Researchers use monkeys to study humans' fine-tuned internal clock
BY THANE BURNETT, QMI AGENCY
FIRST POSTED: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 07, 2012 04:55 PM EST | UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 07, 2012 05:12 PM EST
(FOTOLIA)
If you thought U.S. election night coverage seemed to last forever, then you may want to adjust your neurons.
The closest we've come to mastering a time machine is by subconsciously tracking passing seconds, minutes and hours with our brains, and now researchers have unlocked clues of how that remarkable inner tick-tocking happens.
Rather than a biological central clock -- one specific part of our noggin that tells you it's time to check on the roast in the oven or estimates how long you've been waiting at the stop for a bus -- researchers at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis have determined it's different neurons firing that determine good timing.
To unlock how humans determine passing moments, beyond the position of the sun or what the clock setting on our smartphones display, scientists Geoffrey Ghose and Blaine Schneider measured the reaction time of research monkeys.
The researchers, in an article published in the online-journal PLOS Biology, managed to pinpoint groups of nerve cells that allow the animals to calculate when to shift their gaze after being trained to look at shifting blue and red dots on a computer screen.
If it sounds complicated, it's because it is. It's also very natural and goes on all the time inside us.
For average humans going about the seconds of the days, it could start to explain not only how we know when too much time has passed when a fellow swimmer goes underwater, but reason why some events seem to drag on while good times come and go in a snap.
The fading reaction of our neurons may also explain why time seems to speed up as you get older.
"We automatically (track passing seconds) all the time -- constructing estimates of how long things will take and when it's the right time to do something," Ghose told QMI Agency in an email.
"It's so ingrained and natural that we're probably not very aware of it.
"But we are good at it, and certainly the fact that the monkeys were so accurate, suggests that it's fundamentally important for a lot of animals and correspondingly, an important ... thing for brains to get right."
