Temporality and the Brain: The Long and Winding Emergence of Time in Cognitive Neuroscience

Understanding how our sensory apparatus generates percepts and coherent experiences of the world has been the outstanding quest of centuries. Throughout history, philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and – in the past few decades—cognitive neuroscientists have all sought answers to how our brain generates thinking and feeling, behavior, and consciousness. In this contribution, we discuss a bias that has, by and large, characterized this quest, namely a spatial approach towards understanding the neural correlates and mechanisms of cognition. In what follows, we critically assess the spatial emphasis in the study of the brain and cognitive functions. In our historical account of this emphasis, we point to tacit assumptions and limitations of this scientific approach. We also highlight moments in which the potential for incorporating time and temporal organizing principles was either overlooked or missed due to the ruling perspective. We then discuss the value and potential of integrating the temporal domain into our understanding of the brain and cognitive functions by providing examples that have finally emerged in the field.