tens of milliseconds.
https://www.sciencenews.org/ar... [sciencenews.org]
Yellow (Score:3, Informative)
Not many of the drivers that I've seen. Light turns red and 3 more cars go zipping through.
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You beat me to it. +1