Prof. Virginie van Wassenhove | Making sense of time (in the brain)

How the brain tells time is fundamental for the individuation, the coincidence, the integration, and the ordering of events in time, but also for the feeling that time passes, that things exist for a while (duration), or that we can, at will, mentally travel to our vanished past and our not yet existing future. An epistemological difficulty stands in the way of understanding the status of 'time' in the neurosciences: temporalities emerge from the brain's perspective (the generator, actuator, and observer), not from the external observer. Yet, how neural circuits code, use, and represent temporal information is largely debated. I will discuss the role of neural rhythms from the basic feeling that time passes to the elicitation of, and the mental navigation in, temporal cognitive maps.