The perception of time relates to the sense of touch. A new SISSA study “A sensory integration account for time perception,” published in PLOS Computational Biology uncovers this connection. “The challenge to neuroscience posed by the sense of time lies, first and foremost, in the fact there do not exist dedicated receptors—the passage of time is a sensory experience constructed without sensors,” notes Mathew Diamond, director of the Tactile Perception and Learning Lab. “One might imagine a precise clock in the brain, a sort of stopwatch that registers the start and stop and computes the elapsed time between those two instants. But decades of research have not found any brain mechanism resembling a stopwatch. We thought that understanding sensory systems might be the key to understanding sense of time.”