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.

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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.

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 Time perception is a fundamental element of human awareness. Our consciousness, our

ability to perceive the world around us and, ultimately, our very sense of self are shaped
upon our perception of time in loop connecting memories of the past, present
sensations and expectations about the future. Yet, the way we perceive time is widely
debated.

 Time perception refers to a person’s subjective experience of the passage of time, or

the perceived duration of events, which can differ significantly between different
individuals and/or in different circumstances. Although physical time appears to be
more or less objective, psychological time is subjective and potentially malleable,
exemplified by common phrases like “time flies when you are having fun”.

 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.

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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.

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 BG is also associated with emotions, motivation and cognition, learning, procedural

memory, reward, and reinforcement, addictive behavior development, formation of
habits and time perception. Specifically, some researchers have investigated the role the
BG plays in terms of time perception.

 Representation of time is influenced by the striatum’s ability to detect similar patterns

of cortical and thalamic oscillations, and then synchronize neural firing in response to
different requirements of time perception.

 An individual’s accuracy of time perception is damaged by changes of dopamine on

putamen, leading subjects to hyper or hypo estimate the passage of time.

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 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.

 Specifically, the participation of the cerebellum on the biological basis of time

perception has been highlighted, but its function is yet not well established. It is
believed that there are two systems of timing. The first, automatic, and the second is
cognitively controlled.
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 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.

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 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)

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 Neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine (adrenaline) are integrally

involved in our perception of time, although the exact mechanism is still not well
understood.

 This timing mechanism appears to be specifically linked to dopamine function in

the basal ganglia region of the brain, and norepinephrine also serves to slow down our
internal clock.
  So for those who are not sure about what optogenetics is, Optogenetics is a
technique used for the study of neural circuits in the brain.

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 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)
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 Our ability to integrate multiple sensory-based representations of our surrounding

supplies us with a more holistic view of our world. There are many complex algorithms
our nervous system uses to construct a coherent perception.

 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.

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 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

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 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.

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  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.

 This is known as the stopped-clock illusion, and it's an example

of chronostasis. The reason behind this fairly innocuous illusion is actually an
incredible act of coordination between your eyes and your brain.

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 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.

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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.