

Scientists find brain cells that keep track of time with extreme precision - dskhatri
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/brain-stopwatch.html

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coffeemug
I wonder what indexing method the brain uses to index all the events by time.
I wouldn't be surprised if binary search trees were somehow involved...

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jacquesm
That's a good question. To me the closest thing I can get to describing it is
onion rings. You remember one thing, and then you remember something that came
before that, and so on.

Try to remember the first time you met someone that you know well. It's sort
of like a small movie with moments played backwards until that person wasn't
in my life, then a bit of jiggling around the 'focal' point, and then some
really hard thinking to try to pin it down, pulling in all kinds of auxiliary
data to make the final determination.

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Daniel_Newby
A process resembling this has actually been measured. Scientists wired
electrodes into the brain of a rat, and ran it through a physical activity
while recording nerve signals. They left the recorders going afterwards and
accidentally noticed that the same signal patterns were being replayed in
reverse order.

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jeromec
Do you know where I might read more about this? Do you remember what they were
studying?

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Daniel_Newby
Here is a decent article about the research:
<http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=2325>

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jeromec
Thanks! :)

