Brain’s Internal Clock

Evolution has equipped our brains with the ability to tell time from milliseconds, to days, to years. Keeping track of time is crucial for understanding what is going on around us. For example, we time how long it takes for a voice to reach our ears to tell where it is coming from.

Psychologists use a biological clock model to help us understand how our perception of time changes. When the brain needs to time an event, a gate opens and pulses move into some kind of counting device. Experiences tweak the pulse generator speeding up the flow of pulses or slowing them down. Consider how time seems to slow down when you witness a car crash and how it tends to speed up when you’re on the dance floor in love.

Our brains however, do dot work like a regular clock. Our brains just don’t have what it takes to accurately count the steady pulses our neurons produce.

Many new experiments have been conducted and revealed that our mental time does not work like a stop watch but has several different ways to tell time, and none that work like a clock at all.

Neuroscientists believe that our brains tell time as if they were observing the ripples on a pond. They believe that our brains can compare one pattern of sound to the next to tell how much time has passed. The brain does not need a clock because time is encoded in the way that our neurons react.

How does our brain remember time? German scientists explain in this model how such memory works. When neurons produce a cycle of signals, some come a little sooner and some a little later. They propose that as neurons pass signals along, they can add tiny advances, some bigger than others. The brain can then compress memories of time from several seconds to hundredths of a second, a small enough bundle to store and recover later.

For 40 years, psychologists believed that our brains kept time much like a clock. But if that were the case, how would they explain the mistakes we make in telling time?