If you disconnect your computer, throw clock and stop watch mobile phone, you will still not get rid of the feeling of passing minutes, hours and days. The brain has its own sense of time. Previously it was assumed that in the Central nervous system has a separate area-timer. As shown by recent experiments, the sense of time in the brain decentralized. For each and every task he gets a separate "watch" in different areas. It is an evolutionary mechanism, formed over millions of years. The sense of time, by the way, is characteristic not only to people, it is, and the animals.

Employees of Edinburgh University has created artificial flowers with sugar inside, to learn how to cope with a countdown hummingbirds. When birds drink nectar from these colors, some time is required to supply of nectar in plants recovered. Therefore, Scottish researchers "add" artificial flowers at intervals. In some colours stock of sugar syrup is updated every 10 minutes, others through every 20 minutes. Birds quickly realized how long to wait before you can go back to whatever colors.

Scientists from the University of Georgia found that rats too good at timing. They can learn to wait two days after a meal before he run up to the tray and to receive remuneration in the form of food.

Previously it was thought that in the brains of humans and animals, there is a separate area, responsible for counting time periods. This role is usually offered basal ganglia or cerebellum. The scientists believed that in one of these departments are generated regular sequence of pulses that acts as a timer. This idea is well explained "acceleration" time (while watching interesting movie or friendly talk, recreation) and "the slowdown" in times of stress, during boring lectures, and so forth.

However, the model of a single timer had its weaknesses - for example, did not explain in what way responsible for the Department gets several hours: working hours will be over in six hours, the meeting will be in half an hour, you need to call my mother in the middle of the day and dine after two...

Wanting to find out how our brain still thinks the time, neuroscientists from the University of Minnesota (USA) carried out experiments on rhesus monkeys. Unlike people-volunteers, they have no idea about the seconds and minutes and simply would not have been able to peek time on the phone or hours. Experimenters trained monkeys times per second to translate eyes from one point on the screen to another. Using only its own internal sense of time, for the three months macaques learned how to move the eyes with the set speed. The time interval of the movements of their eyes wavered between 1,003 and 0,973 seconds.

After that, scientists have tried to trace activity of hundreds of neurons in the lateral parietal cortex, where is the center of control eye movements. According to researchers at the portal PLoS ONE, between the eye movements activity of these neurons faded. Moreover, the rate of attenuation corresponded to the time interval between the movements: if it lasted too long, the monkey was waiting for longer than a second; if the activity of neurons fell too soon, the monkey looked a little earlier. That is, the neurons responsible, and eye movement, started its own timer.

Thus, the sense of time is encrypted in neurons, directly responsible for the action, according to the scientists. Because during the day we both exist on multiple time scales - every day I go to bed several times a day to eat, to a specific time we go to work and plan to do different duration - suggests that neural circuits that monitor for hours, in our brain, a lot.

Allocation of temporary duties for a specific task, apparently, much more efficiently than a focus timing in one single structure. But exactly how neurons regulate its own activity, adjusting it under the right rhythm, still remains a mystery.

The results of this experiment anticipated Dean Buonomano, a neuroscientist at the University of California in Los Angeles. In the end of 2000-ies he suggested that the timing in the brain can be likened ripples radiating surface of a pond. For example, you listen to the birds singing, and two sound in this song is distributed between a tenth of a second. The first sound stimulates the auditory neurons. They are activated and chain transfer the excitation in the next nerve cell. These signals are posted on neurons for approximately half a second.

When the bird publishes the second sound, the neurons are not yet calmed down, and as a result, this second note creates another sequence of signals. Buonomano said that the brain can compare the second sequence from the first to the results of this comparison is to find out how much time had passed. The brain is not the right watch, he argued, because the time is encoded in the behavior of neurons. As we see, in fact he was right. However, the exact mechanism of this process, scientists have yet to discover.

The perception of time is definitely depends on the biochemistry of the brain. Certain neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, control pulsating neurons. Drugs that cause a sharp dopamine - for example, cocaine or methamphetamine - change the state of the brain and second change the perception of time.

In 2007 employees of the University of California published the results of the experiment with the participation of healthy people and drug addicts. Scientists gave two calls between 53 seconds and asked volunteers, many seconds, in their opinion, lasted silence.

Healthy people are, on average cited the figure of 67 seconds (some elongation of the interval can be explained by psychological factors: the silence, the presence in a room of strangers, suspense). People taking stimulants, assumed that was 91 seconds. Thus, it was experimentally proved, that other substances having the opposite dopamine action, subjectively compress time.