'Time Cells' Discovered in Human Brains

I guess this is a different thing, but...<p>When I was a kid I read a book that said if before you go to sleep you think &quot;I will wake up at Xam&quot; (whatever time you want) then you wake up at exactly that time. Which is pretty weird! We can&#x27;t do that when we&#x27;re awake. It actually works, and I&#x27;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.<p>I have no idea how it works.

The bike example is interesting because I remember learning how to ride a bike. I remember lots of details which others can confirm. But my perspective is external to my past self and I’m free to meander about in the memory, pause it, etc. It’s not particularly movie-like. I have a difficult time dipping into a first person perspective. And despite the article’s suggestion, even though I remember a spill in some detail (although in that case it’s more like a first-person snapshot than a movie) and although I know there <i>was</i> pain, I don’t remember the pain, just the fact of it. I do remember the feeling of anger and frustration as a result of the fall.<p>Anyway, anyone who found the article interesting might be interested in <i>Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Anything</i> 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.<p>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.

When I was young, I received a serious blow to my head while playing soccer that broke my skull and caused all sorts of issues at the time. I&#x27;ve managed a full recovery, but in the days following the accident, I lost my intuition of time. It&#x27;s difficult to explain: I knew, logically, that I had lunch before I had dinner - and I had memory of doing both - but I couldn&#x27;t &quot;feel&quot; that lunch was before dinner. It&#x27;s pretty hard to explain and it was pretty weird to experience, but this symptom faded away after a couple of days.

Just want to mention here that people exist wich can’t recall a memory trough mental images. It’s called aphantasia. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aphantasia" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Aphantasia</a>

Even just the idea that there are specific cells for this is fascinating, and the fact that they change their &#x27;tick&#x27; speed based on mood&#x2F;interest? I should read the paper!:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;26&#x2F;2013250117" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.pnas.org&#x2F;content&#x2F;early&#x2F;2020&#x2F;10&#x2F;26&#x2F;2013250117</a>

In Sasha Shulgin’s book PIKAL, he describes mixing two drugs, I think it was MMA and cannabis, and experiencing perceived time dilation. He describes it as looking at the hands of a clock and experiencing much more time between the movement of the hands than one normally would. He said it was frightening, so he called his friend to come help. He was able to speak normally and hear people speak normally. While he was on the phone, he asked for a timer to be set while he went to go retrieve something. His experience of walking down the hall and back felt to him like twenty minutes. When he returned to the phone, he was told it had only been two minutes.<p>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.<p>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.

Ok, armchair theory here, let&#x27;s for a moment assume Einstein&#x27;s belief that time is the fourth dimension.<p>We use our senses to detect&#x2F;experience dimensions, right? I mean, we use sight, hearing, touch to detect 3-D space, for example (not forgetting taste and smell too).<p>If time is the fourth dimension, maybe these cells are our evolutionary attempt to sense&#x2F;detect and operate within that dimension.<p>Which explains how the experience of time travel could be possible in at least one way - if we can change&#x2F;affect our sense&#x2F;perception of time (um.. navigating time?), it can seem to us like time travel. I&#x27;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 &quot;experience&quot; time travel.<p>Ok sorry, that does too sound like too much armchair pseudoscience, but this article and some of the other comments just got me thinking.

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.

Are we supposed to have non-movie-like memories about the past? I mean, other than remembering &quot;knowledge&quot; such as sentences or dates or numbers or geography, etc, it seems that all memory about my &quot;actual life&quot; is movie-like.

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 to provide an alibi. It feels like a lot of day to day memories don&#x27;t get &#x27;time-stamped&#x27; at all.<p>I always thought this mainly had to do with ADD related working memory problems, but maybe it&#x27;s more of an episodic memory problem?

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&#x27;t have any concrete understanding of how memories are really encoded, stored, and recalled. Indeed, we don&#x27;t even know if &quot;encoded&quot;, &quot;stored&quot;, and &quot;recalled&quot; are useful approximations for what&#x27;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.

I thought we had discovered pacemaker cells over 20 years ago. I&#x27;d be very surprised if that didn&#x27;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.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hhmi.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;researchers-discover-molecular-pacemakers-heart-and-brain" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hhmi.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;researchers-discover-molecular-pac...</a>

I would be very interested to see a study about how these cells function under ADHD, because as I&#x27;m sure any sufferer would tell you - our time perception is very very weird.

huh... I dont have <i>any</i> movie like memories... is this something I should be concerned about?

This isn&#x27;t unique to humans or even animals<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;CA-YsWXRSHU?t=448" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;CA-YsWXRSHU?t=448</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arabidopsis_thaliana#Light_sensing,_light_emission,_and_circadian_biology" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Arabidopsis_thaliana#Light_sen...</a><p>It records ~40 days of temperature in a certain range, and remembers it till it senses the light of spring. If it&#x27;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.

So Jack reacher was not lying then. Good to know

very interesting discovery!