How is the human body capable of measuring small units of time?

Some people have a natural talent for keeping various rhythm timings. For the rest of us it takes practice.

I just tried it, and it’s actually easier for me to keep a steady rhythm than it is for me to try to vary the time for each beat.

I.e., I can establish a consistent tempo after one beat and maintain it with almost no thought at all, whereas I have to concentrate on the amount of time I spend on each beat to achieve individuated differentiation.

So, the question remains, what sort of internal mechanism allows humans to be able to do that?

It’s not the body; it’s the brain.

I’m not sure if there is any innate, biological mechanism in human beings, in our brains, for keeping time. Keeping time and tempo is a matter of training and practice but even then, that’s one of the things conductors do too, they help all the musicians in an orchestra keep time with one another.

Another scientific mystery, I think. Our sense of the passage of time is somehow intimately tied up with consciousness and self-awareness, which are themselves deep mysteries.

I think (and this is just my opinion, not anything I’ve actually read before), that our minds actually look for and want the pattern of keeping a set rhythm (meaning having the timing right when keeping a rhythm). I think that’s why it’s harder for us to purposefully keep an irregular beat. Almost everything our body does on it’s own is done in a rhythm (our heart beat, breathing, the way it processing our foods, etc). So to me, once a person takes the time to try/practice keeping a rhythm, I think it’s easier for them to keep it than to mess it up on purpose. Of course there are exceptions to this, but I think this is true for the majority of us.

How do we perceive any time intervals? I can see how we store spatial dimensions. It is just a matter of interpreting visual images. Okay, I am sure it is more complicated, but at least there is a perception that maps to reality.

I wonder if any other animals have a perception of time. Is it possible, for example, to get a chimpanzee to understand the idea of one thing happening after another, or of waiting for a short time versus waiting for a long time?

The mechanism isn’t well understood, but we are getting a pretty good idea of the brain structures involved. The cerebellum appears to be the organ that measures discreet time intervals, in stopwatch fashion. The basal ganglia seem to pick up on and anticipate regular beats (when beats become irregular, the cerebellum takes over).

The assumption is that the brain must have some regular internal rhythm—a pacemaker—against which it measures external signals, and a couple of possibilities have been hypothesized. One is a brain stem structure called the inferior olive. It has been found to generate an oscillating electronic coupling that, through feedback from connecting structures, could serve this function. This seems to apply more to the perception of discreet intervals.

In the case of regular beat measurement, many studies have identified a loop between the striatum, the thalamus, and the cortex that involves the dopamine cycle. This loop is monitored by the basal ganglia and correlated to short-term memory.

If you feel up to the challenge, there’s an in-depth article in Nature that presents the neuroscience (you’ll need institutional access to read this, but your library may have such access)

@marinelife I think you are correct, but, how do we do it? Remember the game show (whose name eludes me at this time) where people were supposed to try to figure out a specific timeframe while being distracted? I recall how difficult is was for me to try to play along and get the timing right but some folks could nail it.