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Need to know the time? Just look at a clock. But if your brain needs to tell the time, it's a whole other different theory. Neuroscientist Dean Buonomano is an expert on brains (obviously) but posits that your brain tells time much more by a domino effect than by any sort of mechanism. He uses an interesting pebble-pond-ripple scenario to walk us through it, saying that "if you throw a pebble into a pond it can create this dynamical pattern. And in a way that pattern tells you how much time has elapsed." Much in the same way, our brain simply looks for patterns. Buonomano goes into it in more detail than we do here in this paragraph, but the science is largely that simple: our brains tell time by looking for disruptions in the moments of zen.

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DEAN BUONOMANO

Dean Buonomano was among the first neuroscientists to begin to ask how the human brain encodes time. It’s not an easy concept to grasp, Buonomano says, and for that reason many researchers overlook it. “The first field of modern science was probably geometry, which was formalized by Euclid around 300 B.C.,” says the researcher, “What’s amazing about geometry is that there is absolutely no time involved; it’s the study of things that never change. And there’s a reason why it is one of the first science fields. Science is much easier if you can ignore time.”

Buonomano was in grad school when he became enamored of the question of how we navigate through time. As a graduate student at the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center at Houston, Buonomano collaborated with Michael Mauk after he heard Mauk’s lecture on his studies of the neural circuits in the cerebellum. Mauk and Buonomano modeled the way the cerebellum’s circuits could respond to stimuli and showed that this type of neuronal network can differentiate between time intervals that differ by just tens of milliseconds. Such networks also have the ability to tune the timing of their responses, the two found. “My collaboration with him was absolutely formative for me,” says Buonomano. “Mauk had this very influential notion that time is encoded in the changing patterns of neuronal activity.”

Today, Buonomano’s laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, uses computational modeling, in vitro electrophysiology, and human psychophysics experiments to explore how neurons and the brain as a whole perceive and respond to time. Here, Buonomano describes how he performed his first experiments on his little sister, bathed mice with antidandruff shampoo, and hypothesized that timing is so integral to brain function that all of our brain’s circuits keep tabs on the clock.

In his new book, Your Brain Is a Time Machine, brain researcher and best-selling author Dean Buonomano draws on evolutionary biology, physics, and philosophy to present his influential theory of how we tell, and perceive, time. The human brain, he argues, is a complex system that not only tells time but creates it; it constructs our sense of chronological flow and enables “mental time travel”—simulations of future and past events. These functions are essential not only to our daily lives but to the evolution of the human race: without the ability to anticipate the future, mankind would never have crafted tools or invented agriculture. The brain was designed to navigate our continuously changing world by predicting what will happen and when.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Dean Buonomano: So human beings have been building clocks for millennium and it’s been a long endeavor of our species from sundials to hour glasses to pendulum clocks to quartz watches to car and atomic clocks.

Yet the brain has been telling time since the dawn of animal species, right? So even plants have the ability to tell time in terms of circadian clock.

So one of the mysteries in neuroscience that many people are studying is how the brain tells time. So in order to understand how the brain tells time it’s useful to quickly remember how manmade clocks work. And there’s a vast diversity of manmade clocks from pendulums to quartz watches to atomic clocks. And as diverse as these things are they share a common principle, an almost embarrassingly simple principle, which is just counting the ticks of an oscillator. So with the pendulum you just count the ticks of the pendulum going back and forth. In the quartz watch you’re just counting the mechanica...

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