Neural timescales or lack thereof

This article aims at making readers, experimentalists and theorists, more aware of the abstractions made by an observer when measuring and reporting behavioral and neural timescales. These abstractions stow away the fact that, above lower boundaries that reflect fairly well understood physical constraints, observed and reported timescales are often not intrinsic to the biological system; rather, in most cases they reflect conditions that are imposed by the observer through the measuring procedure. This is true at practically every level of organization, from behavior down to molecules. I analyze the impacts of the resulting temporal manifold in behavioral and brain sciences on experimental designs and mathematical modeling.