Category: Interviews

Aniruddh Patel is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Tufts University, who studies music cognition (including rhythm and timing) in humans and other species. He earned his Ph.D. in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard. Before joining Tufts he was a Senior Fellow at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego.

 

How can we determine the brain’s code for time?

Evolution rarely has just one way of solving a problem. It seems very unlikely that there is a single code for time in the brain. For example, the mechanisms behind circadian rhythms, musical beat perception, and spatiotemporal sequence learning in primary visual cortex are likely to be quite different. It the coming years it will be interesting to see which timing mechanisms are the most ancient and widespread in animal brains and which are more recently evolved and specialized in certain species.

 

What will your talk at the 1st Timing Research Forum Conference focus on?

New findings on monkey synchronization to a beat. One of the surprises in research on timing and rhythm has been the finding that when monkeys are trained to tap to a metronome, their taps do not anticipate metronome events, unlike humans. Instead, the taps lag metronome events by 200-300 ms. In contrast, when humans (even those with no musical training) tap with a metronome, they spontaneously align their taps very close in time to metronome events, indicating accurate prediction of metronome events.  This difference has been important for debates over possible species differences in beat-based timing abilities. Are monkeys capable of predictive temporal synchronization with a metronome? We recently found that if monkeys were trained to move their eyes to a spatialized visual metronome, and were given a reward for each predictive saccade, they could learn to synchronize to a metronome in a predictive way. They could also generalize this predictive synchronization to novel tempi, which is a key feature of human synchronization to a metronome. It remains to be seen if they can demonstrate predictive and tempo-flexible synchronization to an auditory metronome, which is the most widely studied form of sensorimotor synchronization in humans. I will discuss what our new findings suggests in terms of the evolution of human beat-based timing abilities.

 

What according to you are the most pressing and fundamental questions in timing research?

I’m clearly biased by my interest in music cognition, but I think that that understanding how the auditory and motor system interact in rhythm perception (i.e., in pure perception, with no overt movement) is a fundamental issue, and one that also has clinical significance for helping individuals with motor disorders such as Parkinson’s disease.

 

What current topics/techniques or new advances in timing research are you most excited about?

Cross-species research aimed at developing an animal model for beat perception. An animal would allow us measure and manipulate the neural circuits involved in beat perception in fine-grained detail.

 

What advice do you have for students and postdoctoral researchers interesting in investigating the brain’s code for time?

Develop your questions and hypotheses by triangulating between a few distinct areas of research, e.g., behavioral research on humans, neurobiological studies of non-human animals, and cross-species / evolutionary studies of rhythm and timing.

Anne Giersch studied medicine and specialized in psychiatry before doing a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience, with a training in Psychophysics and Experimental Psychology in the field of visual grouping. After a post-doctoral stay in Germany, she was hired by the French Medical Research Institute (INSERM) as a full time researcher. She directs a team in Strasbourg in France (INSERM U1114) recognized for its expertise in the exploration of cognitive disorders in schizophrenia. Anne Giersch has worked on cognition, psychopharmacology and schizophrenia for several years, with 70 papers in international journals. She has developed a specific focus on time issues, to uncover the mechanisms of cognitive deficits in schizophrenia and their relationship with neurobiological disorders and clinical symptoms. She claims that the thought fragmentation described in patients may reveal critical mechanisms of disorders affecting the sense of self in patients, but also critical temporal dynamics of our unconscious and conscious mental activity.  

 

How can we determine the brain’s code for time?

And how do we go from the brain code to the experience of time? Duration? Order? Asynchrony? Thing?

 

What aspect of timing does your lab investigate, and what do you consider to be the most pressing and fundamental questions in timing research?

My lab is investigating the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Those patients have been described as suffering from a disruption of the sense of time continuity, which we can only imagine to be a frightful, unspeakable, experience. The question of the sense of time continuity is so old it might not be considered as a pressing question. However, if its disruption explains some of the terror experienced by the patients; if it leads them to stop from feeling as one unique continuous being over time, then it becomes an emergency. But still one question among other pressing questions.

 

As the Organizers, what are your hopes and expectations for the 1st Timing Research Forum Conference?

The conference brings together researchers coming to timing from different perspectives. This has always been fruitful in research, and my hope for this conference and the following ones is that this timing research will remain open, or even open up more to different approaches and backgrounds, attracting researchers from different fields in a flexible way.

 

What current topics/techniques or new advances in timing research are you most excited about?

I came to timing only after studying psychiatry, and then visual organization under the effect of drugs or pathology. I am now totally absorbed in timing research. I see the whole topic as an ideal way to understand what consciousness is and where our conscious experience comes from, both its content and its container, or structure.

 

What advice do you have for students and postdoctoral researchers interesting in investigating the brain’s code for time?

I would say come! Work and read. As much as you can, in your field and outside your field. Philosophy, neuroimaging, psychology, molecular biology, beyond if you can. And don’t forget to stop, think, and let your mind wander.

 

Jenny Coull is a CNRS Senior Research Fellow and has been at Aix-Marseille University in France for 15 years. Prior to that she spent 7 years in London at the Functional Imaging Laboratory of UCL.  She conducts functional imaging, psychopharmacological and developmental investigations of timing and temporal attention. Her lab website is – https://sites.google.com/site/jennifercoull/

 

How can we determine the brain’s code for time?

Slowly!

 

Warren Meck obtained a B.A. degree in psychology from the University of California, San Diego, a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Brown University, and has been a professor at Brown University, Columbia University, and now Duke University.

His publications are accessible at Google Scholar and can be downloaded at ResearchGate, which also hosts preprints and descriptions of current research projects.

 

How can we determine the brain’s code for time?

It will take well-designed psychophysical studies in combination with neuroimaging, optogenetic stimulation, and electrophysiological recording techniques (triangulation) to break the code. Evaluating subjects with selective lesions and/or genetic backgrounds will continue to be important as well.

 

What will your talk at the 1st Timing Research Forum Conference focus on?

My talk will focus on the pervasiveness of timing abilities across animal species and the idea that a common timing mechanism is used that co-evolved with motor systems, i.e., to move is to time.

 

What according to you are the most pressing and fundamental questions in timing research?

Goals:

a) To map out the “temporal connectome” for time, whereby central timing mechanisms can monitor and synchronize satellite timing mechanisms.

b) To better understand the relationship between intelligence/working memory capacity and timing accuracy/precision.

 

What current topics/techniques or new advances in timing research are you most excited about?

Optogenetics, i.e., selective stimulation of specific types of neurons and/or pathways thought to be involved in controlling the speed of the “internal clock” as well as its mode of operation (e.g., run, pause, and reset).

 

What advice do you have for students and postdoctoral researchers interested in investigating the brain’s code for time?

I would first recommend that students keep in mind the inspiration provided by Robert Rousseau (Laval University) in his forward to the book Functional and Neural Mechanisms of Interval Timing (CRC Press, 2003).

“For more than a century, time has been an object of study in experimental psychology. In his Experimental Psychology, Titchener (1905) wrote, “A student who knows his time sense … has a good idea of what experimental psychology has been and of what it has come to be.” At the dawn of the 21st century, I believe that Titchener’s judgment about the status of timing and time perception in psychology is still appropriate. As was the case a century ago, knowledge of the current research on timing gives a sense of what cognition, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience have come to be and will become.”

I would also advise students to learn as much as they can about the different levels of analysis that can be applied in the study of timing and time perception in humans and other animals. For me, this would involve comparative neuroanatomy, electrophysiology, and computational modeling.

Dean Buonomano is Professor at the Departments of Neurobiology and Psychology, University of California Los Angeles. At the 1st TRF Conference, he is the Organizer of a symposium on ‘Timing, Neural Dynamics, and Temporal Scaling‘. He regularly tweets about time at @deanbuono.

 

How can we determine the brain’s code for time?

I don’t think there will be a single code for time any more than there is a single code for space in the brain. I think there be will be a number of ways the brain represents and tracks time, depending on the time scale and task at hand. Timing is simply to integral to the brain’s fundamental computations to rely on a single strategy. We have increasingly compelling evidence that in some cases temporal information is encoded in dynamically changing neural activity patterns (population clocks) or ramping of firing rates. The challenge will be to understand the mechanisms by which these codes are generated, and the domain in which different coding and timing strategies are relevant (a problem related to the Taxonomy of Time, see #3 below).

 

What will your talk at the 1st Timing Research Forum Conference focus on?

A striking ability we have at the both the sensory and motor level is to recognize and generate temporal patterns at different speeds—such as the tempo of music or the speed of speech. Along with Hugo Merchant and Mehrdad Jazayeri my talk will focus on the problem of temporal scaling: the ability to produce simple or complex temporal motor patterns at different speeds.

 

What according to you are the most pressing and fundamental questions in timing research?

I think the most pressing question in the timing field may be defining what exactly we mean by the timing field. Specifically, there is an increasing recognition that we need a Taxonomy of Time. A taxonomy of memory (e.g., Procedural x Declarative) was in many ways one of the most important advances in the study of learning and memory in the 20^th century. The timing field is severely hampered by our inability to define and pinpoint the different forms, and time scales, of timing and temporal processing.

 

What current topics/techniques or new advances in timing research are you most excited about?

To date most studies have primarily focused on the activity or contribution of a given brain area in a timing task. But the brain is one big “which came first the chicken or the egg” problem when it comes to cause and effect. So I’m excited about improvements in our ability to record from hundreds of neurons in multiple different brain areas simultaneously. I think focusing on the transformations that happen between areas and the differences in representations will provide a powerful tool to understand timing and temporal processing.

 

What advice do you have for students and postdoctoral researchers interesting in investigating the brain’s code for time?

Read, and try to seek out opportunities to write reviews and perspectives.