Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-clues-to-how-the-brain-maps-time-20160126/

by jacobwg • 8 years ago

212 85 8 years ago

Pimpus8• 8 years ago

“In older language, distances were typically given by time — the days it takes to go from one valley to another — since it was not distance but the number of sunsets that was easy to calculate.”

This makes sense evolutionarily. I imagine that for the primitive man, a concept like time did not make much sense -- position and motion were the important things to track. We were aware of change, but perhaps we did not conceptualize of change occurring within a stratum like time. Were there any reasons we would track the number of sunsets before the advent of agriculture?

I would really like to see some research on why time behaves so strangely on psychedelics. Our everyday consciousness is mostly stable and steady so it's quite natural to think of it as dependent on time, as if there is a constant metronome quietly ticking away in the background. Most people assume that 2018 will feel mostly the same and take about as long as 2017. Only when things start slowing down and we peer behind the curtains of our egos do we get the sense that things are much weirder than we'd like to think.

Personally, I think the illusion of time must involve a many different brain processes. Memory is certainly one of the keys, but I wonder if the overall state of connectivity or speed or processing of the brain doesn't have an effect. The ego also seems implicated somehow, as we experience time differently in states of flow and moments of awe and wonder.

zerostar07• 8 years ago

Time was always with us and we have organs that regulate with circadian rhythms for example and brain is one of them. There are also processes regulated by daylight, so its fair to say it always mattered even if we didn’t have a reason to measure it

blueprint11• 8 years ago

The greatest masters in the history of the human world such as Gautama Buddha never taught or used the term "ego". That ought to tell humans something.

Pimpus8• 8 years ago

I've developed an intuitive understanding of what people mean by this term after experiencing its absence and subsequent return. It's the judge, the classifier, the model-maker; it filters incoming information and tries to make sense of it, usually distorting it in the process. Without it, the outside world is strange and magical but also chaotic and overwhelming. But that's just a description, the feeling of its presence is something else. I can pinpoint exactly when it starts to work overtime after e.g. a personal attack as it tries to maintain an undisturbed worldview. What would be the closest analog to such a concept/process in Buddhism?

swamp40• 8 years ago

Wasn't it Freud only 100 years ago who popularized the modern usage of the word 'ego' as everyone uses it today?

JoshCole2• 8 years ago

The same could be said of the term graphene, transistor, computer, genetics, probability distribution, bayesian, nueron, electricity, and millions of other words. We can't learn much from the lack of their use, because the lack of their use says little about their validity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_histo...

awesomepantsm2• 8 years ago

"Ego" is a European word so why would Buddha use it? Please try to stay on topic.

mbrumlow3• 8 years ago

I don't think we have any proof that time is steady. It may just appear as steady. Much like clock based games way back when. You could speed up or slow down the clock rate and the game would be run the same. Only a external observer out side of the system would be able to detect the change.

Edit. But I guess you were talking about our perception of time.

drb91• 8 years ago

This idea involves mapping one time line to another. Why would you suspect a timeline in which our timeline is embedded? That seems like a more interesting question than the shape of the mapping.

PurpleBoxDragon• 8 years ago

If there is an outside observer with their own sense of time, how would we know which time is real? Are they both? It would seem that, even if not steady to the outside observer, our time is still steady. In a world where physics depends upon time, is it even possible for time to not be steady?

kortex2• 8 years ago

Oh man, that reminds me of the time I tried to get Operation: Weather Disaster (ah, nostalgia!) running on a "modern" computer (win98 or xp, vs the intended '95 I think). After much foolery with compatibility settings, I finally got it to work, and it played great... until the final boss fight. It ran so impossibly fast that I would have to be one of those reinforcement AIs to actually succeed. Must have been tied to clock speed.

deciplex• 8 years ago

Well, okay, but we can map different cause-and-effect relationships to other ones. Like for example, I can say that so many trillions of energy state transitions in a caesium atom will occur in the time in takes me to walk to the park down the street, or drive across the state I live in, and anyone with a caesium atom can, in principle, replicate that measurement. And you can replace the caesium atom with, for example, a spring and some gears, or literally any other periodic event generator. (I mean, we can get into what "periodic" means, as well, but I'll table it for the sake of brevity, for now.)

And, somewhere in our brain, we probably have just such a periodic event generator, although it's probably a bit flawed in the implementation like most things generated by evolution typically are, but it does the job well enough for us to arrive at a sense of time that very roughly agrees with more rigorously-derived measurement devices.

Ultimately time is a shorthand for cause and effect, and the fact that causes propagate to their effects at roughly the same speed (relative to a reference cause and effect) everywhere we measure them (relativistic effects notwithstanding). If you have evidence this is not the case, I would love to see it, because it implies some new physics. You would win a Nobel prize for this, easily, if you could prove it.

cecilpl2• 8 years ago

Interestingly, where I'm from (BC, Canada), it's quite common to give distances between cities in terms of driving time.

"Oh, Kelowna is about 5 hours away."

Is this expression common anywhere else?

wil421• 8 years ago

Yes I would give the distance in time if I was telling someone which suburb I grew up in. Ex. 30 minutes from downtown or about 45 from the airport.

I would do the same referencing smaller cites or states/locations close by. 6 hours from the gulf or 2 hours from this college.

TeMPOraL• 8 years ago

I suppose. I've noticed that I often answer questions ostensibly about distance with time units. For instance, I was recently asked by the boss how far do I live from $meeting_place, to which I answered "90 minutes or so". Because what he was really asking for is how difficult it would be for me to get there, for which time is a much better approximation than distance.

Usually people don't care about actual distance. It's not useful for much, unless you're drawing a map. Also, note how new transport options change the perception of the world. 200 years ago, my ancestor would probably not bother with a casual visit to a town 70+ km away. These days, I don't think much of running errands over that distance - it's a 1.5h bus ride away, so I can go there in the morning, do stuff, and come back before dinner (and thanks to the current tech, I can also clock in some work time during commute).

prophesi• 8 years ago

My friend from Houston, TX says it's very common over there. My guess is that it's due to how chaotic the roads are in Houston, so a 5 minute drive versus a 10 minute drive makes a world of a difference.

wvenable• 8 years ago

I've heard this is a Canadian thing -- I also measure pretty much all distances by time. (15 minutes away, 2 hours away, 12 hours away, etc).

This might have been the consequence of switching from imperial measurements to metric in the 70s.

penguinUzer• 8 years ago

Here in Ohio it is common to give distance in time. Especially south/east Ohio in the hills.

There are also congested areas in Col/Cle/Cin where it might take 20min to go three miles so distance is also time there.

graeme• 8 years ago

I'm from eastern Canada. I'm not sure I've ever heard someone give distance colloquailly except by using time.

I'm sure it has happened occasionally, but I wouldn't know how to process the information. Especially since equal distances can take different times depending on speed limits, etc

agumonkey3• 8 years ago

I'd say it's probably the most common encoding for casual communication. Nobody remembers distance (unless for specific trips were it was read). 500m ? 1000m ? well "2min that way" + some external location to help ballparking.

k_sh• 8 years ago

This is common both in the Southeast US (where I'm from; for example "about an hour up the road from here") and in LA (where I live; for example "like 20 minutes from downtown, 45 with traffic")

lozf• 8 years ago

A friend of mine was trekking through a small village in the Amazon rainforest and got chatting to one of the locals. When he said he was from London he was asked "How many days up-stream is that?"

ajuc• 8 years ago

Yes, it's used in Polish (coś jest 2 godziny stąd = something is 2 hours away).

Btw, there's this joke about a soldier asking a sergeant "what is timespace", and the sergeant answers "get a shovel and dig from here till sunset".

poulsbohemian• 8 years ago

Maybe its a Cascadia thing? I'm just south of you in eastern Washington, and I've always done the same thing.

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

In short, time awareness and spatial awareness are linked. Does that mean if you increase your spatial reasoning skills, you could increase the accuracy of your perception of time? I ask because my spatial reasoning skills suck and so does my sense of time. The possibility of increasing both of these skills at the same time instead of just the one changes the cost/benefit equation for me.

kortex2• 8 years ago

That seems to follow. Subjectively, meds that boost my visio-spatial skills seem to also help my temporal perception/planning as well.

goldenkey• 8 years ago

It's all just pattern matching. I would posit that the same neurons that imagine the future, also assist in imagining areas outside of ones' immediacy. Qualia are related to information sources that are orthogonal/uncorrelated.

Try this experiment and see how you fare. When you're in the shower, imagine that the feeling of the water (preferably cold), is like being in the middle of a fire. Imagine being bathed in the flames. Try to associate "wet" with smoke, dancing flames, no pain in any way. It's surprisingly hard but possible. It almost puts me in a meditative state when I try this unintuitive association excercise.

Anyhow, there are learned separations between observations and qualia. I think the one between time and space is such -- learned, not so much due to actual specialization in the brain's anatomy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron

Pimpus8• 8 years ago

Interesting, have you ever had depression? Depression has been linked to low hippocampus size[0]. Would be interesting to see how the drug mentioned by the article affects spatial reasoning and sense of time.

[0] https://gizmodo.com/5874433/the-pill-that-could-cure-depress... (I once read about a differently-named drug which increases hippocampus size and treats depression but I'm unable to find it now)

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

The only time I've ever been "depressed" was when I was also addicted to high reward behaviors. I know these high reward behaviors are linked to both depression and a lack of short and long term memory. It sounds like high reward behaviors (ie: addictions), small hippocampus size, spatial awareness and time awareness could all be interconnected. Or maybe they're separate causes for the same phenomena. I don't know, but it's worth taking a closer look.

I wonder how much it costs to get my brain scanned.

spdionis• 8 years ago

I have horrible spatial awareness but I can easily keep a beat and I've been a drummer when I was younger. As with all these correlations they are probably too simplistic.

ropeadopepope3• 8 years ago

I'm also a drummer. Rhythm is not the same as the awareness of the passage of time. How are you with the passage of time throughout a day? Do you know when it's morning or afternoon without having to look at a clock? Do you know what day of the month it is without having to look at a calendar? How about month of the year?

hammock• 8 years ago

It makes sense that our sense of time and space would be linked - how else does one perceive the discrete passage of time but by sensing discrete spatial differences in our surroundings? The hands of a clock, the position of the sun, the water level of a draining pool, etc..

martin-adams• 8 years ago

If they weren't linked, I don't think I'd ever be able to catch a ball thrown up in the air

phkahler3• 8 years ago

Go to a reasonably safe area and practice the following: Stand still, look around, select a target, close your eyes, turn/walk to the target and reach out to touch it. Then open your eyes to see how close you are. To do this well you need to envision your location and movement in your head. I don't know if practicing this or a variant of it will help because you eliminate the visual feedback and rely on the brains "projection" based on dead reckoning. It does not surprise me that doing this well requires an accurate internal tracking of time as well as position because speed determines the rate of change in position.

You may also want to try remote controlled toys - cars, planes, drones. Controlling them well requires that you be able to transform your position into the vehicle. Beginners tend to turn the wrong way when the vehicle is coming toward them.

Now that I think of it, don't walk around at first. Just face away from a door, look around, then shut your eyes and try to turn around and reach for the doorknob. If by chance you make a real experiment of this or find a way to get better at it, please write about it!

phaedrus3• 8 years ago

I think the question that has to be asked is what is the specific deficiency? What if navigation skill is like a 3 legged stool that needs all 3 legs to work? Different people could be missing a different leg.

For instance in my case I'm actually better at steering an RC car or similar than I am at figuring out which way I should turn myself. To the point that sometimes when I'm lost, trying to relate a map on the wall to hallways in a building, my best strategy is to step outside myself and say, "OK if there were a mouse in a maze which way would the mouse have to turn here?" Often, the answer I get from doing that is different from what my brain tells me I myself should do; always, it is my first-person reasoning which has it wrong and the 3rd-person reasoning which is right.

phaedrus3• 8 years ago

I have problems with time and with space. I got into dance and it was hard because "random packet latency" in my senses messed with my ability to learn and keep a beat. However through the help of dance partners tapping out the beat on my shoulder, and years of practice, I was able to reduce that "sensory latency jitter". I can't say for sure if it helped my spatial sense, but now that I look back, it probably did. I have always understood that, for me, the problems were linked, because you cannot do dead reckoning without an accurate clock.

growlix• 8 years ago

I see a lot of child comments using "spatial" to refer to multiple distinct concepts: 1) coordination and movement in space, 2) visuospatial skills (i.e. intuition for 2D and 3D geometry), and 3) navigation. While many tasks make use of multiple of these capabilities simultaneously, there are clear behavioral and neuroanatomical dissociations between them (thought slightly less so between 1 and 2).

Coordination of movement in space (for example something like grasping an object) is more dependent on parietal cortex & the dorsal visual stream (the so-called "where" pathway), and the cerebellum.

"Visuospatial skill", as typified by tasks like mental object rotation, is more ascribable to temporal cortex & the ventral visual stream (the so-called "what" pathway, responsible for object recognition). However, it often requires both ventral and dorsal visual cortex.

Navigation is hippocampus-dependent. However, the hippocampus is not a "GPS". I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. It is a hub for integrating and associating disparate information from across the brain in order to form representations of and the relationships between behaviorally-relevant states. This explains why the hippocampus is also involved in "navigating" abstract state spaces, for example turn-based game states [0] or auditory frequency [1], when they're behaviorally relevant. It gets analogized as a GPS because 1) most of the research involves spatial tasks, so space is the behaviorally-relevant dimension, 2) a certain Nobel Prize winner does not feel the need to update his theory, and 3) "Hippocampus = GPS" is too sexy and intuitive of an analogy, especially for the lay press.

The idea of the hippocampus as an "associative engine" also helps unify its seemingly disparate roles in "navigation" and memory when you consider that a memory is just information from disparate brain areas that's been associated via temporal correlation because of its behavioral relevance. It also explains why researchers observe "place cells" and "time cells" and "head direction cels" and "eye position cells": because these variables are behaviorally relevant (i.e. important for maximizing reward) in the task the animal is performing.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hipo.22523

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28358077

notduncansmith• 8 years ago

A point in time is an (n-1)-dimensional slice through an n-dimensional space.

agumonkey3• 8 years ago

I play drums, the sensitivity increase by detailed perception of time translates very well to kinetic sensitivity (I can almost sense momentum derivative). Not large scale space though. I do think that most of our senses are first tuned for near future and thus local interactions, not architecture-size understanding?

yosito• 8 years ago

This is a really interesting concept. I'm able to take a look at the layout of a room, then turn off the light and navigate across the room easily without running into obstacles. It's not a perfect skill, but it seems like a very tangible ability to me since I consciously do it. I'm also able to wake myself up most mornings without an alarm within 15 minutes of my intended time despite not having a regular schedule, but since I do that while unconscious, I'm hesitant to believe that it's a real ability and not just good luck. The idea that my brain's ability to count beats in time could be related to my it's ability to track location in space makes me believe it could be a tangible ability after all.

always_good• 8 years ago

If you take enough acid, it can become incredibly difficult to perceive the passage of time with eyes closed. On one of my higher doses, I was in such an uncomfortable state of mental agitation, fetal position under my covers, that I tried killing time by playing a game of pretending hours were passing when I closed my eyes, and I could briefly believe it until an external sound clued me back in.

Changes in spatial perception might also explain some mental visions, like truly massive scale structures that are hard to imagine when sober, but those incidents aren't as profound on acid in my experience, and you don't see them visually. They're more high-definition thoughts.

phaedrus3• 8 years ago

This all makes so much sense, because I (having never done drugs) have a constellation of perceptual issues which all relate to this. I believe I have a congenital mutation in these kinds of beat-tracking and spatial orienting cells (it runs in my family). My mother (who grew up in the 60s) always says, of the few times she tried these substances, "Why would you take something to feel this way? I can experience these things normally, I wish I could take something to not be like this."

My main thing is with time; in the absence of other people / external factors forcing me to be synchronized, my subjective sense of time is "wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff". That is, I might subjectively experience a few minutes as if it is a very long time (like the subconscious dimension in Inception) or conversely I might be doing a task and think only a minute passed and it was an hour.

Sometimes when I close my eyes I experience a sense being an ant in a tiny room versus being the size of Galactus in a solar system sized room, and then warping back and forth like looking backwards through a telescope. That is, the relative scaled distances remain the same but the subjective sense of absolute scale starts to oscillate.

I have amazing visualization skills for reasoning about spaces and machines that I'm not inside of, it's like a CAD program in my mind, but I'm fundamentally unable to track my own location in space. If I walk through a building and take two quarter turns, my ability to reason about where I came from and what's what direction folds over itself in on itself like the collapse of that 4D hypercube house in the Heinlein short story.

The connection to tracking beats was already apparent to me from experience: although I enjoy music, I subjectively experience lengthening and shortening in the time signature even on the scale of between beats in an 8 count. I actually had not understood that music had a beat until I went to a Zumba class for a few weeks and said, "OK I have just one question: how does everyone know WHEN to move?" I had to have someone tap my shoulder on every beat, and the multi-sensory experience like that allowed me to understand what the beat in music was and it was like not knowing there was another sense. (Prior to that I had assumed "the beat" meant "every percussion no matter how rapid" and couldn't figure out how people picked certain ones.

Interestingly, through years of various dance practice since then, I have now got to the point where I can keep a beat, most of the time. But, I still don't "hear" the beat. Instead, I experience it as like that half-breath-taking jolt of acceleration you get stepping onto a moving walkway or if you can imagine grabbing a door on an open train. When I catch the beat I feel it that way, and if I get off beat while dancing and need to catch the 1 or 5 I have to stop for a second with an imaginary hand out to catch that train car and be pulled along again.

While learning dance I felt like there was a varying random time delay between my different senses of hearing the music, seeing people move, moving myself, and my own kinestetic sense that I had moved (I have trouble with sensory fusion in general). It was frustrating to the point of literal tears because I wanted to do it but I couldn't get the circuits in my brain "forward the packets through the network" with a non-random latency. However over time it improved & I think it probably improved my other perceptual issues.

nugator• 8 years ago

This was such a wonderful and interesting read!

Zarath• 8 years ago

Sometimes when I close my eyes I experience a sense being an ant in a tiny room versus being the size of Galactus in a solar system sized room, and then warping back and forth like looking backwards through a telescope. That is, the relative scaled distances remain the same but the subjective sense of absolute scale starts to oscillate.

I have long had a feeling like this, like being tiny by simultaneously huge, but never have heard of anyone else who had experienced it, probably for lack of a good description of the phenomenon. Great description.

olivermarks• 8 years ago

Fascinating article. Time is a human construct, it's interesting to me how the fundamentals of the planet - sunrise and sunset, the two solstice moments as the planet tilts into the other direction to provide more of less sunlight - are overshadowed by human habit patterns. The 'Brain’s Space-Time Matrix' sounds like our true underpinnings, as opposed to our concepts of time by the clock and calendar year..

dmvaldman• 8 years ago

This is a half-formed thought, but if you are blind, how would you perceive space? You can feel against a wall, but you will only be correlating time with locomotion (how long it takes to move your hand against a wall at a certain force) to create space. Spatial reasoning becomes temporal reasoning. (Ignore for the moment you can directionally locate by hearing). It makes this result even more fascinating to me that they are biologically linked to the same part of the brain, rather than one part compensating for another.

c222• 8 years ago

Hearing directionality is also temporal, you only know which way a sound is because you know which ear heard it first.

shiven2• 8 years ago

I am not sure what to make of this. My spatial sense is immaculate - I can sense direction/orientation extremely well - I have near-perfect recall of "way to destination" - so much so that after having visited any previously unknown location once, I can navigate back to it years later without much effort.

Time, on the other hand, is a complete mystery to me - I can not tell if a few minutes have passed or hours. I am totally dependent on my clock and calendar to be a functional adult. Similarly, I have no sense of rhythm, beats etc. Nada, zilch, zero.

wuliwong• 8 years ago

I can think of loads of reasons that both what the article says and your experience can be true. For instance, maybe your neurons are better at handling spatial information? Nowhere in their findings do they imply that the quality of the space and time tracking has to be the same.

gumby• 8 years ago

Do your special skills work as well with your eyes closed? It may be that you’re very good at integrating external waypoints and references, and simply lack those for time.

shiven2• 8 years ago

Vision is an important part of my navigational ability, but I can (very rarely) sense location with eyes closed - eg. with eyes closed on a train/airplane being able to guess where I am on the journey (hard to explain, sorry).

moretai2• 8 years ago

Space is only noise that you can see.

amarte• 8 years ago

Then sound is space that you can hear.

Both are interesting ways of framing space and the senses, but I'm not sure what you mean by "only". To reduce space to "only noise", in my understanding of your statement, is to imply that it is something extraneous, something to be ignored, or at least given less significance, instead of it being actual, existent, a fundamental aspect of reality that we can describe in useful ways. Either way is interesting imo.

moretai2• 8 years ago

It's a song by a guy named Nicolas Jaar. I didn't mean anything by it, I just thought it sounded cool.

stevesimmons• 8 years ago

That article prompted me to reread "Remembrance of Times East" [1]. That describes an Australian aboriginal tribe which only has absolute position terms, no relative ones. So they say for instance "the cup on the north-east side of the table", rather than left or right.

This even affects their concept of time, whose flow from past to future is described in terms of an absolute geographical orientation frame. Rather than me repeat it here, if you're interested, read the abstract of [1].

[1] http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610386621...

agumonkey3• 8 years ago

and thus the space time continuum was born

I find percussions to be highly abstract and mathematical, also probably related to our sense of balance

folkstack• 8 years ago

Time is a path “through” space. In other words, change over space IS TIME. That is why they found “timekeeping” in the space brain. In a sense, they didn’t discover anything. They reaffirmed that time is an aspect of space (or of any n-manifold).

Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

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