How the brain perceives time. And why does spacetime look like a single structure?
We can quite easily separate past experiences from expectations of a bright future. But when it comes to the concept of time, it becomes a little unclear how exactly we feel it. Maybe, really, all we have to do is change our speech, and we will be like the creatures from “Arrival” who saw time holistically. Or perhaps all the necessary patterns are already laid within us.
The brain, the psyche, the functioning of the body… All this seems to be a narrow specialization for a person who is trying to become a little more productive with a double espresso from his favorite coffee shop or a blister of magnesium with the same B6. But what if the path to a better version of yourself is much more winding. And it will be necessary to rethink not only life goals, but also a holistic understanding of human nature? Such strange content based on news from the cutting edge of technology, the philosophical works of Baudrillard, the sociological observations of Harari and the anthropological delights of McKenna you you will find in our community. Welcome.
Origins to understanding how the brain perceives time
Significant studyled by UCLA Health, has begun to unravel one of the fundamental mysteries of neuroscience—how the human brain encodes and makes sense of the passage of time and experience.
Types of Brain Cells
The research began by detecting the activity of individual neurons in humans. The result was that certain types of brain cells were found to be activated in ways that reflected the order and structure of a person's experience. It turns out that the brain retains unique activation patterns from experience and can quickly reproduce them in a resting state. Moreover, the brain is also able to use these learned patterns to prepare itself for future stimuli that follow the experience. These results provide the first empirical evidence of how certain brain cells sort information into “what” and “when” criteria, distributing experiences over time.
The study's senior author, Dr. Itzhak Fried, said the findings could be used to develop neuroimplants to improve memory and other cognitive functions, and were also important for empowering artificial intelligence to give it a greater share of human resources. However, as the new concept says, it is precisely the departure from human thinking patterns that will help artificial intelligence evolve faster and more efficiently. Perhaps up to singularity.
Recognizing patterns across experiences, and over time, is critical to the human brain. Thanks to this, memory is formed, we can predict potential results from the future and regulate markers of our behavior. But how this process occurs in the brain at the cellular level remained unknown—until recently.
Itzhak Fried, professor of neurosurgery, psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences.
Key areas of the brain that process experience over time
Previous research, including that of Professor Itzhak Fried, has used neuroimaging to understand how the brain processes navigation in space. As a result, in animal and human models, two areas of the brain were most active – the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex. These areas of the brain work in continuous interaction to create a “cognitive map.” Hippocampal neurons act as “place cells” that fire when an animal is in a specific location, like an “X” on a map. Entorhinal neurons act as “grid cells,” creating the idea of distances within locations. These cells, first discovered in rodents, were later discovered in humans by Professor Itzhak Fried's group.
Further research showed that similar neural patterns arise in the brain during non-spatial impressions: time, sound frequency and characteristics of objects. Fried's basic discovery was the discovery of “concept cells” in the human hippocampus and entorhinal cortex that respond to specific people, places, or specific objects.
To study how the brain perceives events over time, the UCLA study involved 17 people with intractable epilepsy. As part of the treatment, depth electrodes were implanted into their brains. The researchers recorded the neural activity of the participants as they went through a complex procedure that included behavioral tasks, pattern recognition, and image sequence reconstruction.
Progress of the study
Participants first went through an initial screening phase in which they were repeatedly shown about 120 images of people, animals, objects and landmarks on a computer for about 40 minutes. The participants were given completely different tasks. Determine whether the image shows a person or not. Images of subjects such as famous actors, musicians, and locations were selected based in part on each participant's preferences.
Participants then completed a three-phase experiment in which they performed behavioral tasks in response to images that were randomly displayed at different locations on a pyramid graph. Six images were selected for each participant.
In the first stage, images were displayed in a pseudo-random order. In the next step, the order of the images was determined by location on the pyramid plot. The final stage was identical to the first stage. While viewing these images, participants were asked to perform various behavioral tasks that were unrelated to the location of the images on the pyramid graph. These tasks involved determining whether an image contained a man or a woman, or whether a given image was a mirror image of the same image from a previous phase.
Time anchor in our brain
In their studies, Fried and his colleagues found that neurons in the hippocampal-entorhinal area gradually began to change and closely coordinate their activity with the sequence of images on pyramidal graphs. According to Fried, these patterns formed naturally and without direct instructions to the participants. In addition, neural patterns reflected the likelihood of upcoming stimuli and retained the encoded patterns even after task completion.
This study shows us for the first time how the brain uses similar mechanisms to represent seemingly completely different types of information: space and time. We demonstrate at the neural level how these representations of object trajectories over time are incorporated into the human hippocampal-entorhinal system.
Itzhak Fried, professor of neurosurgery, psychiatry and biobehavioral sciences.
In fact, we are talking about the fact that the concept of space-time is woven into a single structure in our minds, which is subject to general patterns and helps us understand our place in this world. Well, it would be interesting to analyze whether this activity changes depending on what language a person speaks.
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