DEAN BUONOMANO
Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience, Neurobiology Brain Research Institute
University of California, Los AngelesCOURTESY OF DEAN BUONOMANODean Buonomano was among the first neuroscientists to begin to ask how the human brain encodes time. It’s not an easy concept to grasp, Buonomano says, and for that reason many researchers overlook it. “The first field of modern science was probably geometry, which was formalized by Euclid around 300 B.C.,” says the researcher, who is currently working on a popular-science book about time and the brain. “What’s amazing about geometry is that there is absolutely no time involved; it’s the study of things that never change. And there’s a reason why it is one of the first science fields. Science is much easier if you can ignore time.”
Buonomano was in grad school when he became enamored of the question of how we navigate through time. As a graduate student at the University of Texas (UT) Health Science Center at Houston, Buonomano collaborated with Michael Mauk after he heard Mauk’s lecture on his studies of the neural circuits in the cerebellum. “He had really transformative ideas about how the cerebellum tells time and how the dynamics of neural circuits in the cerebellum might code for timing,” says Buonomano. “His ideas were really something that directed the rest of my career.”
Mauk and Buonomano modeled the way the cerebellum’s circuits could respond to stimuli and showed that this type of neuronal network can differentiate between time intervals that differ by just tens of milliseconds. ...
