Epilepsy and multidimensional time:a perspective inspired by theoretical physics
3 hours ago
- Epileptic seizures disrupt temporal integration, causing subjective time distortions such as déjà vu, jamais vu, acceleration, slowing, looping, and fragmentation.
- Subjective time is proposed to emerge from hierarchical neural timescales, oscillatory coordination, and brain–body rhythms rather than a single centralized clock.
- Kletetschka's multidimensional time model is used only as a conceptual analogy for how partially independent neural temporal processes may decouple during seizures.
- Temporal experience involves the interaction of fast sensory integration and slower narrative or self-referential processes across distributed cortical regions.
- Phenomenological frameworks such as Husserl's retentio, protentio, and presentatio help explain how seizures fragment the synthesis of temporal consciousness.
- Seizure-related temporal distortions can also occur interictally, as seen in childhood absence epilepsy, correlating with executive dysfunction.
- Cultural and social contexts shape temporal cognition, suggesting that time is not purely biological but context-dependent and pluralistic.
- Seizures are viewed as natural experiments that reveal latent plasticity and alternative modes of temporal organization in consciousness.
- The framework generates falsifiable predictions linking neural timescales, oscillatory synchronization, physiological rhythms, and subjective temporal reports.
- The Perspective integrates neuroscience, phenomenology, brain–body dynamics, and physics-inspired analogies to guide future research on temporal consciousness.