Introducing the brain: timed events in hippocampus (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, October 27, 2022, 15:00 (756 days ago) @ David Turell

Timed memories are recorded in the hippocampus:

https://www.sciencealert.com/time-cells-in-the-human-brain-encode-the-flow-of-time-scie...

"Research suggests that 'time cells' – neurons in the hippocampus thought to represent temporal information – could be the glue that sticks our memories together in the right sequence so that we can properly recall the correct order in which things happened.

"To investigate, a team of researchers led by neuroscientist Leila Reddy from the Brain and Cognition Research Center (CerCo) in France monitored electrical activity in the brains of 15 epilepsy patients, using microelectrodes implanted in the hippocampus.

"'Creating episodic memories requires linking together distinct events of an experience with temporal fidelity," the researchers explained in their study, published last year.

"'Given the importance of the hippocampus in sequence order learning and temporal order judgments, we tested whether human hippocampal neurons represented temporal information while participants learned the order of a sequence of items."

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"According to the researchers, the neurons involved are evidence of time cells: "neurons whose activity is modulated by temporal context within a well-defined time window".

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"'Temporal modulation during these gap periods could not have been driven by external events; rather they appear to represent an evolving temporal signal as a result of changes in the patients' experience during this time of waiting."

"According to the researchers, time cells in the human brain are "multi-dimensional", capable of encoding information in relation to time but also responding to different kinds of sensory information or stimuli.

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"'Central to our experience of reliving the past is our ability to vividly recall specific events that occurred at a specific place and in a specific temporal order… Our results provide further evidence that human hippocampal neurons represent the flow of time in an experience.'"

Comment: the brain is too integrated to assume that is there is to memory recall. There has to be interpretation connections to the frontal lobe cortex.