> Theoretically, the top speed for a neuron to feasibly fire and send information to its neighbor is 500 hertz. However, if neurons actually fired at 500 hertz, the system would become completely overwhelmed.
> Our neurons, however, have an average firing rate of 4 hertz, 50 to 60 times less than what is optimal for information transmission.
Could this explain the time dilation you can get when under high stress - is this your brain just firing as fast as it can?
This is a vast simplification. Every neuron has a different preferred baseline firing rate. Not all neurons can fire at 500 Hz. In fact, most neurons in neocortex fire at a much lower firing rate. (most neurons are in the cerebellum!)
As for the internal sense of time, there isn't a consensus as to how it is kept, but for the cognitive time scale, it seems that it is a distributed time keeping mechanism rather than some sort of central unified clock mechanism.
> Our neurons, however, have an average firing rate of 4 hertz, 50 to 60 times less than what is optimal for information transmission.
Could this explain the time dilation you can get when under high stress - is this your brain just firing as fast as it can?