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Time Perception
Time Perception
Time Perception
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.
Slide 3:
Most websites and books on the subject begin with a candid admission that time is a curious
and slippery concept which continues to defy definitive explanation despite hundreds, even
thousands, of years of trying. Time is something we deal with every day, and something that
everyone thinks they understand. However, a compact and robust definition of time has
proved to be remarkably tricky and elusive. Clearly time is not an object or substance we can
touch or see. But neither is it merely a dimension, quantity or a concept.
Slide 4:
As a field of study within psychology and neuroscience, time perception came of age in
the late 19th Century with the studies of the relationship between perceived and
measured time by one of the founders of modern experimental psychology, Gustav
Theodor Fechner.
Thus, the perception of time requires a complex neural mechanism and may be changed
by emotional state, level of attention, memory and diseases. Despite this knowledge,
the neural mechanisms of time perception are not yet fully understood.
Slide 5:
Research about the holdings of the frontal cortex, parietal, basal ganglia, cerebellum and
hippocampus have provided advances in the understanding of the regions related to the
perception of time.
Slide 6:
Slide 7:
The cerebellum has connections with almost all central nervous system, directly or
indirectly. For a long time, the cerebellum was exclusively associated with motor
functions, however it is involved in different processes motivation, attentional ,
associative learning and proprioceptive.
The automatic system, acts on motor circuits of the cerebellum is responsible by events
of milliseconds.
The controlled cognitively, is formed by parietal and prefrontal areas linked to attention
and memory, being responsible by periods of minutes.
Factors such as the temporal scale (sub-seconds vs. supra-second), the task typology
(motor vs. not motor) and the type of measurement (continuous vs. intermittent) are
considered as (have been considered) the key factors underlying this distinction.
Slide 9:
The hippocampus is a structure of the CNS which is associated with memory formation.
The types of memory (e.g., episodic and working) require a temporal sequence of
successful encodings between events to consolidate and evoke memories. To evoke
memory, time perception is essential in the processing of sequential events, and
includes the participation of the hippocampus for organization and recruitment of
episodic memory.
For example, some cells fired when the rat first enters the sensory deprivation area,
some in the next second, some in the third second, some in the fourth, etc.
These are similar to the “place cells” which are also found in the hippocampus (i.e. some
cells seem to respond mostly to distance or location, while some respond mostly to
time)
Slide 10:
Slide 11:
Although thought and perception appear to take no time at all, they are nevertheless
constrained by the speed of neurological processes (e.g. the time for signals to leap
across synapses, for action potentials to move along the axons of neurons, etc)
Slide 12:
Temporal binding, the ability of the brain to group together separate events occurring
at different time points into one coherent and meaningful event sequence.
As an example, if touch our nose and our toes at the same time, the signal from our distant
toes must take longer to arrive at the brain than the signal from our nearby nose, but we
perceive them as occurring simultaneously.
Slide 13:
This works in a similar way to the way in which the brain makes our sense perceptions of the
outside world into a complete and unitary picture, glossing over any discontinuities and
inconsistencies.
E.g. the way we perceive a smoothly-moving movie, rather than a series of discrete and
separate frames, and the way we can usually piece together meaning from a partially heard
sentence
Slide 14:
In such cases, a person may momentarily perceive time as slowing down, stopping,
speeding up, or even running backwards, as the timing and temporal order of events are
misperceived. When we say that time slows down, what we actually mean is that our internal
clock speeds up, which gives the impression that time in the rest of the world slows down.
Slide 15:
Despite the universal importance of accurately timing events of a second
and under, our perception of events in this range is subject to numerous
illusions and distortions. One example is the stopped clock illusion.
If you've got an analog clock in your house, try to observe what happens when
you glance at it for the first time after, say, you were reading a book or
watching television. You might notice that the second hand seems to linger for
just a moment too long, as though it had been frozen right before you looked up
at the clock.
Slide 16:
Simply put, the oddball effect is how our sense of time slows down when we're
presented with something that sticks out.
the effect is enhanced when a visual oddball stimulus grows larger, as though it
were looming or approaching the viewer. Similarly, the effect is reduced when
the oddball stimulus grows smaller, as though it were moving away. The idea
here is that our brains are trying to highlight the importance of something new
and unfamiliar approaching you.
Slide 17:
Medical conditions that result in, or are caused by, abnormal dopamine levels in the brain (e.g.
Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, etc) may be linked to
noticeable impairments in time perception. For example, in time estimation tasks, children
with ADHD feel that time passes very slowly for them. Some Parkinson’s patients find it difficult to
clap to a regular beat, despite their own perception of having completed the task quite
effectively. Schizophrenic patients may stop perceiving time as a flow of causally linked events, and
there is often a delay in time perception in schizophrenic patients compared to normal subjects.
The brain’s internal clock, which is typically used to time durations in the seconds-to-minutes range,
has been shown to be specifically linked to dopamine function in the basal ganglia region of the
brain, so it is perhaps no surprise that dopamine abnormalities might affect time perception in this
interval range.
Some autistic savants have an incredibly developed and accurate sense of the passage of time,
and may be able to tell the exact time to the minute at any point in the day or night, or to state
exactly how much time has passed, without looking at (or even being able to read) a clock.
An autistic savant is someone with autism who also has a single extraordinary area of
knowledge or ability.