Time Perception in an Adaptive Excitable System

Department of Physics and Center for Complex Systems,National Central University, Chungli, Taiwan 320, Republic of China(Dated: February 16, 2015)Time anticipation is the ability of a system under a periodic stimulation to produce transientresponses with a time scale similar to that of the stimulation after the stimulation is removed. Itcan be easily implemented by a clock. However, the observations of anticipative dynamics in diversebiological systems raise the question of the existence of such a clock. Here we demonstrate thatan excitable system, such as FitzHugh-Nagumo model with an adaptive excitability, will exhibitanticipative dynamics; suggesting that no such clocks are needed. Since our adaptive mechanismrequires that the excitability of the system increases with the frequency of the external stimulation,such an adaptive mechanism can be viewed as the facilitation of synapses in a neural system,which is an important ingredient for modeling of working memory (WM). With this interpretation,an existing model of WM has been shown to have the anticipative mechanism already built-in;con rming the belief that the perception of time resides in temporary storage.