The nature of mental time-keeping research

I've previously highlighted the important mental timing research of Dr. Penny Lewis at the IQ Brain clock (she is listed as one of the blogs "mental timing scholars" - see link section).

Although her important 2006 publication (Remembering the Time - see "key research articles" link section) suggests that contemporary research has started to zero in on the possible locations of the internal brain clock, I found what she wrote in 2005 (which was less specific about possible brain functions and locations) to be a very nice easy-to-read summary of the nature of the search for the mental/interval time clock. I have reproduced her words below...food for thought. Nicely written statement of the nature of mental timing research progress. I've also added this article to the "key research article" section for those who want to read the entire manuscript.

Lewis, P. & Walsh, V. (2005). Time Perception: Components of the Brain’s Clock. Current Biology, 15 (10), 389-391.

• Our brains measure time continuously. We are aware of how long we have been doing a particular thing, how long it has been since we last slept, and how long it will be until lunch or dinner. We are ready, at any moment, to make complex movements requiring muscle coordination with microsecond accuracy, or to decode temporally complex auditory signals in the form of speech or music. Our timing abilities are impressive, diverse and worthy of investigation. But they are not very well understood.
• Many models of time perception have been put forward...collectively postulating a wide variety of different mechanisms. Regardless of their diversity, the models all agree that temporal information is processed in many ways: it is remembered, compared to other temporal information, combined with sensory information, and used in the production of motor outputs.
• The holy grail of timing research is to understand the ‘time-dependent process’: a mechanism equivalent to a piezoelectric crystal in a man-made clock or the movement of a shadow on a sundial. This has proven an elusive goal, to the extent that ideas about how this mechanism might work remain near the level of conjecture. Researchers have had great difficulty in pinning timing-related activity in the brain to any specific type of function. This is largely because most time measurement tasks draw upon more than one process, making it difficult to tease the various components apart.

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