The Neuroscience and Physics of Time

This event is part of the Eugene J. Surowitz and Helen M. Teclaw Program in Neuroscience.

Time lies at the center of a perfect storm of unsolved scientific mysteries: consciousness, free will, relativity, and quantum gravity. The problem of time is particularly fundamental in neuroscience because the brain is in a sense a time machine: it tells time, stores information about the past in order to predict the future, allows us to engage in mental time travel, and creates the subjective conscious feeling of temporal flow—an experience, that, according to some, is at odds with the laws of physics. Because of the fundamental importance of time, the brain can tell time across a broad temporal range: from milliseconds to days and beyond. But in contrast to the clocks on our wrists, which rely on the same mechanisms, the brain uses fundamentally different mechanisms to tell time across scales. We have proposed that on the time scale of seconds some forms of timing rely on population clocks: time-varying patterns of neural activity that emerge from the dynamics of recurrent neural circuits. In my talk I will present experimental and computational support for this view, and briefly explore the tension between the neuroscience and physics of time.

Dean Buonomano is a professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology, and a member of the Integrative Center for Learning and Memory at UCLA. He is a computational and experimental neuroscientist, and leading expert on how the brain tells time. Buonomano is the author of Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time and Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Shape our Lives.