Sunday, November 05, 2006

Mental timing scholar feature: Dr. Penny Lewis

In a prior post I announced the IQ Brain Clock blog "Mental Timing Scholars" link section. One of the two (I'm sure there are more...this "honor roll" will be updated) researchers is Dr. Penny Lewis, at the University of Manchester.

Below is a statement (lifted from her faculty web page) re: her mental interval time-keeping program of research. She is a scholar whose research this blog will monitor and summarize at it becomes available.
  • "Time measurement is fundamental to almost everything we do: music and speech, for instance, are just time-coded variations in sound, and movements are carefully timed contractions of muscles. We perceive our lives as a flow of events in time, and plan our futures in the same way. If our timing system gets damaged, as it does in patients with Parkinson’s Disease, Schizophrenia, and certain types of brain injury, all of these abilities can be impaired. A fundamental question about time measurement is whether we have just one mental clock or a number of different clocks for timing in this range. I am using fMRI and temporary brain lesions induced using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to address this question. To date, my findings support the existence of two quite distinct systems for automatic and cognitively controlled timing. Future work will clarify this picture and provide more information about how each system works."

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