How does virtuoso tennis player Jannik Sinner manage to hit the ball at exactly the right moment with staggering precision? And how do we perceive the duration of everyday events around us? Researchers at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Italy say the answer lies in how the brain constructs our sense of time.
The study’s authors — Valeria Centanino, Gianfranco Fortunato, and Domenica Bueti — published their findings in PLOS Biology. The researchers explain that, for example, when we see an approaching ball, temporal information travels through progressively complex stages: from the occipital visual cortex to the parietal and premotor areas, and finally to the frontal lobes.
What the team discovered about how the brain senses time
In the study, the team used high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) — the gold standard for brain imaging. By measuring time perception in healthy adult volunteers, the researchers shed light on what happens in the brain when a person judges the duration of a visual event (a stimulus).
“Our results showed that time perception is not a single process but the outcome of multiple processing stages distributed across the cerebral cortex. Each stage contributes differently to time perception, from encoding the physical duration to constructing the subjective experience of time,” the authors wrote.
At the initial stage, the occipital visual areas encode duration through gradual (monotonic) neural responses: the longer the stimulus, the stronger the neural response. Then, in the parietal and premotor areas, that information is transformed into selective (unimodal) representations. There, different populations of neurons respond to specific durations, enabling the “reading” of time. Finally, higher-order regions — notably the frontal cortex and the anterior insula — help form the subjective categorization of duration, shaping time perception.
The study expands our understanding of time perception and opens new avenues for investigating how the brain constructs subjective time and why that experience can sometimes be distorted.
