New research has scientists rethinking how the brain tells time

A tennis return can look almost automatic. The ball comes off the racket, crosses the court in a blur, and somehow a player like Novak Djokovic meets it at just the right instant. That kind of timing feels seamless, but inside the brain it is anything but simple.

Research published in PLOS Biology suggests that the brain does not process time in one place or in one uniform way. Instead, duration appears to be built step by step across several cortical regions, beginning with visual areas and moving through parietal, premotor, and frontal regions until it becomes something closer to a subjective judgment.

“Our results show that time perception is not a unitary process, but the outcome of multiple processing stages distributed across the cerebral cortex,” the authors wrote. “Each stage contributes differently, from encoding physical duration to constructing the subjective experience of time.”

The study was led by Valeria Centanino, Gianfranco Fortunato, and Domenica Bueti from Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati.

Time matters constantly in daily life. The brain has to track events that unfold within fractions of a second, whether that means catching a ball, crossing a street, or reacting in conversation. Scientists have long known that many brain regions take part in timing, but the exact relationship among those areas has remained murky.

To probe that question, the researchers studied 13 healthy participants using ultra-high-field 7T functional MRI. Volunteers performed a visual duration task while lying in the scanner. They saw a circular visual stimulus that lasted between 0.2 and 0.8 seconds, then judged whether it was shorter or longer than a reference duration of 0.5 seconds that they had learned beforehand.

That setup let the team look beyond simple activation and ask how different brain regions were tuned to different durations.

The pattern that emerged was layered.

In occipital visual areas, neural responses increased as the stimulus lasted longer. The researchers describe this as a monotonic response. Put plainly, longer input produced stronger activity. These early regions seem to handle the raw encoding of duration coming from the visual scene.

Farther along the cortical hierarchy, in parietal and premotor regions, the pattern changed. There, neural populations responded preferentially to specific durations rather than just ramping up with longer ones. The authors interpret this as a kind of readout stage, where the brain transforms incoming timing information into distinct duration representations.

Then came the frontal cortex and anterior insula.

Those higher-order regions did not simply track the full range of durations in the same way. Instead, many of them clustered around the middle of the tested range. That matters because the task required people to sort durations into “shorter” or “longer” relative to a learned reference.

In some of these frontal and insular regions, the researchers found that brain activity tracked each participant’s point of subjective equality, or PSE. That is the comparison duration a person is equally likely to call shorter or longer than the reference. In other words, it reflects the participant’s internal boundary for the judgment.

This is where the study becomes especially interesting. The data suggest that some regions are not just representing physical time as it arrives through the senses. They may be helping construct the personal boundary that shapes how time is perceived.

The authors argue that this points to three processing stages: duration encoding, duration readout, and duration categorization.

That last stage may be especially important for everyday experience, because it moves the brain away from simply registering an external event and toward forming a usable perception. A visual event is no longer just a stimulus with a length. It becomes something the brain can classify and act on.

The study also found that these timing signals were arranged differently across the cortex. In some regions, similar duration preferences clustered together in organized maps. In others, the spatial organization was weaker. The supplementary motor area stood out because its front and back portions seemed to play different roles, with caudal regions covering the full range of durations and rostral regions favoring more categorical, middle-range representations.

The researchers say this helps explain why timing can serve different purposes at once, from perception to action.

Still, the work has clear limits. The team examined only cortical regions, leaving out the cerebellum and subcortical structures, which are also known to be important for temporal processing. The study focused only on vision, so it remains unclear how well the findings apply to sound or other senses. And because the experiment used one duration range, it could not fully test how flexible these apparent “boundary” signals are under changing conditions.

Even with those caveats, the study offers a more mechanical account of how the brain may build time from the ground up.

This work suggests that your sense of time is assembled through several brain stages rather than produced by a single internal clock.

That matters for understanding fast actions such as sports performance, but it could also help researchers study disorders in which time feels distorted.

By showing where physical duration may turn into subjective experience, the findings give scientists a clearer framework for exploring how timing breaks down, and how it might someday be improved.

Research findings are available online in the journal PLOS Biology.

The original story "New research has scientists rethinking how the brain tells time" is published in The Brighter Side of News.

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