Editorial: Understanding the Role of the Time Dimension in the Brain Information Processing

An accurate representation of time-dimension in the neuronal circuits is required for a successful interaction of the brain with the four-dimensional physical world. Time-dimension, unlike other three dimensions of our physical universe, is never perceived as a novelty, but only reported as the flow of time. As there are no known neurological or psychiatric disorders that are associated with the loss of the sense of flow of time, this suggests that the functions of the brain involve processing of temporal information (Merchant et al., 2013). Moreover, psychological flow of time is likely the result of the perception of the physical nature of the time-dimension. The information about a stimulus coded by neural circuits can be understood in terms of Shannon information, which is the arrangement of spikes (an absence or presence) in timebins of specific size along the time-dimension (Gupta and Chen, 2016a,b). Thus, Shannon information inherently incoporates time-bin as the time-dimension in information processing. Encoded stimulus characteristic, can be decoded or utilized in brain circuits by processing this information, referred as the temporal processing of information. Thus, it is implicit that the information processing, underlying various cognitive functions of the brain, is coupled with the invariant time-dimension. Several novel findings are reported in this Special Issue, which bring us closer to understanding the role of the time-dimension in the brain information processing. These include the representation of the physical time in neural circuits, temporal processing of information, the role of prior information in the internal representation of rhythmic time, and neural oscillations in timing behavior and perception.