With the coming of a new year, we think about the time that has passed and what we have accomplished. We reflect on memories we have created, and the goals we hope to achieve in the coming years. But, how do we perceive time or rather how does the brain create time? An article in The New York Times (which I highly recommend reading), titled "Where did the Time Go? Do not ask the Brain,” led me to think about how the brain creates time.
During my research I learned that the way the brain creates time is still an enigma for many scientists. Moreover, extensive research has been done which has led us to believe that certain neurological diseases such as dyslexia are results of the brain’s distortion of time. According to the research of Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at UCLA, and Warren Meck of Duke University, the brain has an internal clock which creates time. It does this through medium spiny neurons which send pulses that are read by the brain much like music.
In an effort to explain how we can skew the perception of time, Meck believes that neurotransmitters such as dopamine affect the pulses read by these neurons. As a result, watching a car crash can seem to us to have taken place a longer period of time than it actually was. However, on a daily basis, the brain makes time elastic, making certain events or actions seem much longer or shorter in time span. Moreover, emotions greatly affect our brain’s perception of time. It is still debated where the brain stores memories of time and how we remember the amount of time that an action took to complete.
Perception of time is not dependent on one sensory organ but rather on many parts of the brain depending on the situation. For example, a sense of the length of an event is thought to originate in the medial temporal lobe, while sequencing events in their correct order comes from the prefrontal cortex. Therefore, understanding how we perceive time has proven to be very complex. Einstein once said "…for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one." Perhaps, Einstein knew more about our perception of time than we know today.
Tags: Cognitive Science, Neurobiology, Time