Amazing stuff!
"They found that our momentary perception of time is not continuous but may stretch or shrink with each heartbeat.
The research builds evidence that the heart is one of the brain’s important timekeepers and plays a fundamental role in our sense of time passing – an idea contemplated since ancient times ...
The team harnessed that variability in a novel experiment. Forty-five study participants – ages 18 to 21, with no history of heart trouble – were monitored with electrocardiography, or ECG, measuring heart electrical activity at millisecond resolution. The ECG was linked to a computer, which enabled brief tones lasting 80-180 milliseconds to be triggered by heartbeats. Study participants reported whether tones were longer or shorter relative to others.
The results revealed what the researchers called “temporal wrinkles.” When the heartbeat preceding a tone was shorter, the tone was perceived as longer. When the preceding heartbeat was longer, the sound’s duration seemed shorter. ..."
From the abstract:
"The role of the heart in the experience of time has been long theorized but empirical evidence is scarce. Here, we examined the interaction between fine-grained cardiac dynamics and the momentary experience of subsecond intervals. Participants performed a temporal bisection task for brief tones (80–188 ms) synchronized with the heart. We developed a cardiac Drift-Diffusion Model (cDDM) that embedded contemporaneous heart rate dynamics into the temporal decision model. Results revealed the existence of temporal wrinkles—dilation or contraction of short intervals—in synchrony with cardiac dynamics. A lower prestimulus heart rate was associated with an initial bias in encoding the millisecond-level stimulus duration as longer, consistent with facilitation of sensory intake. Concurrently, a higher prestimulus heart rate aided more consistent and faster temporal judgments through more efficient evidence accumulation. Additionally, a higher speed of poststimulus cardiac deceleration, a bodily marker of attention, was associated with a greater accumulation of sensory temporal evidence in the cDDM. These findings suggest a unique role of cardiac dynamics in the momentary experience of time. Our cDDM framework opens a new methodological avenue for investigating the role of the heart in time perception and perceptual judgment."
FIGURE 1 Two views on the impact of heart rate on the brain and behavior.
No comments:
Post a Comment