Are there "place cells" for temporal encoding?
It seems the topic of time perception is quite complicated. In contrast to the place and grid cells in the hippocampus (Moser et al., 2015), the perception of time seems to be distributed across many places in the brain. A review by Fontes et al., 2016) cites 158 papers written between 1980 to 2015 that describe a variety of brain structures relating to the perception of time, including areas in the frontal cortex, parietal cortex, basal ganglia, cerebellum and hippocampus. It indeed seems to be a highly distributed system in the brain. The proximity of time cells and place and grid cells in the hippocampus is interesting and is an active area of research.
References
- Fontes et al., Neurol Int (2016); 8(1): 59392016
- Moser et al., Cold Spring Harb Perspect Biol (2015); 7: a021808