How the Brain Creates a Timeline of the Past

Just a few months after Howard and Shankar started to flesh out their theory, other scientists independently uncovered neurons, dubbed “time cells,” that were “as close as we can possibly get to having that explicit record of the past,” Howard said. Invigorated by empirical support for their theory, he and his colleagues have been working on a broader framework, which they hope to use to unify the brain’s wildly different types of memory, and more: If their equations are implemented by neurons, they could be used to describe not just the encoding of time but also a slew of other properties —  even thought itself. So have recent findings — soon to be published by Howard, Elizabeth Buffalo at the University of Washington and other collaborators — that monkeys viewing a series of images show the same kind of temporal activity in their entorhinal cortex that Tsao observed in rats.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org