I really don’t know much about neural networks which are organized in space and certainly can’t make much comment upon the discovery that they can be organized through “multiple timescales” as well, yet, I’m hardly surprised. See this article, Robots Show That Brain Activity Is Linked To Time As Well As Space, for a summary of the research that indicates that…
even without explicit spatial hierarchical structure a functional hierarchy can self-organize through multiple timescales in neural activity. Their model was proven viable when tested with the physical body of a humanoid robot.
Results suggest that it is not only the spatial connections between neurons, but also the timescales of neural activity, that act as important mechanisms in neural systems.
Brains make their minds by responding to their environments as a first step. As the human mind developed its higher-level abstract capabilities, starting around the 6th century BC so far as I can judge, it began to explore more sophisticated aspects of what we now know as the universe. In the past century or so, theoretical physicists and mathematicians were able to think about the universe in terms of a four-dimensional space-time structure. To do that, our brains would have to be able to encapsulate that space-time structure and that would mean the brain itself must partake in those time-like aspects of the being of that structure. Hardly a surprising proposal since we were born into that space-time and develop inside of it.