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Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

quantamagazine.org

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Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

#41

Post by phkahler »

drb91 wrote: post #7
mbrumlow wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think we have any proof that time is steady. It may just appear as steady. Much like clock based games way back when. You could speed up or slow down the clock rate and the game would be run the same. Only a external observer out side of the system would be able to detect the change. Edit. But I guess you were talking about our perception of time.

This idea involves mapping one time line to another. Why would you suspect a timeline in which our timeline is embedded? That seems like a more interesting question than the shape of the mapping.

It's Time Turtles all the way down.

Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

#42

Post by blueprint »

Pimpus wrote: post #39
blueprint wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Illusion? It depends on the exact range of your definition of the term. What exists itself is the truth. Who can see it as it is? No one can speak of something they haven't seen as it is. Every living thing suffers.

No offense, but this wasn't helpful to me. I feel like you're speaking in riddles now. Do you have any sources I could read up on?

I had a short time to reply and wanted to tell you the information you needed. It takes time to confirm. Every living thing suffers means to stop suffering then you have to die forever. Really think Buddha taught that? People don't need a rare master's help to do that lol

Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

#43

Post by wuliwong »

shiven wrote: post #38

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…

I can think of loads of reasons that both what the article says and your experience can be true. For instance, maybe your neurons are better at handling spatial information? Nowhere in their findings do they imply that the quality of the space and time tracking has to be the same.

Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

#44

Post by gumby »

shiven wrote: post #38

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…

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.

Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

#45

Post by c22 »

mbrumlow wrote: post #31
PurpleBoxDragon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is an outside observer with their own sense of time, how would we know which time is real? Are they both? It would seem that, even if not steady to the outside observer, our time is still steady. In a world where physics depends upon time, is it even possible for time to not be steady?

When I was typing that I was thinking the hypothetical observer. I don't think there can actually be one with respect to actual time. But to be able to think about how maybe it does work you have to think as though there was a an ability to observe the universe in such a way. But you are right, if there was a outside observer the same stands, just for that observers observer -- hypothetically. > In a world where phys…

I think the interactions between "ticks" not being "observed" or "realized" by the universe is what gp means when they assert our [physical] world depends on time. If these between-tick interactions are not impacting our physical measurements then I am not sure it's possible for time to not be "steady" from a single frame of reference.

I can of course imagine a scenario where different entities, even in the same universe, experience the passage of time differently. For instance, a positronic robot whose consciousness is only switched on for one minute of every hour. To this being, events could appear to happen willy-nilly, without causation, due to activity between ticks, but the robot would have no way of knowing why the world works like this without talking to another being without the limitations who has been making observations in "real time". So perhaps something like this is happening to us and could explain some weird quantum phenomena, but I'm having trouble thinking of any way we could test it.

Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

#46

Post by shiven »

gumby wrote: post #44
shiven wrote: post #38

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…

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.

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).

Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

#47

Post by c22 »

dmvaldman wrote: post #32

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…

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

Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

#48

Post by JoshCole »

blueprint wrote: post #5
Pimpus wrote: post #2

> “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 c…

The greatest masters in the history of the human world such as Gautama Buddha never taught or used the term "ego". That ought to tell humans something.

The same could be said of the term graphene, transistor, computer, genetics, probability distribution, bayesian, nueron, electricity, and millions of other words. We can't learn much from the lack of their use, because the lack of their use says little about their validity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_histo...

Re: Brain cells that track location in space appear to also count beats in time

#49

Post by penguinUzer »

cecilpl2 wrote: post #17
Pimpus wrote: post #2

> “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 c…

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?

Here in Ohio it is common to give distance in time. Especially south/east Ohio in the hills.

There are also congested areas in Col/Cle/Cin where it might take 20min to go three miles so distance is also time there.

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