
Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time - jacobwg
https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-clues-to-how-the-brain-maps-time-20160126/
======
always_good
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
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.

~~~
nugator
This was such a wonderful and interesting read!

~~~
mywittyname
It makes me wish HN had a "super-upvote," or something like Reddit gold that
flags a post as being more significant or notable than would be expected.

------
Pimpus
> “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.

~~~
cecilpl2
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?

~~~
prophesi
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
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.

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ropeadopepope
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.

~~~
phkahler
Go to a reasonably safe area and practice the following: Stand still, look
around, select a target, close your eyes, turn/walk to the target and reach
out to touch it. Then open your eyes to see how close you are. To do this well
you need to envision your location and movement in your head. I don't know if
practicing this or a variant of it will help because you eliminate the visual
feedback and rely on the brains "projection" based on dead reckoning. It does
not surprise me that doing this well requires an accurate internal tracking of
time as well as position because speed determines the rate of change in
position.

You may also want to try remote controlled toys - cars, planes, drones.
Controlling them well requires that you be able to transform your position
into the vehicle. Beginners tend to turn the wrong way when the vehicle is
coming toward them.

Now that I think of it, don't walk around at first. Just face away from a
door, look around, then shut your eyes and try to turn around and reach for
the doorknob. If by chance you make a real experiment of this or find a way to
get better at it, please write about it!

~~~
phaedrus
I think the question that has to be asked is what is the specific deficiency?
What if navigation skill is like a 3 legged stool that needs all 3 legs to
work? Different people could be missing a different leg.

For instance in my case I'm actually _better_ at steering an RC car or similar
than I am at figuring out which way I should turn myself. To the point that
sometimes when I'm lost, trying to relate a map on the wall to hallways in a
building, my best strategy is to step outside myself and say, "OK if there
were a mouse in a maze which way would the mouse have to turn here?" Often,
the answer I get from doing that is different from what my brain tells me I
myself should do; always, it is my first-person reasoning which has it wrong
and the 3rd-person reasoning which is right.

~~~
phkahler
That has to be one of the most interesting things I've read. I'm going to pay
attention to my own navigation skills now as there are some gaps may be
similarly odd seeming. There seems to be a distinction between the map/real-
world and just navigating the real world without feedback.

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yosito
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.

------
shiven
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.

~~~
gumby
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
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).

------
stevesimmons
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...](http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610386621?url_ver=Z39.88-2003)

------
folkstack
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).

------
olivermarks
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
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
Hearing directionality is also temporal, you only know which way a sound is
because you know which ear heard it first.

------
moretai
Space is only noise that you can see.

~~~
amarte
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
It's a song by a guy named Nicolas Jaar. I didn't mean anything by it, I just
thought it sounded cool.

~~~
wbronitsky
Not only does it sound cool, but it is cool!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4krz1cTmmU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4krz1cTmmU)

------
agumonkey
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

