Neural Correlates of Temporal Presentness in the Precuneus: A Cross-linguistic fMRI Study based on Speech Stimuli

• Published in: Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. 1991) Vol. 31; no. 3; pp. 1538 - 1552
• Main Authors: Tang, Long, Takahashi, Toshimitsu, Shimada, Tamami, Komachi, Masayuki, Imanishi, Noriko, Nishiyama, Yuji, Iida, Takashi, Otsu, Yukio, Kitazawa, Shigeru
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Oxford University Press 05.02.2021
• Subjects: Acoustic Stimulation; Adult; Female; Humans; Language; Linguistics; Magnetic Resonance Imaging; Male; Parietal Lobe - physiology; Speech Perception - physiology; Time Perception - physiology; cross-linguistic; fMRI; time perception; precuneus; tense
• ISSN: 1047-3211; 1460-2199
• DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhaa307

Abstract The position of any event in time could be in the present, past, or future. This temporal discrimination is vitally important in our daily conversations, but it remains elusive how the human brain distinguishes among the past, present, and future. To address this issue, we searched for neural correlates of presentness, pastness, and futurity, each of which is automatically evoked when we hear sentences such as “it is raining now,” “it rained yesterday,” or “it will rain tomorrow.” Here, we show that sentences that evoked “presentness” activated the bilateral precuneus more strongly than those that evoked “pastness” or “futurity.” Interestingly, this contrast was shared across native speakers of Japanese, English, and Chinese languages, which vary considerably in their verb tense systems. The results suggest that the precuneus serves as a key region that provides the origin (that is, the Now) of our time perception irrespective of differences in tense systems across languages.