Discover magazine has a very interesting article on how the brain sense, stores, and retrieves memories and makes sense of time, “How Your Brain Can Control Time“.

Carl Zimmer reports in Discovery online that our medium spiny neurons appear to rather elegantly store signals from sensory perceptions of time. These specialized neurons then read the signals like a chord on a piano and derive how much time has elapsed from the reading.

Zimmer’s article also highlights the now well-known elasticity of time perception, as in when one’s perception of time slows down during an auto accident or when it is otherwise altered through the use of chemical substances. One of the more interesting facts to recently emerge is how the brain processes information more quickly than the visual receptors can transmit data from our eyes. This means that humans are naturally pre-cognitive, in that our brains weave together a seamless interpretation of extrinsic data and events from an endless sequence of visual snapshots.

One of my undergraduate professors did not like the use of historical or mechanistic analogies for the human mind or for cognition, as they were always limiting. Given a current analogy used to describe human nature, to the effect of “we come wired that way”, in reality, there is no ‘wiring’: there is data gathered and generated from perception and cognition. Our brains do, indeed, physiologically perform in ways that we are better understanding through study and research. Our minds, however, are potentiators of reality, relying on our choices to shape our life, our future, and our world.

May we choose to birth a better world for us all.

PROFILE  James is a storyteller, musician, thinker, scholar, technopagan, creative, and polymath. MORE from Creative