The Laplace Transform of Time in the Brain

Researchers at the University of Washington found that rats' time signals overlapped during a repetitive task. Mark Howard says it shows how our perception of time is elastic, and what happens in those sequences helps us estimate how much subjective time has passed. If Howard's model is true, then it tells us how we create and maintain a timeline of the past. That timeline could be of use not just to episodic memory in the hippocampus, but to working memory in the prefrontal cortex and conditioning responses in the striatum. The same mathematics can help us understand our sense of the future, too.