A new understanding of how the brain processes the time, may one day allow scientists to improve their individual perception of it.


A recent study suggests that the process of tracking time in the brain decentralized, and different neural circuits have their own mechanisms for specific activities.

This discovery not only allows artificial perception management time, but also explains why our sense of time changes in various conditions - for example, when we are having fun, or we experience stress.

Two researchers from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis taught rhesus to perform tasks that require them to move their eyes between two points with an interval of exactly one second, informs "New Scientist".

Despite the absence of external tips that could help them to measure time, after three months of training monkeys learned how to move the eyes between the points with an average interval from 0.0973 to 1.003 seconds.

Then, with the help of electrodes scientists have recorded a hundred activity of neurons in the side of the parietal area of the brain macaques - site associated with eye movements - in the exercise of their tasks.

They found that the activity of these neurons were observed between each eye moves with constant velocity, which allowed them to predict what will happen next movement.

The slower pace of decreasing the activity of neurons meant that the monkey is likely to overestimate the length of a second, while the faster rate of decrease meant they moved eyes before time runs out.

The results of this experiment suggest that scientists may one day find a way to control the subjective perception of time, manipulating neural connections that are responsible for this perception in our brain.

And this also explains why, under certain conditions, the subjective sense of time may vary considerably.

For example, when a person experiences stress, it affects the amount of chemical compounds in the brain -- for example, adrenaline. And as is known scientists, adrenaline affects the strength of neural activity.

"And in our model, the change in the rate of decreasing the activity is all that you need to get a different feel "much time has passed"," says lead researcher of the project Joffrey Goes.

Dr. GOS and his colleague blaine Schneider currently plan to find out whether they discovered neurons absolute mental clock to set points, changing their behavior to see if it'll affect the measurement of time macaques.