It's Day 51 of the Year 2019 CE, meaning that it's February 20, 2019
A while back I put up a post concerned with the question of whether or not we ever directly experience the flow of time. (December 12, 2018; https://caucus99percent.com/content/wednesday-open-thread-tempus-fugiting-or-it cross posted as https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/12/12/1816530/-Wednesday-Open-Thread-Tempus-is-fugiting-or-is-it(). The gist of it was that we can project, predict and envision the future, with varying degrees of accuracy, because it isn't yet real, and recall and reflect upon the past, which displays elements of linearity and sequence, but we never directly experience the actual flow of time concurrently, as it happens. We are sure that there is a future and that our remembrances are a record of past futures that became momentarily present and then were history, but, in reality, tomorrow never comes, it is always now. I can focus diligently upon my hands to an extent that I can become intensely aware of them, see them with great clarity, sense what they touch and all of the minor aches and pains that emanate from them and "know" that they are now and are in the now and are part of the now, but I cannot directly sense that now. One practicing mindfulness can become enormously aware of much about the self during and in the now and of much about the now, but cannot be aware, in an unmediated fashion, of the now itself, or so it seems. As I noted in that prior post, Erwin Schroedinger of quantum theory fame stated:
“Time no longer appears to us as a gigantic, world-dominating chronos, nor as a primitive entity, but as something derived from phenomena themselves. It is a figment of my thinking.”Now further information about "time" has presented itself to me in the form of an article in a UC newsletter which can be found here https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/study-identifies-new-way-which-human-brain-marks-time?utm_source=fiat-lux&utm_medium=internal-email&utm_campaign=article-general&utm_content=text .That article reports on a study conducted at UC Irvine that involved real time brain imaging using fmri (functional magnetic resonance imaging, a tool for imaging brain activity). This research identified a new network of human brain regions involved in storing information related to when events happen. This work appears to confirm earlier rat studies reported in nature on August 29, 2018 (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0459-6)
The findings suggest that populations of lateral entorhinal cortex neurons represent time inherently through the encoding of experience. This representation of episodic time may be integrated with spatial inputs from the medial entorhinal cortex in the hippocampus, allowing the hippocampus to store a unified representation of what, where and when.The UC study was reported on in nature neuroscience on January 14, 2019 ( https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-018-0331-x ). The abstract for that article claims:
Experience unfolds continuously in time, but we remember discrete sequences of events. In this issue of Nature Neuroscience, Montchal et al. describe brain activity patterns that predict how well people remember precisely when recent events occurred. Converging evidence suggests that homologous neural machinery structures temporal representations in rats and people.So here is the rub. The rat experiment was described as suggesting that the memory of episodic time sequences in one cortex could be integrated with spatial information from a different cortex to allow a unified memory of the what, where, and when of an event. Though not clear from the abstract for the UC study, that study supports the idea that the where and when are stored separately. The article from UC notes that the team at Irvine had previously found that the lateral entorhinal cortex and the perirhinal cortex are associated with the memory things or objects, but not their location. They have now found that those regions do store and retrieve information as to time as well. One researcher was quoted on point that:
“Space and time have always been intricately linked, and the common wisdom in our field was that the mechanisms involved in one probably supported the other as well,” added Maria Montchal, a graduate student in Yassa’s lab who led the research. “But our results suggest otherwise.”So, think about your car keys. This research indicates that you remember "object car keys" + "when car keys" separate from "car keys location", and maybe don't ever remember "car keys location" per se, but only some overall generalized spatial map of your reality. As a result, "car keys location when" will be a construct and one of a great many possible combinations of one or more points on the "keys-when" line or matrix with one or more points on the "stuff-where" line or matrix. This potentially explains a great deal, such as the fact that I don't know where in hell my car keys are about half of the time. This interpretation, my own, is seemingly borne out by information in the article to the effect that the lateral entorhinal cortex seems to be impaired in persons with dementia and that it shows effects of Alsheimer's, such as tangles, early on. So, back to Shroedinger, and "time" as a construct, derived from phenomena, and the idea that we do not directly experience time, but instead, infer it from memory. This study seems to leave that view unchallenged. Sure, we store "Time data", but we do so after the fact, and only as a memory. The process is pretty immediate, but not instantaneous, nor even immediate enough that we can say we directly experience the flow of time. What we have learned is that we now know why we don't know where our keys are, because we don't remember where, only what. The best we can do is remember what was before or after keys, like maybe "door" before and "kitchen table" after, telling us to try all possible paths between those two "whats" in the hope of stepping into the correct "where". If we fail, after searching and re-searching, then we look to the next what, like toothbrush or lawn mower and see how to get to that what from the prior what, still looking for the where. As entertaining as that idea is, I suspect that it isn't complete, because when I consider my model of the space around me, it seems to me to contain some whats among the wheres. It's a simple test: my gardening hat is on a magnetic hook on a metal cabinet above the roll-away tool box in the garage by the door to the back yard, and my wide-brim hiking & birding hat is on the right end of my dresser which is to the left of the bed in the bedroom, while my everyday EFF baseball cap is on a hook by the front door. The where data may not be associated with the what-when data, but is must have some what data associated with it somewhere somehow. That also only makes sense, because pure where really can't be a category for a memory, certainly not for a reality map, there is an intrinsic association between where and some one or more whats. Where am I? Where is the Thai restaurant? Where is my heavy coat? Those things make sense. Pure "Where?" with no object really doesn't. What is the whatless "where" that our brain putatively somehow stores. I suspect that a lot more work in this area is required particularly on how the lateral and medial entorhinal cortexes communicate and interact. Image is: Project 366 #135: 140512 All Together Now, by Pete: Public Domain Its an open thread so have at it. The floor is yours . Cross posted from caucus99percent.com