Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 133 posts

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#71

Post by ekanes »

eloisius wrote: post #45
andai wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can't do that when we're awake 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 tim…

I have the exact opposite sense of time. I'm frequently several minutes late to meetings because I've completely lost track of time. I'm very cue-dependent, and with this everything-at-home lifestyle we've transitioned to, I often have split-second confusion that I'm just having lunch in the middle of the day and have to go back to work in a minute and not go take a shower like it's after dinner.

If you haven't before, consider looking into whether or not you might have ADHD.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#72

Post by ckosidows »

Drakim wrote: post #34
orbifold wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always wondered this during meditation in high school: Do people actually see things when they close their eyes? The whole “you are at a beach, there is a gentle breeze...” never did anything for me. I can remember colors, relative positions, even how a specific place looked overall fairly well, but I don’t see anything.

You likely have Aphantasia 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.

I wish we had a better way of conveying what goes on in our heads.

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?

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#73

Post by majewsky »

xwdv wrote: post #44
VBprogrammer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone asks me the time I'll often respond without looking "about 2.30". Then after digging out my phone check and see it's actually "2.35".

Your perception of time is off, you are perceiving time to be passing slower than it actually is. Right now it only seems like 5 minutes, but over time these error minutes will accumulate and you will feel like you have lived less life than you actually have lived in real time. 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 c…

Is this Poe's Law?

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#74

Post by eloisius »

ekanes wrote: post #71
eloisius wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the exact opposite sense of time. I'm frequently several minutes late to meetings because I've completely lost track of time. I'm very cue-dependent, and with this everything-at-home lifestyle we've transitioned to, I often have split-second confusion that I'm just having lunch in the middle of the day and have to go back to work in a minute and not go take a shower like it's after dinner.

If you haven't before, consider looking into whether or not you might have ADHD.

I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid and took Ritalin for a little while, but hated it so I convinced my parents to let me stop. I haven't sought medication or treatment since then. I can manage it really well if I'm intentional about how I arrange and use my environment, and it usually seems like the bursts of intense focus and creativity compensate for the tendency to be distracted and chasing multiple concurrent threads. Granted, I need a manager and work environment that indulges my need to deep dive on something without a lot of structure occasionally. Losing those bursts and everything becoming kind of gray scale is why I hated taking the meds as a kid.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#75

Post by eloisius »

polytely wrote: post #49

I wonder if this is something that is going wrong in my brain lol. I have a hard time remembering when exactly things happened (to figure out in what year I started school I basically have to walk backwards through my memories keeping track of some kind of time marker like seasons, like traversing a linked list). I often joke that if I ever was a suspect in a criminal investigation it would be very difficult for me t…

This sounds exactly how my sense of chronology works. I have to find time markers and work my way from those to arrive at when a related memory occurred. I'll frequently reference photos that I happen to know has some obscure clue in it like a shirt a family member was wearing because I knew they had that shirt when I went to X event, which I still have a ticket stub memento for, therefor it was Y date.

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.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#76

Post by ButWhatFor »

elliekelly wrote: post #53
davidn20 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gary Halbert, one of the best copywriters of all time, uses a time method to check if his mind was sharp. He will guess at how much time has passed without looking at a clock. The closer he was to the real time the better.

That's interesting. I thought I had read that older people perceive time more slowly than younger people but I wonder if that can be overcome by keeping our sense of time-telling "calibrated" by periodically checking our accuracy.

I thought it was the other way around? As you get older your perceive time as moving more quickly? As you get older every hour is a smaller percentage of your total life, so that made sense to me?

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#77

Post by sosodev »

Loughla wrote: post #50
lexicality wrote: post #37

I would be very interested to see a study about how these cells function under ADHD, because as I'm sure any sufferer would tell you - our time perception is very very weird.

My experience is that it is much more difficult to focus on any individual task, but much easier to enter a 'flow' state with ADHD. 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…

From what I understand ADHD and Autism share some symptoms but ADHD isn’t part of the spectrum because the causes are different.

It’s generally understood that the effects of ADHD diminish as you get older but the effects of Autism do not.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#78

Post by floathub »

This title seems very misleading given the study described. They have found a correlation between some neurons firing in sequence and a list of words being spoken from memory. We don't have any concrete understanding of how memories are really encoded, stored, and recalled. Indeed, we don't even know if "encoded", "stored", and "recalled" are useful approximations for what's really going on in there. So suggesting that we have found some specific time keeping module seems awfully hand-wavy (at best) to me.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#79

Post by carapace »

basicplus2 wrote: post #21
TheSpiceIsLife wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a term / name for this method. Emotional freedom technique (EFT)?

I had never heard of this.. Seems it is for relieving emotional stress but i had only used it specifically to wake up at a specific time. https://www.healthline.com/health/eft-tapping

EFT is unrelated to head tapping for setting internal wake up calls.

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.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#80

Post by carapace »

apples_oranges wrote: post #19
notRobot wrote: post #4

Memory is a crazy thing. What I find particularly interesting is that some people recall memories in first person, and others in third person. Baffling.

I never thought about this, but if there's two ways to remember events there's probably also three, four.. or more?

Yes.

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.

Post reply on HN