David Robbe challenges conventional notions of time and memory

In this “Brain Inspired” episode, Paul Middlebrooks and David Robbe, group leader of the Cortical-Basal Ganglia Circuits and Behavior Lab at the Mediterranean Institute of Neurobiology, explore Robbe’s idea that brains don’t measure time. Like many neuroscientists, Robbe has searched for correlates of internal clocks in specific brain regions, such as the basal ganglia. But based on his experiments with rodents trained to estimate duration, and his renewed interest in the philosopher Henri Bergson and his notion of durée—or our lived experience of time—Robbe concludes that animals use their own movements and interactions with their environment to perceive the passing of time.

Read the transcript.