Keeping track of time is one of the brain's most important tasks.

As the brain processes the flood of sights and sounds it encounters, it must also remember when each event occurred.

For decades, neuroscientists have theorized that the brain "time stamps" events as they happen, allowing us to keep track of where we are in time and when past events occurred. However, they couldn't find any evidence that such time stamps really existed - until now.

An MIT team led by Institute Professor Ann Graybiel has found groups of neurons in the primate brain that code time with extreme precision. "All you do is time stamp everything, and then recalling events is easy: you go back and look through your time stamps until you see which ones are correlated with the event," she says.

That kind of precise timing control is critical for everyday tasks such as driving a car or playing the piano, as well as keeping track of past events.

The discovery, reported in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to new treatments for diseases such as Parkinson's disease, where the ability to control the timing of movements is impaired.

Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology