FBS Colloquia No.327Center for Information and Neural Networks

Neural bases of the subjective experience of time

In order to adaptively behave in the dynamically changing environment, it is crucial to accurately estimate the timing of events and their duration, and utilize it for future predictions. However, our sense of time does not necessarily coincide with physical time that can be measured by a stopwatch, and is an extremely subjective sensation that can be stretched or compressed by various factors. In this seminar, I will introduce a series of psychophysical and neuroimaging studies we performed to understand the brain mechanisms that generate human time perception, and finally discuss the potential social impact of artificially manipulating the subjective experience of time.