Life and Time are very closely linked, because life needs the patience of eons to emerge and evolve, and also due to the precision timing of neural networks in the perception of the world, encoding information, and performing actions. A dozen renowned biologists and neuroscientists collaborate in this volume to explore the various facets of timing in the living world. The temporal programming of the activity of the genetic code controls the essential mechanisms of individual development from zygote to adult, while evolution uses the succession of generations to accomplish its work. For its part, the brain accomplishes the miracle of justifying presentism and reconstructing the continuity of present time from the fragmented data accessible to the senses, as well as measuring durations and dating events. To this end, the brain uses a multilevel temporal coding to transport and decode sensory information and prepare motor responses. It is only gradually that we have discovered the temporal precision of the mechanisms involved, of the order of a few milliseconds or less, for the adjustment of neural networks, or the synaptic plasticity used for memory formation. Today, the perfection of natural neural networks, the energy saving use of spikes of electrical impulses to categorize the sensory environment and to guess its probable future is an example to the modelers and engineers of artificial intelligence.
Contents:
- Time, Operational Scale, and Emergent Modularity in Evolution (Michael Crawford)
- Timing of Genes and Development (Florence Petit)
- The Feeling of Time Continuity: Not as Obvious as It Seems? (Anne Giersch)
- Mental Imagery and Time (Eve A Isham and Morteza Izadifar)
- Cognitive Neuroscience of Time: Nows, Timelines, and Chronologies (Virginie van Wassenhove)
- Memory and Time: From Past- to Future-Oriented Mental Time Travel (Pascale Piolino and Valentina La Corte)
- Neuroscience Reveals the Role of Timing in the Brain (Remy Lestienne)
- Timing, Spikes, and the Brain (Simon Thorpe)
- Bayesian Sense of Time in Biological and Artificial Brains (Zafeirios Fountas and Alexey Zakharov)
- Bridging the Neuroscience and Physics of Time (Dean Buonomano and Carlo Rovelli)
Readership: Researchers and people with academic or teaching professions in Biology (particularly Neuroscience, Genetics, Evolution), or Philosophy of Science.
Key Features:
- Key contemporary scientific issues addressed by ten leading researchers, including genetic mechanisms in development and evolution; neuroscientific analysis of the memory and consciousness and the timing mechanisms of neuronal networks
- Contributions freely discuss specificity and relation to the time of physical sciences, relation with the orders of classical philosophy (present, past and future) and with the various mechanisms of memories that evolution has fitted in the brain
