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

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.

Coordination of movement in space (for example something like grasping an object) is more dependent on parietal cortex & the dorsal visual stream (the so-called "where" pathway), and the cerebellum.

"Visuospatial skill", as typified by tasks like mental object rotation, is more ascribable to temporal cortex & the ventral visual stream (the so-called "what" pathway, responsible for object recognition). However, it often requires both ventral and dorsal visual cortex.

Navigation is hippocampus-dependent. However, the hippocampus is not a "GPS". I cannot emphasize this strongly enough. It is a hub for integrating and associating disparate information from across the brain in order to form representations of and the relationships between behaviorally-relevant states. This explains why the hippocampus is also involved in "navigating" abstract state spaces, for example turn-based game states [0] or auditory frequency [1], when they're behaviorally relevant. It gets analogized as a GPS because 1) most of the research involves spatial tasks, so space is the behaviorally-relevant dimension, 2) a certain Nobel Prize winner does not feel the need to update his theory, and 3) "Hippocampus = GPS" is too sexy and intuitive of an analogy, especially for the lay press.

The idea of the hippocampus as an "associative engine" also helps unify its seemingly disparate roles in "navigation" and memory when you consider that a memory is just information from disparate brain areas that's been associated via temporal correlation because of its behavioral relevance. It also explains why researchers observe "place cells" and "time cells" and "head direction cels" and "eye position cells": because these variables are behaviorally relevant (i.e. important for maximizing reward) in the task the animal is performing.

[0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hipo.22523

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28358077

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.

I'm sure it has happened occasionally, but I wouldn't know how to process the information. Especially since equal distances can take different times depending on speed limits, etc