Fast-changing party leadership contests, police shootings in America, fallout from Brexit and the Chilcot enquiry… If you’re exhausted by the pace of news, you might be surprised it’s been just over three weeks since the referendum result. Feels like three years, doesn’t it?
Humans are hopeless at judging time intervals of minutes, hours and days on our own – hence our reliance on watches and calendars. Being a neuroscientist, this is surprising to me, because when it comes to milliseconds, our brain is an exquisitely calibrated timepiece.
One example of this is our ability to hear in stereo. The auditory system is very good at detecting whether a sound is coming from our left or right by comparing the arrival times of sounds in the left and right ears. Given the speed of sound in air, the timing difference between these is minuscule, yet we can decode how much time has passed to tell where the sound is coming from.
Physicists use very rapid atomic clocks to measure fluctuations in our orbit around the sun over years. But, sadly, our brains cannot keep count of the precise ticks that regulate us at the cellular level.
Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London
