Since ancient times, humans have tried to develop a vision of time and measure it, from the first lunar calendars to the invention of clocks, we always need more or less complex mechanisms to position ourselves in the world in relation to the passage of time. .
Actually, the view of perceived time is very different from real time. We can measure time, but our perception is difficult to quantify.
- Science discovers many facts about the subjective vision of time experienced by living beings.
- Including humans.
A research team located a neural clock in the entorrinal lateral cortex of the brain, this neural clock is responsible for our perception of the passage of time, and it does so according to the experiences we have.
Maybe that’s why, sometimes, we feel that time passes fast, and other times, that time doesn’t pass.
By the 1930s, psychologist Hudson Hoagland had already noticed the existence of a type of neural clock in the human brain, while his wife had a fever.
She complained that when her husband left the room, it took too long to return. For example, Dr. Hoagland noted that the higher his wife’s fever, the slower his perception of time.
Subsequent studies have shown that the perception of time can accelerate when the temperature of the human body drops. Since these early studies, many other researchers have been working on subjective perception of time.
Valuable information has been provided to promote new research. Science is beginning to clarify the view of perceived time, which differs greatly from real time.
The idea of a neural clock located somewhere in the brain has been the subject of research for several years. Recently, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology appears to have located the neural clock in laboratory mice used in the study.
In addition, researchers at May-Britt Moser University and Edvard Moser have discovered a network of neurons that create a spatial map of the environment, which has several scales and is based on hexagonal units.
Dr. Albert Tsao of Stanford University used the results of this research to determine the function of the entorrinal cortex and discovered that activity in this area of the brain is constantly changing without a defined pattern.
Changes occur over time. The structure formed by hundreds of neurons during connection was analyzed, this time resulting in an experimentation mechanism.
“Time is an unbalanced process. Is it always unique and constantly evolving?Moser Edvard?
Everything seems to indicate that this network of neurons located in the entorrinal cortex creates “temporary seals”. These temporary buffers mark events that establish sequences of events.
In this way, different experiences would be responsible for shaping, in a certain way, the type of temporal signal and how time is perceived.
In other words, this neural network does not explicitly encode time, but creates a subjective time born from the continuous flow of lived events.
“Our study revealed how the brain builds time as a lived event. “Albert Tsao?
Previous studies were already beginning to link dopamine to this neural clock. It has been discovered that in circumstances that the brain perceives as “pleasant”, dopamine produced in the black substance is released into neurons that appear to form the neural clock.
It is at this point that they begin to integrate temporal signals, so they deduce that this is how the brain advances seconds, even minutes, towards an event, the higher the dopamine level, the faster the neural clock, and vice versa.
The results of this research begin to give us a deeper understanding of the perception of time.
In addition, this could be an explanation of why events that occur in seconds can be reported later as occurring over a longer period of time.
That’s what happens in traffic accidents, for example, and it would also explain why time passes much faster when we do something that produces positive emotions, or because in activities that bother us, time doesn’t pass.
It seems that emotions have a lot to do with this view of time, it is something that we already have intuitively and that science is beginning to demonstrate.