Hearing noise and moving our body helps us gauge the passing of time

Moving your body or listening to sounds during an event can help you become more aware of the passage of time.This improved temporal awareness may help assess the efficacy of treatments for conditions like Parkinson’s disease

To Alex Wilkins

Moving your body while listening to sounds may help you better understand the passage of time for certain events.

Previous research suggests that this finding could help improve treatment of conditions such as Parkinson’s disease. may help assess the effectiveness of interventions aimed at

When an event occurs, the body has different means of measuring how long it lasts. However, it was unclear to what extent movement itself contributed to this, or how accurately movement alone kept time.

To learn more, Martin Wiener and his colleagues at George Mason University in Virginia had 20 people control a robotic arm projected on a screen until they felt a vibration and stopped moving. Participants then held the button down for as long as they thought they had moved their arm.

Participants then listened to a tone for 1 to 4 seconds, pressed a button, and considered how long the tone lasted. Then I controlled the arm, listened to the sound at the same time, and pressed the button for the amount of time I thought was right.

In the robotic arm experiment, participants slightly underestimated elapsed time, but slightly overestimated when listening to auditory tones. They were most accurate when both inputs were received.

“What we found is that people incorporated both [signals] This shows that the brain has a way of putting together the right signals at the right time,” says Wiener.

Hearing rhythmic noises is associated with walking more steadily in Parkinson’s patients, but the extent to which these noises are responsible is unknown. Measurements can assess the effectiveness of these interventions, Wiener says.

“This is a fascinating study that greatly advances our understanding of the potential ways in which multiple sources of sensory information can be optimally combined to produce timed actions,” said Ruth Cohen of Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Ogden said.