To understand the neural mechanisms of time perception, we combine psychophysical, behavioral, and computational approaches to address the relationship between the timing of perception and the timing of neural signals. We are currently engaged in experiments that explore temporal encoding, time warping, manipulations of the perception of causality, time perception in schizophrenia, and time perception in high-adrenaline situations. We use this data to explore how neural signals processed by different brain regions come together for a temporally unified picture of the world.

Time Flies

For a popular-science essay that lays out the mysteries of time perception, see my essay Brain Time (published in What’s Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. M. Brockman, Ed).

"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer
"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal
"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times
"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker
"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand
"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald
"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian