An international team of researchers from Tübingen and Cold Spring Harbor (New York) has found a pioneering way of determining at what pace changes typically happen. The new method avoids previous systematic errors in estimating timescales, for example of neural activity in the brain. The results are now being published in the journal Nature Computational Science; first applications of the method to neural recordings from the visual cortex highlight it as a powerful tool for neuroscience and many other disciplines.