Brain Functions: Temporal Perception

Your senses enable your brain to perceive images, sounds and textures. But they can also perceive time, even without any specific sensory organ designed to tell time. How it does so isn't easy to explain, because although it seems natural to us, perceiving time is an extremely complex phenomenon that neuroscientists are only beginning to understand.

The ability to perceive the passage of time comes into play when you need to estimate or reproduce the length of events, compare the length of two or more events, or place events in the order in which they occurred. For these, your brain needs a "mental timer." You use this "mental timer" in everyday life to determine how fast you need to run to catch a ball or calculate whether you have enough time to make it through a yellow light. It also reminds you to remove your pasta from the water after cooking it for eight to ten minutes.

Perceiving time is associated with other cognitive processes such as attention and memory. Measuring the length of an event -- such as the length of time you let your sauce simmer before turning down the heat -- requires a certain amount of attention if you're also busy working in the kitchen or especially doing something else out of the kitchen. And think of this: you probably not only remember what you ate this morning, but also the fact that you took your shower before breakfast and that you were in the shower for about 10 minutes.

Not only do you have no sensory organ to tell time, but there's also no specific part of the brain dedicated to telling time. It's still unconfirmed, but researchers think that the "mental timer"may be in two areas of the brain associated with motor skills, the cerebellum and the basal ganglia.

Various parts of the brain are activated depending on the type of mental exercise involved in processing the sequence and length of events. According to recent studies, estimating the length of time elapsed and reproducing the length of an event are managed by areas in the medial temporal lobe, in the lower central part of your brain, while the ability to judge the sequence of two events is governed by the prefrontal cortex at the front of your brain.