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New Clues To How the Brain Maps Time (quantamagazine.org)
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.
Republucan map time since they have no brain?
And they stitch sensory input together to provide the illusion of continuity to the various bits. It's the only way the entire system could possibly maintain the level of cohesion it does.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.
The best part is we're discussing the brain's timekeeping mechanisms -- keep in mind that your sensory perception has a built-in time delay.
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."
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
is it possible that those areas of the brain are associated with the concept of quantity of any kind (length, weight, number) and that this is just another measure, maybe a count of other neural activity in some way. After all, perception of time seems to vary considerably depending on what's going on.
Nullius in verba
No u just stupid
Considering time is directly linked to movement through space it's not surprising our brains use the same area to measure and remember both.
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.
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
https://www.xkcd.com/1524/
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?
Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you tonight as one who was homeless in my youth in New York City, so I do understand the plight of the homeless and know what I am talking about.
Part of what is creating the ever-expanding number of homeless people in the USA may indeed be drug addiction and alcoholism. Another part of it may be mental illness and physical handicaps that prevent people from finding jobs. However, I believe the major cause of homelessness today is the cost of rent and buying real estate, combined with the fact that America really has no large, unskilled, non-union, blue-collar work force anymore.
Therefore, in order to solve the plight of the homeless we must do two things :( 1.) Making renting and buying homes affordable and ( 2.) Then revive America’s heavy industry. To do the first, we need to introduce legislation at the Federal and State levels to institute caps on apartment rent followed by “Universal Rent Control” everywhere across the nation. That will force landlords to play fair with tenants. To achieve the second, we must abolish Labour Unions, so companies will stay in this country. Then a commission should be formed to study and revive the local heavy industry, whatever that was in the past, so that large numbers of unskilled, blue-collar workers could be trained and employed rapidly. In Zanesville, Ohio and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where I used to live, that would be potteries and coal mines. Here in Baltimore that would be shipping.
As I see it, this will not only curb homelessness but it will also help get America working again. Isn’t that what we all really want, a chance to earn a decent living and live decently in a vital, living, healthy country?
Seems to slow down my time by ~2x
I.e. The 30sec electric toothbrush cycle seems... busted. Also, timed distance fails, you turn too soon. I.e. Turning towards a door in a dark corridor you know well. Try it sometime, see whether you can estimate a minute.
Or are you just given the ability from God to do more as you grow older? Minus Dr. Who type Time travel.
The brain has no concept of time. It only has a concept of events. Time is merely the absence of events and the relative structure of events that creates. So, if I want to measure a minute, I need to think of a series of rather predictable events. And that is what the brain does to measure and understand time.
> 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..
I once tried to locate timing genes due to the shape of the protein.... I cant remember the amino acid sequence I was after. Hoping to get back into that project someday. It would be the most important gene in the genome. Worthy of a patent.
Maybe within 10 milliseconds, perhaps... but a millisecond is far too brief a duration for a human being to assess or even respond with muscle memory.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
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? :-)
Put a brain scanner in the DMV office and determine which regions of the brain shut down, making it seem like you are stuck there forever. Mystery solved.
Happens a couple of times per month. Example I'll set the alarm to 7:50 and I'll wake up on my own at about 7:46~ ish. I just feel the need to wake up at that moment and feel nervous if I try to sleep on. My alarm times vary, but still I regularly beat the alarm even on non-pattern times. I guess the only reason why I do this is because I hate being startled by the alarm clock.
And I'm sure plenty of people here have woken up in a dark room and guessed the time down to ~15minutes error before.
space, time... spacetime
Einstein was right, in more ways than one
exactly. set your microwave and sit down to watch tv while it's heating up. bet you get up to check it right before it beeps
This is just off the cuff, but maybe a combination of memory networks, the reticular cortex, and a bunch of sensors that have regular or circadian rhythms?
...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).
-Styopa
Not many of the drivers that I've seen. Light turns red and 3 more cars go zipping through.
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?