"Time Cells" In the Brain Keep Track of Events, Firing As Time Goes By
Whether we're engrossed in an activity or the alarm clock simply fails to chime, we've all been in situations when we say we've lost track of time. But our brains have not really lost track at all. A specific group of cells in the brain's memory center is encoding for the passage of time, researchers report. These "time cells" are key to our perception of sequences of events. Related ArticlesNew Molecule Can Reset Your Biological Clock With Unprecedented EffectivenessIn Test of Relativity Theory, Superaccurate Atomic Clocks Prove Your Head Ages Nanoseconds Faster than Your FeetBig Bang Recreated in a Metamaterial, Offers Evidence That Time Travel is ImpossibleTagsScience, Rebecca Boyle, brain, complementary sequences, hippocampus, memory, neurons, rats, timeIn a new study involving rats, researchers at Boston University monitored neurons in the hippocampus, the center of memory and learning. Howard Eichenbaum and colleagues trained rats to perform a three-part task, which included a...