Hickory dickory dock, the mouse ran up the brain... UCLA researchers have uncovered some details of how the brain records the passage of time, PhysOrg reports, and these details could reveal how brains truly work.

Remember that report on "How Brains Weave Memory"? (Must have been a scene of How to Make an American Quilt that didn't make the cut.)

Based on this theory of brain time, the brain might also be adding a "time stamp" to every sensory processing your cranium does. The explanation is likened to ripples in the water: drop a pebble, ripples form, and these ripples act like a "signature" of the time the pebble entered the water. The further the ripples travel, the longer the time.

Same thing with the brain. The time a brain cell is triggered is like the pebble being thrown into the lake: it sets off a ripple of reactions among neighboring brain cells and connections. The brain, it seems, is capable of interpreting these ripples as the passage of time. We don't have an internal clock as we do an internal stopwatch.

These findings bear significance, not only in the understanding of the architecture of the human brain, but also in applications where time is involved, such as speech recognition (pronounciation is a factor of time, too) and musical apprehension. By the way, it's been forty-plus minutes since I started writing this article. And I didn't even have to check the clock.