(Credit: Created by Hedi Young with the assistance of Stable Diffusion)
From Aristotle’s musings on the nature of time to Einstein’s theory of relativity, humanity has long pondered: how do we perceive and understand time? The theory of relativity posits that time can stretch and contract, a phenomenon known as time dilation. Just as the cosmos warps time, our neural circuits can stretch and compress our subjective experience of time. As Einstein famously quipped, “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.” In new work from Champalimaud Research’s Learning Lab published on July 13, 2023 in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists artificially slowed down, or sped up, patterns of neural activity in rats, warping their judgement of time duration and providing the most compelling causal evidence so far for how the brain’s inner clockwork guides behavior. The article is titled “Using Temperature To Analyze the Neural Basis of a Time-Based Decision.”