Research published in PLOS Biology by Valeria Centanino, Gianfranco Fortunato, and Domenica Bueti on Apr. 3 describes how the brain constructs the perception of time through a series of complex processing stages. The study used high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure time perception in healthy volunteers and examined what happens in the brain when estimating the duration of visual stimuli.
Understanding how people perceive time is important for both everyday activities and skilled actions such as sports. For example, tennis player Jannik Sinner's ability to hit a ball at precisely the right moment relies on accurate timing processed by his brain.
The researchers found that temporal information is processed from basic sensory areas to higher-order regions. Initially, occipital visual areas encode duration through increasing neural responses: longer stimuli produce stronger signals. This information moves to parietal and premotor regions, where distinct neural populations respond preferentially to specific durations. This allows for an internal 'readout' of elapsed time.
Finally, frontal cortex and anterior insula regions are involved in categorizing these durations subjectively, shaping each person's experience of time passing. "Our results show that time perception is not a unitary process, but the outcome of multiple processing stages distributed across the cerebral cortex," Centanino, Fortunato, and Bueti said. "Each stage contributes differently, from encoding physical duration to constructing the subjective experience of time."
The study proposes a mechanistic model explaining not just where but also how temporal information is handled in the brain. The authors say this new framework advances understanding of why people's sense of time can sometimes be distorted or variable.
