8 de abril
2nd session - The biology of time | Moderator - Miguel Castelo-Branco
09:00 - 09:15 - Abertura

Miguel Castelo-Branco
Professor of Biostatistics and Visual Sciences and Director of CIBIT at ICNAS, University of Coimbra, Portugal. Scientific interests: sensory and perceptual neuroscience, and neurobiology of decision-making, social cognition and reward in health and disease.
09:15 - 09:45 - Predictive anticipatory activity: How do biological systems pre-spond to future events?

Julia Mossbridge
Visiting Scholar at Northwestern University, Evanston, and Associated Full Professor, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, USA. 2014 recipient of the Charles Honorton Integrative Contributions Award from the Parapsychology Association. Scientific interests: the relationship between psychological and physical time, unconscious access to future events, training people to improve their future orientation.
Abstract: Physical systems are generally time symmetric and retrocausal effects have been demonstrated in quantum systems. However, we normally assume that at least for biological systems, events in what we call the future cannot produce influences in what we call the past. This assumption seems ripe for questioning, given data showing the biological systems - so far, humans, worms, and birds - seem to pre-spond reliably to events produced by random number generators. This talk will be nearly evenly divided between an overview of the evidence and a discussion of potential mechanisms.
09:50 - 10:20 - Kinship: Life time memories

Michael Brecht
Professor of Systems Neuroscience, Humboldt University Berlin. Coordinator of the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin, Germany. Scientific interests: memory formation, social touch, social neuroscience and biological approaches to brain function.
Abstract: According to Hamilton’s inclusive fitness hypothesis, kinship is an organizing principle of social behavior. There is abundant behavioral evidence supporting this hypothesis, including the ability to recognize kin and the adjustment of behavior based on kin preference with respect to altruism, attachment and care for offspring in insect societies. Despite the fundamental importance of kinship behavior, the underlying neural mechanisms are poorly understood. We repeated behavioral experiments originally performed by Hepper on behavioral preference of rats for their kin. Consistent with Hepper’s work, we find a developmental time course for kinship behavior, where rats prefer interactions with their siblings at young ages and express non-sibling preferences at older ages. In probing the brain areas responsible for this behavior, we find that aspiration lesions of the lateral septum but not control lesions of cingulate cortices eliminate the behavioral preference in young animals for their siblings and in older rats for non-siblings. We then presented awake and anaesthetized rats with odors and calls of age- and status-matched kin (siblings and mothers) and non-kin (non-siblings and non-mothers) conspecifics, while performing in vivo juxta-cellular and whole-cell patch-clamp recordings in the lateral septum. We find multisensory (olfactory and auditory) neuronal responses, whereby neurons typically responded preferentially but not exclusively to individual social stimuli. Non-kin-odor responsive neurons were found dorsally, while kin-odor responsive neurons were located in ventrally in the lateral septum. To our knowledge such an ordered representation of response preferences according to kinship has not been previously observed and we refer this organization as nepotopy. Nepotopy could be instrumental in reading out kinship from broadly tuned responses and in the generation of differential behavior according to kinship. Thus, our results are consistent with a role of the lateral septum in organizing mammalian kinship behavior.
10:25 - 10:55 - Circadian clocks and their impact on metabolism, aging and longevity

Joseph S. Takahashi
Professor and Chair, Department of Neuroscience, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, USA. Scientific interests: genetics and molecular neuroscience of circadian clocks in mammals, genetic basis of behaviour, healthy aging and longevity.
Abstract: Genetic analysis of circadian behavior in mice has revealed that the molecular basis of circadian clocks involves an autoregulatory transcriptional network that oscillates with a 24-hour periodicity. In mammals, the discovery of “clock genes” led to the realization that circadian clocks are cell autonomous and are expressed in the majority of cells and tissues in the body. The master circadian pacemaker located in the hypothalamic suprachiasmatic nucleus sits at the top of a hierarchy of oscillators in the body, but peripheral oscillators can and do respond to more proximal signals such as nutrients and metabolites. Thus, the “circadian system” in mammals is a multi-oscillatory hierarchy. The lecture will discuss recent discoveries on the neuronal network in the suprachiasmatic nucleus. In addition to controlling the timing of behavior and physiology, the clock gene network interacts directly with many other pathways in the cell. These include metabolism, immune function, cardiovascular function and cell growth to name a few. With respect to metabolism, the timing of nutrient consumption is critical, and we and others have shown that restricting the timing of feeding has many health benefits. The lecture will also discuss the role of time-restricted feeding as a critical factor for aging, health span and longevity.
11:00 - 11:30 - Café, sessão de posters e contactos
11:30 - 12:15 - Conferência "Time as construct and implicit coding space. A neurobiological perspective"

Wolf Singer
Professor, studied Medicine in Munich and Paris, obtained his MD and PhD in Munich. Director emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research, Frankfurt, Germany. Founding Director both of the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS) and of the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience (ESI) and Director of the Ernst Strüngmann Forum. Scientific interests: the neuronal substrate of higher cognitive functions.
Abstract: Curiously, organisms lack specialized receptor systems for the perception of the fundamental dimensions in which they evolve, for space and time. These categories, considered by many as constitutive properties of reality, are constructs generated by cognitive processes in the brain. These constructs are inferred from the evaluation of spatial relations among objects in case of space and of temporal relations among events in the case of time. The evaluation of temporal relations is of immense importance for organisms as it allows them to derive predictions for future conditions by discovering statistical contingencies in the outer world and causal dependencies. Similarly important is the ability to measure the duration of elapsing time in order to structure behavior. This in turn does require parsing of the continuous flow of time into units amenable to some counting process. The first part of the presentation will be devoted to neuronal mechanisms underlying the detection, encoding and storage of relations. It is suggested, that ultimately all relations - spatial, temporal and semantic - have to be encoded in the brain as temporal relations. The second part will focus on mechanisms allowing for the parsing of time. The emphasis will be on the crucial role that oscillations play in providing the time frame for the definition of relations, for the coordination of distributed processes in the brain and for the organization of complex behavior. Finally, and this part is bound to remain speculative at the present stage of knowledge, the apparent paradox will be discussed that the perception of elapsed and remembered time is strongly dependent on context while the reproduction of temporally structured sequences can be extremely precise.
12:30 - 13:00 - Discussão
13:00 - 14:30 - Almoço
14:30 - 16:30 - Paralell Workshops (W)
W1 - The physics and metaphysics of time | Room Auditorium (there will be simultaneous translation)
Moderator | Axel Cleeremans
Invited presenters: Orfeu Bertolami, Bernard Carr, Daniel Sheehan & Patricia Cyrus
W2 - Precognition and anomalous experiences | Room Conferências (without translation)

Moderator | Caroline Watt
Holder of the Koestler Chair of Parapsychology, and founder member of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit, Psychology Department, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. Scientific interests: replication and methodological issues in parapsychology.
Invited presenter: Julia Mossbridge
Abstract: Controlled precognition is a subset of remote viewing in which the target is known by no one until after the viewing session is complete. Therefore, it is precognitive (knowing information ahead of time that cannot be deduced by existing facts) and controlled (the information is not available to anyone else and therefore cannot be unconsciously communicated). In this workshop, you will learn how to practice controlled precognition. You will be led through 3-5 exercises to help start off your new practice or enhance your existing practice, learn how to use random number generators to select targets after their controlled precognition session has completed, and discover how to strengthen the relationship between the unconscious and conscious minds.
W3 - The experience of time in altered states of consciousness | Room Medicoteca (without translation)

Moderator | Stefan Schmidt
Professor of Systemic Family Therapy and Head of the Academic Section of Systemic Health Research, Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, University Medical Centre, Freiburg, Germany. Scientific interests: systems approaches in health research, psychophysiology, consciousness research, mindfulness meditation, experimental parapsychology, exceptional experiences, placebo research and brain-computer interface.
Invited presenter: Etzel Cardeña, Marc Wittmann
Abstract: Altered States of Consciousness such as those related to rituals, meditation, hypnosis, and ingestion of psychoactive substances can produce different changes in subjective time experiences. Thus, we can get a better understanding of how time is experienced by studying changes during these states. In this workshop a theoretical framework for time experience and altered states of consciousness will be presented, and then we will explore changes in our own time experience following meditation and hypnosis exercises.
W4 - Perception and memory of time | Room Braga (without translation)

Moderator | Rui Costa
Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology, Columbia University, and Director and CEO of Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, New York, USA. Investigator at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown, Neuroscience Programme, Lisbon, Portugal. Scientific interests: molecular, cellular and systems mechanisms of action generation, sequence and skill learning, goal-directed actions versus habits, across-level approach to study cognitive and sensorimotor disorders (PD, OCD, and autism).

Moderator | Rainer Goebel
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Faculty of Psychology and Neuroscience, Maastricht University, The Netherlands. Founding director of the Maastricht Brain Imaging Centre (M-BIC). Scientific interests: neuronal representations in the brain and how they are processed to enable specific perceptual and cognitive functions, neural correlates of visual awareness, clinical applications in brain computer interfaces (BCIs) and neurofeedback studies.
Invited presenters: Dean Buonomano, Jennifer Coull
Abstract: Humans are capable of telling time over a wide range of scales, ranging from a few milliseconds to days and beyond. In this workshop we will provide demonstrations of how scientists estimate the precision of the brain's clocks, and examples of temporal illusions. Demonstrations will include: 1) estimating the interval discrimination threshold, that is, how precise the brain's clocks are; 2) illusions of time estimation; and 3) examples of how the interaction between language and the representation of time.
17:00 - 18:00 - Get-together Cheese & Wine