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| Mysterious Tendrils in the Brain Could Control Time Perception |
According to a recent study on mice conducted by scientists from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), in the US, tiny organelles that resemble tiny antennae that were formerly believed to be remnants from our distant past appear to be essential for keeping track of time.
The study was released in the journal Molecular Neurobiology.
The microtubule projections sometimes referred to as cilia, are present on many of our own cells as well as other more complicated branches of the tree of life.
The majority of cilia in the human body, also known as primary cilia, are not mobile, except when they play a function in motion, such as pushing cells around or transporting things near their surface.
These types of structures were thought to be vestigial during early research more than a century ago. Numerous primary cilia are now understood to be crucial components of a signaling hub system that keeps the body responsive and adaptable.
Although primary cilia play a variety of roles in receiving and reacting to sensory information, little is known about how these organelles fit in with higher-order cognitive processes occurring in the brain.
Acting as this central clock, the striatum's role in the brain includes synchronizing motor actions, learning, planning, and decision-making. The control of working memory and attention maintenance depends on it as well.
The striatum cilia were removed from mice for the study using a gene-manipulation approach, which had a significant impact.
Although the mice could still retain their long-term memories and taught or ingrained motor abilities, several detrimental impacts were seen when the cilia were removed.
The rats demonstrated a lack of ability to acquire new motor tasks, repeated motor activity, and apparent delays in decision-making. Their capacity to swiftly recall information about position and orientation as well as their capacity to block out unimportant external sensory data were both significantly impacted.
These results were reached after conducting a number of experiments on the mice, including putting them through mazes and measuring their ability to identify items and places.
According to UCI neuroscientist Amal Alachkar, "perfect and exact time judgment, often within a millisecond to a minute, is required for successful execution of working memory, attention, decision-making, and executive function.
Damage to such capacity entails being unable to maintain appropriate, goal-oriented motor responses and being unable to quickly alter behavior in response to changes in external inputs.
It is evident that all of the effects of cilia removal share the loss of the capacity to swiftly adapt behavior in response to environmental changes in a timely manner.
Although the implications of these findings for humans are not yet completely understood, it is probable that human brain cilia function similarly to those in mice. To further examine the connection between cilia and time perception, the researchers are now working on follow-up investigations.
The discovery advances our knowledge of how we experience the world and may even enable us to correct it when our notion of time is incorrect.
Numerous mental and neurological conditions, such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, Tourette syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, and Huntington's disease, share the trait of impaired time perception and incorrect time judgment.
"Our findings may offer new pathways for therapeutic intervention through cilia-targeted interventions," claims Alachkar.
Understanding the processes by which cilia govern time perception and creating specialized treatments to treat behavioral abnormalities are the goals of our continuing research.
