When Einstein’s Relativity Meets Neuroscience

Abstract

When perceived by the human mind, an object might encompass diverse content according to different observers. Further, subjectively experienced time is encoded in the later entorhinal cortex. Starting from these two observations concerning mental perception of space and time, and considering Einstein’s accounts, we show how, in terms of special relativity, imagination’s content is not stationary and fixed, rather depends on the observer’s standpoint. We elucidate how the subjective phenomenon of time (perceived by our mind as static) might give rise to changes in quantifiable content between the real and the imagined object. We describe how to correlate the quantifiable content of the sensed object embedded in the environment with the corresponding internal thought (subjective percept). In particular, based on recent neuroscientific literature, we show how changes in our mental time windows are able to squeeze the information content of the subjective percepts, compared with their matching environmental objects. Further, we elucidate how this novel framework could be able to confirm or reject a recently raised hypothesis, which suggests that the brain activity takes place in functional dimensions higher than our usual four-dimensional spacetime.