'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains
npr.org
npr.org
When I was a kid I read a book that said if before you go to sleep you think "I will wake up at Xam" (whatever time you want) then you wake up at exactly that time. Which is pretty weird! We can't do that when we're awake. It actually works, and I've never needed an alarm clock. For a few ultra-important days I used one, like catching a plane, but I was always awake before it went off.
I have no idea how it works.
I started using a timer about ten years ago for mundane tasks (getting done a chunk of unpleasant work, or for cooking) and these days I'll get up from my desk to go check on the oven right before the timer rings.
It works regardless of the length of the timer, and even when I don't know exactly how many minutes it is (twisty analog oven dial).
I don't consciously know how much time is left, but somehow I do know when "it's time."
Haven't tested this on longer timescales (hours) though, but I did meet a guy who said he always knew what time it was because he used to work for a TV station doing the countdown til they go on air.
1. Medications have come a long way, and there's more than just Ritalin (or Adderall) as options. I get the grey scale concept, but I don't think it has to be that way. There are varying doses and varying medications, and you might find something that is almost all upside with (possibly) no downside.
2. You might perceive yourself to be managing / coping fine (and you might be, I don't mean that in any disrespectful way!) but there could be vast undiscovered focus abilities you could access. For me personally, the difference on and off medication is VAST.
3. You might not always have that manager/environment. Or (what happened for me) someday you might (already) have a family, and fewer options for those bursts of focus. I used to work until 3am when I was on a roll, but now I can't.
4. The distraction / multiple threads stuff can have other impacts on your own self-image. Depends on how well it's managed I guess, in the world and inside your head.
Good luck! :)
You are fine and valid the way you are, and don't let anyone call you a disorder.
The definition of a disorder is that it's interfering with your life. So, if it's not bothering you, ALL GOOD. :) You don't have a disorder.
I appreciate that you're well-intentioned. And of course if someone is happy exactly as they are, that's awesomesauce!
But to the degree someone expresses that they struggle with something, and they might benefit from learning more or exploring options, it's not wrong to gently and respectfully encourage them to explore learning/options.
It doesn't mean someone is "calling them" something.
Yes, you WERE too smart to be forced to sit around and learn at a pace that was way too slow for you.
Imagine how much you could have learned if you were progressing at your own pace (let's say top 10%) rather than school curriculum pace (let's say tuned for 90% of students to keep up)
Think about how much more successful you could have been in programming if you had learned calculus by 8th grade, a task I'd say at least half our U.S population is capable of.
Instead, you are forced to put up with the same spoonfeeding as everyone else, and if you don't like it, you have a disorder?
You were rightfully frustrated and upset at this waste of your time. Not to mention how unnatural and unhealthy it is to sit in place for hours at a time.
It's not a disorder, it's a natural response to reality.
Joke's on you. I still haven't learned calculus.
Worth looking in to foooor sure.
As well, we now know that like hormonal birth control there’s no one pill that’s right for everyone so it’s awesome to have people be open to the adjustment process.
From a life perspective, even without medication it’s been extremely helpful for me to see (for example) my lateness for what it mostly is: my brain is driven by the desire to be fully engaged. In the past I have been late not only because I forgot (which is easy(ish) to deal with by sticking to the calendar), but because in the “dead” time before a timed event I am driven to fill it with things I used to deem “worthwhile”, and would focus intently to turn up the engagement (obviously) thus lose track of time and suddenly find myself in a time crunch. Anything from “just a quick level” of a fast-paced fps, fast racing game, or sparkly new mobile game to picking up a sidelined woodworking project or (more often honestly) grabbing a work-task off the todo list.
And, I will say that it feels great to be fully engaged and “firing on all cylinders” (I’m really enjoying Space Pirate Trainer on quest this month), but in the past where I would say subconsciously to myself “This is what I’m made for!” and push other things aside, now I can recognize the drive to what’s unique or engaging as being just about those two things, and I can properly choose what my priorities are.
If you actually want to wake up at the prescribed time, you can do it. If you think you SHOULD wake up at the time, no dice.
If you have 27 minutes of working on something you want to work on before a time limit for something else you want to do, you'll know. If you have a time limit before something you "should" do? no dice.
There is quite a bit of stuff in life that works this way, and it was shocking to me how often I've confused what I "should" want with what I actually want.
If you did not know how old you were, one day you might be asked to guess, and think you are 63, but then be told the truth and come to the chilling realization you are actually 82 and near death. That is the danger of lagging time perception.
Still, some individuals endure the risk of ostracization by carefully camouflaging such payloads to avoid detection. Often they still fail, as the detection systems become more fit through continuous training data and unsupervised learning.
A similar phenomenon occurs on public transit-- waking up at (or just before) your stop. I found that if I've taken the trip at least once, I can wake up pretty much exactly when I need to. Nearly every other frequent commuter I've discussed this with has a similar experience.
I used to believe it was related to subtle audio/visual cues while unconscious, but it might just be a function of a sense of time.
But feels like it wouldn’t be hard for that long term sense of time to be fairly disconnected with a very short term one.
Anecdotally, I had this feeling of time moving more and more quickly, and "that thing which feels just a week ago was actually a year ago" until my early 30s, when I finally decided to unsubscribe from routines.
As I gradually moved away from having a daily schedule, I had more time for unique and memorable experiences in my everyday life, and this feeling began to change.
Nowadays, it is actualy more typical for me to feel the other way, meaning something which was just a week ago feels like it was much longer.
- boring things: usually a slow dirge or filled with brief distractions
- novel things: either no sense of time passing, or a feeling of time going anywhere from slowly to “endless”
- mundane things: time passes “at a familiar rate”, but I remember fee details later
Try tapping your forehead with forefinger while counting up to the time you want to wake up just before you close your eyes to go to sleep..
eg to wake at 6am...
tap six times while saying "1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6"
Repeat 2 times, (3 times in total)
Emotional freedom technique (EFT)?
Seems it is for relieving emotional stress but i had only used it specifically to wake up at a specific time.
In EFT you're tapping on the end points of the meridian lines to send a kind of "reset pulse" to clear emotional issues. (At least that's the concept.)
To set a "wake up call" you (basicplus2) tap your head with your finger, but probably not on a meridian point, and you're not trying to clear an emotional issue. Also, some people tap their whole head on their pillow instead.
You tend to only remember what seem those unusual times. And the more you freak out about it, and wonder what the hell's going on, the more you remember seeing them, and the more you look..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases#Frequ...
On the flip side, my awake brain is completely and totally time-blind. I can go _hours_ on a subject I am obsessing over, and think it’s been just thirty minutes. Asperger’s sucks.
One thing I noticed is that in the last year I have been waking up just a few minutes before my alarm goes off. My postulation is the iPhone alarm sound. It's bizarrely painful that I think I'm waking up just before it to avoid hearing it.
If I want to wake up really early for something I think is important, even if I stay up late, I just need to tell myself to wake up at $time and it works.
Another thing I would like to add is that scientific community should be more open to test conventional wisdom.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10870...
Anyway, anyone who found the article interesting might be interested in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Anything by Joshua Foer. In the book, Foer talks about his experiences with memory championships and fills that in with information about then-current understanding of human memory.
The place I learned to ride a bike is a place I know very well and I’ve used it as a memory palace. I wonder if doing that has somehow modified the perspective on that particular memory. I certainly have other memories which are episodic. Or maybe it’s just so far back in my past and I’ve reconstructed it enough times that it’s not quite as personal or visceral.
These things are surprisingly little studied, for example aphantasia has only really seen scientific interest in the last ten years. We all seem to assume that everyone's experience is the same as ours, only slowly discovering how untrue that really is. Even something "obvious" like colour blindness in only known for about 250 years.
It works wonders for me personally to see code blocks as literal blocks that do X and connect to other blocks via graph edges. Then I pseudocode what I want and replace.
Whiteboarding is a bit difficult if I can't visualize transformations or stores of data in some way, or if I can't see a theoretical big picture for a particular function.
SDAM isn't a recognised 'condition' as such, but it has a subreddit with some active users to compare your experiences with which you may find useful.
That list is pretty long, I'm not sure how to feel about that. (Probably because I generally seem to have less extreme emotional reactions)
A study from May 2020 [1] seems to show a strong correlation between these symptoms, suggesting that the underlying cause may be the same.
On a related note... If you suspect that you have one of these conditions, is there someone you can talk to for confirmation? Are there people who specialize in... bad brain RAM?
The effect wore off by the next day. He was never able to recreate the effect, but he kept a battery of experiments at the ready of it ever happened again. He expressed regret at not being able to carry them out.
He once said that the experience changed his perception of death. If time were to continue dilating, asymptotically approaching a halting of time, then one might never die in their own experience.
We use our senses to detect/experience dimensions, right? I mean, we use sight, hearing, touch to detect 3-D space, for example (not forgetting taste and smell too).
If time is the fourth dimension, maybe these cells are our evolutionary attempt to sense/detect and operate within that dimension.
Which explains how the experience of time travel could be possible in at least one way - if we can change/affect our sense/perception of time (um.. navigating time?), it can seem to us like time travel. I'm not saying we would be affecting the timeline itself in this case, I mean more like messing with the sense of time that causes us to "experience" time travel.
Ok sorry, that does too sound like too much armchair pseudoscience, but this article and some of the other comments just got me thinking.
There's a whole field of study (often decried as pseudoscience) of the structure of subjective experience called Neurolinguistic Programming. Within it there's a constellation of concepts and techniques around deliberately altering your subjective experience.
For example, the first person / third person difference is referred to as "associated" / "disassociated" in the NLP jargon, and you can change which "mode" you use for a given memory and that will (typically) change the subjective effects of the memory.
You can use this to e.g., fall in(out) of love with someone. Recall all the good times with that person in associated(disassociated) mode and all the bad times with that person in disassociated(associated) mode and it will (typically) have a profound effect on your feeling towards that person.
Neat, eh?
There's a whole body of work around manipulation of time-coding. Some people see e.g. the past to the left and the future to the right,while others have the past behind them and the future ahead of them. Those are just two common styles of "timeline". Changing your time-coding can have profound effects on your psychology.
The real information revolution has only just begun and it doesn't have a lot to do with tiny transistors, if you catch my drift.
I seldom remember what I dream, but when I do it's usually right before I wake up in the morning, and it feels like being in a movie. I often get aware that I'm dreaming and can control the movie (dream) to some extent. I can then get really annoyed when the alarm clock goes off before the exciting part is over.
Somewhat related, while I can't visualize memories I do visualize dreams. That would leave me to believe that dreams are fundamentally different (see also how the body has to seize many motor functions during dreaming, but we can use all of them during remembering).
I always thought this mainly had to do with ADD related working memory problems, but maybe it's more of an episodic memory problem?
I always attributed this to being home schooled (really just kind of free-range unschooled) until I was 14. I feel like I'm missing a lot of date-significant markers like passing from one grade to the next that most people have.
Not being able to recall the year something occurred if you don't reflect on that memory every so often seems "normal" as well.
https://www.hhmi.org/news/researchers-discover-molecular-pac...
https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/08/408006/searching-brain-cel...
We can be aware of our breathing or not, yawn, and hold our breath. I imagine we can do similar with our sense of time: count seconds, have a sense of time, and lose our sense of time (on purpose or by accident).
The prior probability of the researcher being wrong about facts in their own field is much lower.
Therefore the default assumption one should have when reviewing research from a field that is NOT their own is closer to "I am the idiot" than "The researchers are the idiots".
in my humble opinion.
I have no problem with the paper authors. Most of the authors on the paper come from neurosurgery/neurology, and I don't doubt for one second that they have a strong grasp of "I can mess with the human brain in these ways and I'll get these behaviors". They shouldn't be expected to know everything we've ever looked at for time in the brain.
I am frustrated at one of the ways science journalism tends to report on neuroscience. I think they want to do it like they do physics, and it affects how people outside the field think. Rather than considering the brain as a complex system, we're looking for the Jennifer Anniston neuron, or time cells, or some single component that explains consciousness, much like we looked for the "god particle" (Higgs) or gravitational waves. It's not a great way to look at things.
My original comment on fragmentation is just my own opinion. Maybe it's not as much of a barrier as I think it is.
Anyhow, I've now read much more of the two linked papers, and some related papers.
In the 2011 paper linked from the NPR article, under "Neuronal Ensembles Signal Time, as well as Location and Behavior, during the Delay Period" (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731...) "time cells" are defined under their relation to "place cells". As far as I can tell, this paper coined the term. Now, in this paper, they aren't sure if the time cells are scalar time (Gibbon) or non-linear time (Staddon and Higa) or some combination of the two. Well, Gibbon's scalar expectancy theory for timing (SET) uses pacemaker cells in the theory. Now other papers do want to move away from pacemaker cells: Staddon and Higa point out that the "Weber law" that SET depends on doesn't scale well, so they have other theories. However, I could still imagine that pacemaker and timestamping neural circuits would work together, no?
This review article of timing in the brain seems helpful, though I don't have time to read it fully today: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731... It covers oscillators (pacemaker-accumulator/SET), ramping, and population clocks ("time cells" and other names). I find it problematic that the NPR article only focuses on one name for one possible explanation of the observed behavior. It makes for a nice article, and the metaphor of time cells and place cells are attractive. It doesn't leave
Time cells seem to invoke a chain of neurons firing, to encode events along the chain. I can believe that this orders events on the order of tens of seconds (the literature surveys from milliseconds to tens of seconds). But the NPR article suggests that the ordering of an entire tour of UCSD is also encoded in time cells. I doubt that there was one unending chain of ordering for that entire tour. Personally, I find that I have to reason about time on longer time scales, or I might mix up a recollection of how a story goes. (Once I tell a story a few times, I've learned a new skill--how to tell the story--so it becomes easier to recall a sequence I've chosen to highlight.)
If I can manage to do 'thing a', I find that often, all the world falls away - regardless of what the thing is.
I also have a theory, completely unfounded and out of my own ass, that ADHD and other similar issues are just part of the spectrum that is autism. Any scientist want to confirm my personal belief?
It’s generally understood that the effects of ADHD diminish as you get older but the effects of Autism do not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
As for your question, yes! I don't need to actually close my eyes, I can think about certain things and see a vivid image of it deep inside of my mind.
If you need something to compare it to, can you actually hear music in your "mind" when you think about a song? It's kinda like that.
However we can say HN is the site where people with aphantasia feel safe when describing what they experience.
I have dreams and I can visualize things, but it's never like I'm "watching" a dream or memory. While I'm dreaming it feels real, but when I recall a dream it feels visually distinct from a lived experience. It's like I "see" things but my eyes aren't doing the seeing. Is that what others experience, or are dreams visually identical to the real world?
https://youtu.be/CA-YsWXRSHU?t=448
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabidopsis_thaliana#Light_sen...
It records ~40 days of temperature in a certain range, and remembers it till it senses the light of spring. If it's put into a dark room after 40 days, it waits till it senses light to flower, so it must be remembering those memories of cold temperatures.