Abstract
The dynamics of the environment where we live in and the interaction with it, predicting events, provided strong evolutionary pressures for the brain functioning to process temporal information and generate timed responses. As a result, the human brain is able to process temporal information and generate temporal patterns. Despite the clear importance of temporal processing to cognition, learning, communication and sensory, motor and emotional processing, the basal mechanisms of how animals differentiate simple intervals or provide timed responses are still under debate. The lesson we learned from the last decade of research in neuroscience is that functional and structural brain connectivity matter. Specifically, it has been accepted that the organization of the brain in interacting segregated networks enables its function. In this paper we delineate the route to a promising approach for investigating timing mechanisms. We illustrate how novel insight into timing mechanisms can come by investigating brain functioning as a multi-layer dynamical network whose clustered dynamics is bound to report the presence of metastable states. We anticipate that metastable dynamics underlie the real-time coordination necessary for the brain's dynamic functioning associated to time perception. This new point of view will help further clarifying mechanisms of neuropsychiatric disorders.
Highlights
The dynamics of the environment where we live in and the interaction with it, predicting events, provided strong evolutionary pressures for the brain functioning to process temporal information and generate timed responses
Alternate models have been proposed, describing timing as an ensemble of neural processes emerging from the activity of neural circuits inherently capable of temporal processing as a result of the complexity of cortical networks coupled with the presence of time-dependent neuronal properties (Buonomano and Maass, 2009)
Our perspective view about the best strategy able to provide a coherent and complete description of timing can be divided in three steps: (1) the choice of tasks involving different aspects of timing (Coull and Nobre, 1998, 2008; Coull, 2004; Coull et al, 2013; Ciullo et al, 2018a) to be administered on a steady-state fashion (Gonzalez-Castillo and Bandettini, 2018; Tommasin et al, 2018) in order to saturate the activity of the areas interacting during the specific task; (2) the brain activity should be monitored by means of different techniques able to highlight different temporal and spatial scales
Summary
Timing is an umbrella term that encompasses a variety of processes based on the prediction and estimation of temporal intervals across a wide range of scales, from hundreds of milliseconds to seconds. By moving to larger temporal and spatial scales, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies in humans showed that interval timing is regulated by distributed brain networks whose involvement is flexibly adapted according to task demands: timing emerges from the interaction among diverse brain regions rather than from processing in a specific one (Livesey et al, 2007; Coull et al, 2008; Harrington et al, 2010; Fingelkurts, 2014). A network based description of brain regions integration in timing is still largely incomplete and available only in Ciullo et al (2018b) and Ghaderi et al (2018) This kind of cerebral systems modeling (Bassett and Sporns, 2017), will be crucially beneficial in the close future to an organic description of brain functioning during the estimation of temporal intervals and eventually to a better description of disorders characterized by impaired time perception
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