Our brain doesn’t merely register time – it structures it, new research from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience shows.

The research team led by NTNU’s Nobel Laureates May-Britt and Edvard Moser, from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, is already known for their discovery of the brain’s sense of place.

Now they have shown that the brain also weaves a tapestry of time: The brain segments and organizes events into experiences, placing unique bookmarks on them so that our lives don’t become a blurry stream, but rather a series of meaningful moments and memories we can revisit and learn from.

We live in a continuous stream of fleeting sensory information. How do we manage to select and segment this stream of reality into meaningful experiences we carry forward in life?

The NTNU researcher have found a “jumping” answer in a new study published in Science.

Read more about this discovery here!
 

Researchers from the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience have shown that the brain segments and organizes events into experiences, placing unique bookmarks on them. That keeps our lives from becoming a blurry stream, and is instead a series of meaningful moments and memories we can revisit and learn from. Illustration: Astrid Strømmen/NTNU

 

The study was carried out by Ben Kanter (first author), Christine Marie Lykken, Ignacio Polti, May-Britt Moser (senior author), and Edvard Moser (senior author) from the Moser Group at the Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, NTNU.

Reference: Benjamin R. Kanter et al., Event structure sculpts neural population dynamics in the lateral entorhinal cortex. Science 388, eadr0927 (2025).  https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adr0927

Reference:
Vollan, A.Z., Gardner, R.J., Moser, MB. et al. Left–right-alternating theta sweeps in entorhinal–hippocampal maps of space. Nature (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-08527-1