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Cognitive neuroscience

Time, space and memory

Nature volume 497, pages 568–569 (2013)Cite this article

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The brain's hippocampus contains place cells, which encode an animal's specific location. The finding that hippocampal neurons may also respond to time could provide information on the coding of episodic memories.

The philosopher Immanuel Kant made life difficult for neuroscientists by posing the following dilemma: does the brain represent time and space, which are themselves actual entities, or does it produce time and space and impose these categories on the world with which we interact? A more mundane, yet important, practical issue is whether there is a dedicated time-keeping mechanism in the brain, similar to the clock of a computer. The hippocampal region of the brain has long been suspected to represent Kantian space1. Now, in work published in Neuron, Kraus and colleagues2 attempt to address the hard problem of time by describing 'time cells' — guess where, in the hippocampus. The implications of these findings are potentially far reaching.

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Figure 1: Externally driven and self-organized cell assemblies track time.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. György Buzsáki is at the Neuroscience Institute, New York University Langone Medical Center, New York, New York 10016, USA.,

    György Buzsáki

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  1. György Buzsáki
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Correspondence to György Buzsáki.

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Buzsáki, G. Time, space and memory. Nature 497, 568–569 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/497568a

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