Let's play a game. Think about the last minute without looking at a clock. Now think about the last minute waiting for a text back from someone you absolutely should not be emotionally invested in. Same sixty seconds, wildly different spiritual damage. So here is the mystery: if clock time is fixed, why does your lived time act like it hired a chaos agent?

That question sits at the center of a new review by neuroscientist Gyorgy Buzsaki. The old story says the brain builds a neat internal map of space and a clean internal ruler for time, with place cells and time cells acting like tiny GPS pins and calendar alerts. Buzsaki says not so fast. Maybe the brain is not storing time as a straight line at all. Maybe your sense of time comes from change itself, measured through layered rhythms in the brain and body - breathing, heartbeat, movement, sleep cycles, and neural activity [1].

The Brain Is Not a Swiss Watch

Neuroscience has long loved place cells, the hippocampal neurons that fire in specific locations, because they make the brain look satisfyingly map-like. Time cells joined later, firing at particular moments in a sequence and helping explain how memories get their "when" attached to their "where" [2]. Very elegant. Almost suspiciously elegant, like a crime scene where someone definitely wiped the fingerprints.

Buzsaki's complaint is that subjective time is messy in a way a simple internal stopwatch does not explain. Physical time moves in one direction. Your experienced time does whatever it wants. A boring meeting lasts three geological eras. A great night disappears before the fries arrive. His proposal is that the brain extracts time from organized change, using rhythms already present in the body and nervous system as reference scales [1].

Your Memory Runs on Beats, Not Just Facts

This idea fits a growing pile of evidence that memory is deeply rhythmic. The hippocampus already relies on oscillations like theta waves and sharp-wave ripples to organize encoding and recall. Recent work in humans found that breathing during sleep lines up with hippocampal oscillations involved in memory consolidation, suggesting respiration may help coordinate memory-related events instead of merely keeping you from dying in bed [3]. An impressive multitasker, the nose.

Other recent papers make a similar case from different angles. One 2022 review argued that heartbeat and breathing phases can shape perception, attention, and cognition, linking cardiorespiratory cycles to brain oscillations rather than treating the body as background plumbing [4]. A 2024 Nature paper showed that human hippocampal and entorhinal neurons can encode the temporal structure of experience, not just isolated moments [5].

Put differently, your episodic memory may work less like a filing cabinet and more like a band trying to stay on tempo while improvising. Some instruments are external events. Some are internal rhythms. Somehow you still get a recognizable song out of it.

Why This Matters Outside a Neuroscience Seminar

If Buzsaki is even partly right, this matters well beyond theoretical debates. Disorders that warp time perception and memory - Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, depression, schizophrenia, epilepsy, sleep disorders - may involve not just damaged "memory centers" but disrupted timing across brain-body rhythms [1,4].

It could also help explain why sleep quality, breathing patterns, and bodily state have such outsized effects on memory and attention. If the brain uses nested rhythms as scaffolding, then bad sleep is not just low battery mode. It is like the stage crew showing up drunk and misplacing the spotlight.

The classic version of episodic memory asks how the brain stores what happened, where it happened, and when it happened. Buzsaki is basically saying that "when" may not be a separate tag slapped onto memory afterward. It may emerge from the changing bodily and neural context in which the event unfolded [1].

But Here Is Where It Gets Weird

This is still a review and a theory piece, not a final verdict. Place cells and time cells are real, and they remain useful concepts. The live debate is about what those cells are actually doing. Are they representing abstract coordinates in a mental spacetime? Or are they pieces of a dynamic sequence machine shaped by movement, sensation, internal state, and bodily rhythms [1,6]?

That distinction matters because it changes the target. If memory and subjective time emerge from relational change across nested rhythms, then future therapies might focus more on restoring coordination than on hunting for one broken clock part. Cleaner sleep. Better rhythm tracking. More precise stimulation timed to ongoing brain states.

Your brain, in other words, may not be a passive observer sitting inside time and space. It may be actively manufacturing the feeling of both from the inside out. Which is either thrilling or deeply rude, depending on how much trust you had left in your own skull.

References

1. Buzsaki G. Time, space, memory and brain-body rhythms. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2026;27:61-78. doi:10.1038/s41583-025-00987-2
2. Tsao A, Yousefzadeh SA, Meck WH, Moser MB, Moser EI. The neural bases for timing of durations. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2022;23:646-665. doi:10.1038/s41583-022-00632-z
3. Sheriff A, Zhou G, Sagar V, et al. Breathing orchestrates synchronization of sleep oscillations in the human hippocampus. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2024;121(52):e2405395121. doi:10.1073/pnas.2405395121. PMCID:PMC11670218
4. Parviainen T, Lyyra P, Nokia MS. Cardiorespiratory rhythms, brain oscillatory activity and cognition: review of evidence and proposal for significance. Neurosci Biobehav Rev. 2022;142:104908. doi:10.1016/j.neubiorev.2022.104908
5. Tacikowski P, Kalender G, Ciliberti D, Fried I. Human hippocampal and entorhinal neurons encode the temporal structure of experience. Nature. 2024;635(8037):160-167. doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07973-1. PMCID:PMC11540853
6. Fenton AA. Remapping revisited: how the hippocampus represents different spaces. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2024;25:428-448. doi:10.1038/s41583-024-00817-x

Disclaimer: The image accompanying this article is for illustrative purposes only and does not depict actual experimental results, data, or biological mechanisms.