9 ms·

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

212 points by jacobwg 8y ago

Pimpus 8y 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 8y 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
- blueprint 8y 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.
  - Pimpus 8y 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?
    - blueprint 8y ago
      It's not a matter of what it is in Buddhism, the term doesn't refer to an existent thing as it is, THAT is the problem. It's used only by those who don't perceive. Let me give you an example. Think of a mathematician who knows their shit. Now think of that mathematician using an ambiguous term that lacks rigor and therefore introduces inaccuracies in a range of cases. A lay person who doesn't understand the term may use it easily but the mathematician in the other hand finds it very hard to use such a term. The reason is merely that they can realize it's not true.
      - Pimpus 8y ago
        I don't understand, is the "ego" just an illusion? Not the one who downvoted you btw. I did read somewhere that Buddhism doesn't have the concept of ego, which genuinely confuses me as there seems to be a very real process occurring in our brains that labels and categorizes information, which introduces distortion and the "ignorance" that leads to delusion and suffering (in the Buddhist view).
        blueprint 8y ago
        Illusion? It depends on the exact range of your definition of the term. What exists itself is the truth. Who can see it as it is? No one can speak of something they haven't seen as it is. Every living thing suffers.
- mbrumlow 8y 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 8y 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.
    - phkahler 8y ago
      It's Time Turtles all the way down.
  - PurpleBoxDragon 8y 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?
    - mbrumlow 8y ago
      When I was typing that I was thinking the hypothetical observer. I don't think there can actually be one with respect to actual time. But to be able to think about how maybe it does work you have to think as though there was a an ability to observe the universe in such a way. But you are right, if there was a outside observer the same stands, just for that observers observer -- hypothetically. > In a world where physics depends upon time, is it even possible for time to not be steady? I think so. Physics is a construct that we have to describe how our universe works. Lets think about things in "ticks" where a "tick" is just one particle or I should say interaction happening in our universe. Or better think of our universe as a big state machine. Between each new state there are many ticks arranging the matter and getting ready for the next observed state. And by observed state I mean observed by the universe -- or realized. Now we have two time domains to think about. One, tick time. How long is a tick? Would it matter if some ticks took "longer" than others. Then you have the notion of time outside of a tick, that gives ticks its "tick time" or what makes some ticks "longer" than others. If this is anywhere near the case then time outside of the umbrella of each realized universe state does not matter. I may not be doing a good job of getting the notion out of my head. But try to think of it if you were in a video game. Lets take it back to maybe the "Max Payne" days given it is a game that has some dealings with time. If you were playing the game on a laptop and closed the lid and the computer suspended would Max be able to detect or care even that the time between rendering one frame the other went from something like 60FPS (well back then 12FPS) to 2 hours our observed time to render the next frame? We would be the hypothetical observer. Max would not have a clue. Anyways thinking about how time works is always fun. About all we can do is learn how time works from our observable position.
- cecilpl2 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
    - stefantheard 8y ago
      Also from Houston. Giving distances is almost meaningless in this city 2.8 miles away could be 20 minutes or it could be 3 minutes, so time is really the only accurate measure.
deleted 8y ago
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ropeadopepope 8y 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.
- kortex 8y ago
  That seems to follow. Subjectively, meds that boost my visio-spatial skills seem to also help my temporal perception/planning as well.
- goldenkey 8y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron
- Pimpus 8y 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-depression-by-growing-your-brain 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)
  - 8y ago
yosito 8y 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 8y 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.
- phaedrus 8y 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.
olivermarks 8y 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 8y 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.
- c22 8y ago
  Hearing directionality is also temporal, you only know which way a sound is because you know which ear heard it first.
shiven 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
  - shiven 8y 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).
moretai 8y ago
Space is only noise that you can see.
- amarte 8y 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.
  - moretai 8y ago
    It's a song by a guy named Nicolas Jaar. I didn't mean anything by it, I just thought it sounded cool.
    - wbronitsky 8y ago
      Not only does it sound cool, but it is cool! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4krz1cTmmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4krz1cTmmU
stevesimmons 8y 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?url_ver=Z39.88-2003 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610386621...
agumonkey 8y 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 8y 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).
grawprog 8y ago
This makes me wonder about a friend of mine who started taking seroquil....since starting this his awareness of both space and time seem to be nothing. He doesn't notice things around him anymore, can't navigate through a city he lived.in for years anymore, doesn't ever know what time of day it is and his perception of the flow of events seems wrong. He doesn't remember things happening in the correct order any more, his memory of how long things take is off now and seems to now lack a sense of how long ago different things are. He talks about stuff from 5 or 10 years ago like it was yesterday and recent things he talks about like a distant memory or just doesn't remember.

212 points by jacobwg 8y 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 8y 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
blueprint 8y 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.
- Pimpus 8y 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?
  - blueprint 8y ago
    It's not a matter of what it is in Buddhism, the term doesn't refer to an existent thing as it is, THAT is the problem. It's used only by those who don't perceive. Let me give you an example. Think of a mathematician who knows their shit. Now think of that mathematician using an ambiguous term that lacks rigor and therefore introduces inaccuracies in a range of cases. A lay person who doesn't understand the term may use it easily but the mathematician in the other hand finds it very hard to use such a term. The reason is merely that they can realize it's not true.
    - Pimpus 8y ago
      I don't understand, is the "ego" just an illusion? Not the one who downvoted you btw. I did read somewhere that Buddhism doesn't have the concept of ego, which genuinely confuses me as there seems to be a very real process occurring in our brains that labels and categorizes information, which introduces distortion and the "ignorance" that leads to delusion and suffering (in the Buddhist view).
      - blueprint 8y ago
        Illusion? It depends on the exact range of your definition of the term. What exists itself is the truth. Who can see it as it is? No one can speak of something they haven't seen as it is. Every living thing suffers.
mbrumlow 8y 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 8y 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.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    It's Time Turtles all the way down.
- PurpleBoxDragon 8y 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?
  - mbrumlow 8y ago
    When I was typing that I was thinking the hypothetical observer. I don't think there can actually be one with respect to actual time. But to be able to think about how maybe it does work you have to think as though there was a an ability to observe the universe in such a way. But you are right, if there was a outside observer the same stands, just for that observers observer -- hypothetically. > In a world where physics depends upon time, is it even possible for time to not be steady? I think so. Physics is a construct that we have to describe how our universe works. Lets think about things in "ticks" where a "tick" is just one particle or I should say interaction happening in our universe. Or better think of our universe as a big state machine. Between each new state there are many ticks arranging the matter and getting ready for the next observed state. And by observed state I mean observed by the universe -- or realized. Now we have two time domains to think about. One, tick time. How long is a tick? Would it matter if some ticks took "longer" than others. Then you have the notion of time outside of a tick, that gives ticks its "tick time" or what makes some ticks "longer" than others. If this is anywhere near the case then time outside of the umbrella of each realized universe state does not matter. I may not be doing a good job of getting the notion out of my head. But try to think of it if you were in a video game. Lets take it back to maybe the "Max Payne" days given it is a game that has some dealings with time. If you were playing the game on a laptop and closed the lid and the computer suspended would Max be able to detect or care even that the time between rendering one frame the other went from something like 60FPS (well back then 12FPS) to 2 hours our observed time to render the next frame? We would be the hypothetical observer. Max would not have a clue. Anyways thinking about how time works is always fun. About all we can do is learn how time works from our observable position.
cecilpl2 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
  - stefantheard 8y ago
    Also from Houston. Giving distances is almost meaningless in this city 2.8 miles away could be 20 minutes or it could be 3 minutes, so time is really the only accurate measure.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

ropeadopepope 8y 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.

kortex 8y ago
That seems to follow. Subjectively, meds that boost my visio-spatial skills seem to also help my temporal perception/planning as well.
goldenkey 8y 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaneron
Pimpus 8y 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-depression-by-growing-your-brain 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)
- 8y ago

yosito 8y 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 8y 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.

phaedrus 8y 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.

olivermarks 8y 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 8y 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.

c22 8y ago
Hearing directionality is also temporal, you only know which way a sound is because you know which ear heard it first.

shiven 8y 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 8y 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 8y 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.
- shiven 8y 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).

moretai 8y ago

Space is only noise that you can see.

amarte 8y 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.
- moretai 8y ago
  It's a song by a guy named Nicolas Jaar. I didn't mean anything by it, I just thought it sounded cool.
  - wbronitsky 8y ago
    Not only does it sound cool, but it is cool! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4krz1cTmmU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4krz1cTmmU

stevesimmons 8y 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?url_ver=Z39.88-2003 http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610386621...

agumonkey 8y 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 8y 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).

grawprog 8y ago

This makes me wonder about a friend of mine who started taking seroquil....since starting this his awareness of both space and time seem to be nothing. He doesn't notice things around him anymore, can't navigate through a city he lived.in for years anymore, doesn't ever know what time of day it is and his perception of the flow of events seems wrong. He doesn't remember things happening in the correct order any more, his memory of how long things take is off now and seems to now lack a sense of how long ago different things are. He talks about stuff from 5 or 10 years ago like it was yesterday and recent things he talks about like a distant memory or just doesn't remember.