The Ninth International Conference on Neuroesthetics University of California, Berkeley Saturday,  January 16,  2010
Abstracts
		Semir Zeki
		Introduction
		Dean Buonomano
		How does the brain tell time? Humans time events on scales that span from microseconds to days and beyond. In contrast to the watches on our wrists, which track both milliseconds and months, biology has developed fundamentally different mechanisms for timing across different scales. The mechanisms underlying timing across ranges are understood to varying degrees. The neural basis of timing in the range of tens to hundreds of milliseconds is among the least understood. This range is critical for simple interval and duration discrimination, as well as well as complex forms of processing including speech and music recognition, and motor coordination. Our research suggests that temporal processing on this scale is a generalized property of cortical networks, and does not rely on specialized or centralized mechanisms. In this framework timing is more akin to the dynamics of ripples on a pond than a clock. One consequence of this hypothesis is that our representation of time is inherently nonlinear, and subject to a number of illusions and distortions.
		Athanassios (Thanos) Siapas
		Clocking the Brain’s Memory Making Circuits Theta oscillations are a clocking signal that strongly modulates activity in the hippocampus, a brain area critical for the formation of long-term memories. The prevailing view has been that theta oscillations are synchronized throughout the hippocampus. In this talk I will describe experiments showing that theta oscillations are in fact traveling waves that pattern hippocampal activity not only in time, but also across anatomical space. Hence time in the hippocampus, as clocked by theta oscillations, is organized in a way similar to time on Earth—in a regular progression of local time zones. I will discuss the implications of these findings for the coding of information in hippocampal networks and for patterning the communication of the hippocampus with other brain areas.
		Bernhard Staresina
		Building memories across temporal gaps Our memories enable us to vividly re-experience past events, feelings and thoughts. Importantly, many of the original experiences consist of multiple event details and unfold over extended time periods that exceed the temporal constraints for synaptic learning (i.e., long-term potentiation [LTP]). How do our brains overcome those gaps in order to make discontiguous experiences amenable to LTP and thereby convert them into a unified memory trace? Our recent work has focused on revealing the building blocks of our memories and the neural mechanisms through which they are assembled in the brain. We found that specific regions in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) play a key role for intact memory and that there exists a clear division of labor in the service of successful memory formation. In particular, our data suggest that the human hippocampus is critical for integrating separate event details across space and time and thus provides the 'glue' with which our vivid memory traces are formed.
		John-Dylan Haynes
		Christian Kluge
		Studying time in the Neurosciences: The conceputal framework. The concept of time, like the somewhat related concept of space, has been at center stage in human thought since ancient times. About one hundred years ago physics taught us to see the two as related sides of one entity and the whole as not absolute and universal but rather relative and context-dependent. I will present an overview of the use of the concepts of time and space, starting from their ancient greek roots and extending via the thoughts of Newton, Kant, and others to present day theories. In this, special attention will be paid to the overlap, the differences, as well as the frequently observed tension between concept-using empirical sciences, especially neurosciences, and concept-reflecting, i.e. philosophical ways of seeing these matters. Here, the synthesis aims to show not only that, but also how these two ways of seeing complement each other and that their constructive co-operation can be most fruitful for both domains.
		Rafael Nunez
		Making sense of time: The embodied nature of human abstraction Events that already occurred and events that have not occurred yet, cannot be perceived directly thought the senses. In order to grasp them, refer to them, talk about them, and make sense of them, we must construe them in a stable and tractable manner via the recruitment of bodily-grounded mechanisms that make human imagination possible. Thus, humans from all over the world, speaking different languages, naturally express (and apparently, think about) everyday temporal events as if they were spatial entities. This remarkable but ubiquitous phenomenon manifests itself via ordinary linguistic metaphorical expressions such as (a) "we are approaching the end of the semester," and (b) "Easter is approaching." Moreover, beyond words and grammar, this phenomenon can be observed also through largely unconscious motor actions co-produced with speech-- spontaneous gestures, which reveal its deep conceptual nature. In this presentation I will try to give an overview of how the question of human conceptualization of time can be studied empirically using a variety of research methods, from ethnographic fieldwork to psycholinguistic experiments to neuroimaging. Research in cognitive linguistics and in processing of temporal metaphors has traditionally distinguished between Moving-Ego conceptual metaphors, as in (a) above, and Moving-Time ones, as in (b). Both of these conceptual metaphors involve time events in reference to an Ego, which specifies the present time “Now” where FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST IS BEHIND EGO. I will argue, however, that the picture is more complicated than that: (1) not all spatial construals of time have the Ego as reference point (Ego-RP), and (2) the specified bodily orientation is not universal. I will provide evidence from a priming psycholinguistic experiment to support (1), which shows that there is a fundamental (perhaps more primitive) spatial metaphorical construal of time defined after Time events—not Ego—as reference points (Time RP mapping). Regarding (2) I will show convergent empirical evidence (lexical-metaphorical-gestural) from my fieldwork in the SouthAmerican Andes, which shows that the Aymara people operate with an unusual PAST-IN-FRONT-OF-EGO and FUTURE-BEHIND-EGO mapping. Moreover, from a recent fieldwork investigating time construals in the Yupno culture from the remote mountains of Papua New Guinea, I'll show some preliminary data we have that suggests that some human groups can also naturally conceive time in terms of an entire different set of spatial frames of reference, namely, geocentric (not ego-centric) ones. Finally, regarding Ego-RP mappings, I will present some of our preliminary neuroimaging (fMRI) studies that address the question of the neural basis of the Ego-RP space-time mapping, especially what concerns the role of the ventral-intra parietal area (VIP) and the poly-sensory Zone (PZ) of the human brain. Implications for “Embodiment” and bodily-grounded approaches to the understanding of human imagination and abstraction will be discussed.