How Is Time Represented in the Brain?

Abstract

This chapter addresses the question of how time is represented in the brain. It presents a collection of basic computing principles, focusing on algorithms that deal with sensory pattern sequences that vary over time scales from a few to a few hundred milliseconds. It shows that transmission delays, input currents that decay in time, and synaptic short-time dynamics, such as depression or facilitation, support interesting calculations in the time domain that would otherwise require much more elaborate architectures and algorithms.