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Hello Reader!

Welcome to the special 1-year anniversary edition of NeuroNotes! 🎉 When I started writing weekly NeuroNotes, my hope was to share small sparks of science and practice that could shift the way you experience your own body and brain. What a journey of discovery this has been!

Musings

Have you ever wondered what, primarily, feeds into our sense of time? How do we learn about it? Because the way we experience time varies incredibly, right? Sometimes it feels long and dense, packed with too much life, too many changes, too many versions of ourselves. And sometimes it feels like it vanished in a blink. It's almost like the quality of time is different each day. Feeling anxious? Time seems discontinuous, jumpy. When you're in pain, your sense of time warps until everything feels like one endless second. When you have trauma,or you dissociate, you lose your sense of time.

And then there are cycles and patterns. Things return, patterns repeat and crystallize. We learn - and sometimes what we learn isn't entirely supportive. Healing is rarely a straight line, and yet somehow, over time, we are never where we started.

From a neurosomatic perspective, life is full of repetition. Breath. Digestion. Heart Beats.Steps. Days. Seasons. But repetition is never truly identical, there's lots variation and change. The nervous system is always receiving information. Even when something looks the same from the outside, it may be landing differently on the inside.

So if you find yourself on a repeating pattern, and that pattern isn't right for you - whether its a relationship, work, pain, anxiety or anything else - try inserting a tiny bit of intentional variation. You'll see the amazing changes that can arise from one single difference.

This week's practice is one you might be familiar with. If you've done it before, do it... differently.

🎁 NeuroSomatic Practice of the Week

🧠 NeuroMinute...

In your brain, timing appears to be distributed across interacting networks that contribute differently depending on the task: subsecond vs longer intervals, beat-based vs duration-based timing, motor vs perceptual timing, and memory for temporal order.

We humans have a very early, pre-verbal sensitivity to temporal structure. Research suggests that a primitive sense of temporal regularity emerges well before the cognitive concept of time appears. In other words, the nervous system is tracking temporal patterns before the child has a mature “concept” of time.

A recent neuroscience idea is that explicit time understanding grows out of action, perception, and embodied regularities. Explicit processing of time in adulthood may rely on motor structures because time is first learned implicitly through action during childhood (i.e, movement!).

Finally, time perception is influenced by attention, working memory, emotion, arousal, and bodily state. That is one reason time can feel stretched, compressed, dense, or strangely absent. So the “passage of time” is not just a neutral readout of seconds; it is a construction that depends on what the brain and body are doing.

Warmly,

Joana

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