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Published on: February 15, 2011
Constructing calendars in the brain
V S Ramachandran1, Chaipat Chunharas1,2, Zeve Marcus1
1Center for Brain and Cognition, Department of Psychology, University of California, San Diego, CA, USA.
Abstract:
By studying an enigmatic condition called, "calendar synesthesia", we explored the elusive boundary between perception, visual imagery, and the manner in which we construct an internal mental calendar by mapping time-sequences onto spatial maps. We use a series of demonstrations to establish that these calendars act more like real objects activating sensory pathways rather than purely abstract symbolic descriptions that bear no resemblance to an actual calendar. We propose that the calendar is enshrined in acircuitry involving the hippocampal place-cells and entorhinal grid-cells, which are connected to the angular gyrus (involved with computing sequences) via the inferior longitudinal fasciculus.
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