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

111–120 of 133 posts

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#111

Post by forgotmypw17 »

ButWhatFor wrote: post #76
elliekelly wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think this is a side effect of one's life becoming more routinized as they grow older, and having fewer memorable moments in each day.

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.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#112

Post by [deleted] »

pontus wrote: post #81
xwdv wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is this down voted? It's obviously a joke (and reasonably funny too)...

[deleted]

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#113

Post by Shorel »

wongarsu wrote: post #42
Drakim wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Anectotally, aphantasia seems highly correlated with reading HN (or probably programmers in general). HN threads about aphantasia-related topics always have lots of people with aphantasia, while these people make up a much smaller proportion in for example reddit threads about the same topic.

I would not go as far. Self selecting bias is probably the reason. People without aphantasia just don't comment in these threads.

However we can say HN is the site where people with aphantasia feel safe when describing what they experience.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#114

Post by [deleted] »

pontus wrote: post #81
xwdv wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why is this down voted? It's obviously a joke (and reasonably funny too)...

[deleted]

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#115

Post by forgotmypw17 »

yesenadam wrote: post #60
skocznymroczny wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a kid, we used to have a radio/tape/CD player with a digital clock on it. Whenever I looked at it, as in whenever my body thought it would be a good idea to check the time, it was always something like 11:11 or 16:16.

Maybe that's true, but when I hear people say they always look at their watches at 12:34 or such a thing, I suspect (because it never happened to me!) it's probably something akin to the Baader-Meinhof illusion, "where something that has recently come to one's attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards." There are many similar phenonema humans fall victim to, thanks to our cogniti…

It might also be precognition?

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#116

Post by eloisius »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #107
eloisius wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thre…

Don't let society dictate how your brain should function. You are fine and valid the way you are, and don't let anyone call you a disorder.

Yeah, that's the narrative I fed myself since I was a teenager, and I had plenty of validation for it from family members that loved me. I was just "too smart" to sit in class bored all day or whatever. I'm trying to question that narrative. The burst of focus and creativity might be great, but I wonder if the sibling commenter is right that I could be missing out on vast, untapped potential and I might not lose the upside. I don't know.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#117

Post by acrefoot »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #87
acrefoot wrote: post #83

I thought we had discovered pacemaker cells over 20 years ago. I'd be very surprised if that didn't already factor into hypotheses of how episodic memory is ordered. Either this article is disingenuous, or neuroscience suffers from deep fragmentation that is hindering progress. https://www.hhmi.org/news/researchers-discover-molecular-pac...

Did you actually read both studies? If so, I don't see how you could have arrived at the conclusion that the time cell paper is a rehash of what you linked. They are talking about and focusing on entirely different things.

I hadn't read the paper, just the article. Which is primarily what I was commenting on. When I read "now researchers have identified cells in the human brain that make this sort of memory possible", I was lead to believe that NPR was suggesting that there weren't plausible mechanisms of timekeeping for episodic memory before now. Especially since they don't mention any other mechanisms, and Buzsáki (not a study author) and NPR together imply that people with hippocampal lesions who can't order events correctly are simply missing their time cells.

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.)

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#118

Post by forgotmypw17 »

eloisius wrote: post #116
forgotmypw17 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't let society dictate how your brain should function. You are fine and valid the way you are, and don't let anyone call you a disorder.

Yeah, that's the narrative I fed myself since I was a teenager, and I had plenty of validation for it from family members that loved me. I was just "too smart" to sit in class bored all day or whatever. I'm trying to question that narrative. The burst of focus and creativity might be great, but I wonder if the sibling commenter is right that I could be missing out on vast, untapped potential and I might not lose the…

> I was just "too smart" to sit in class bored all day or whatever.

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.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#119

Post by acrefoot »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #97
acrefoot wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The years I've gone to SFN, I've been amazed at how fragmented the field is. People get into neuroscience from all sorts of places. Neurosurgery, C. elegans research, optogenetic studies, fmri studies, biochemistry: these approaches to neuroscience are often so different they don't know about the advances of the others.

Should have gone to HBM I guess ;) I suppose my comment was a bit strong. My Ph.D was on the the hippocampus and the development of binding operations supporting episodic memory using standard MRI and cognitive tasks, and I already know I don't understand half of what they are doing in more basic neuroscience articles.

No worries!

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.

Re: 'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

#120

Post by eloisius »

forgotmypw17 wrote: post #118
eloisius wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's the narrative I fed myself since I was a teenager, and I had plenty of validation for it from family members that loved me. I was just "too smart" to sit in class bored all day or whatever. I'm trying to question that narrative. The burst of focus and creativity might be great, but I wonder if the sibling commenter is right that I could be missing out on vast, untapped potential and I might not lose the…

> I was just "too smart" to sit in class bored all day or whatever. 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 progr…

> if you had learned calculus by 8th grade

Joke's on you. I still haven't learned calculus.

Post reply on HN