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Discover Magazine

How much work our brains do to give us a steady experience of time?

Discover Magazine
Summary
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67% Informative

Our own personal perceptions of the flow of time can slow, stretch, speed up, and everything in between.

Our brains constantly monitor a complex influx of signals arriving with different timings, and the balancing act from all those signals, combined with many internal operations, combine to give us our sense of time's passage.

People suffering from Parkinson's disease have difficulty maintaining regular rhythms, such as tapping a finger at a fixed interval.

National Library of Medicine . Neuroanatomy, Prefrontal Cortex . Paul M. Sutter is a theoretical cosmologist, NASA advisor, host of the "Ask a Spaceman " podcast, and a U.S. Cultural Ambassador. He is the author of " Your Place in the Universe" and "How to Die in Space.".