Time, Control, and the Nervous System

Because organisms are able to sense its passage, it is perhaps tempting to treat time as a sensory modality, akin to vision or audition. Indeed, certain features of sensory estimation, such as Weber's law, apply to timing and sensation alike. However, from an organismal perspective, time is a derived feature of other signals, not a stimulus that can be readily transduced by sensory receptors. Its importance for biology lies in the fact that the physical world comprises a complex dynamical system. The multiscale spatiotemporal structure of sensory and internally generated signals within an organism is the informational fabric underlying its ability to control behavior. Viewed this way, temporal computations assume a more fundamental role than is implied by treating time as just another element of the experienced world. Thus, in this review we focus on temporal processing as a means of approaching the more general problem of how the nervous system produces adaptive behavior.