The Neural Basis of Timing: Distributed Mechanisms for Diverse Functions

Abstract

Timing is critical to most forms of learning, behavior, and sensory-motor processing. Converging evidence supports the notion that, precisely because of its importance across a wide range of brain functions, timing relies on intrinsic and general properties of neurons and neural circuits; that is, the brain uses its natural cellular and network dynamics to solve a diversity of temporal computations. Many circuits have been shown to encode elapsed time in dynamically changing patterns of neural activity-so-called population clocks. But temporal processing encompasses a wide range of different computations, and just as there are different circuits and mechanisms underlying computations about space, there are a multitude of circuits and mechanisms underlying the ability to tell time and generate temporal patterns.