Do nonhuman animals live in a kind of eternal present, or are they aware of the passage of time? That question has been debated by scientists for decades.
Most experts agree that animals have some way of measuring time, but how their brains process time has long been a mystery. We may never know what the passage of time feels like to other animals, but researchers are beginning to discover what’s going on in the brain when animals process time.
How Animals Process Time
Daniel Dombeck, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, has done a lot of work on what happens in the brain as it forms, stores, and recalls memories. As you might imagine, this kind of work often involves mice and mazes. However, in Dombeck’s lab, they let the mice play video games — that is, they use a virtual reality maze. This turned out to be a brilliant way of designing an experiment to study how animals process time.
