THE PERCEPTION OF TIME

Does time seem to us to pass, even though it doesn’t, really? Many philosophers think the answer is ‘Yes’ – at least when ‘time’s (really) passing’ is understood in a particular way. They take time’s passing to be a process by which each time in turn acquires a special status, such as the status of being the only time that exists, or being the only time that is present (where that means more than just being simultaneous with oneself). This chapter suggests that on the contrary, all we perceive is temporal succession, one thing after another, a notion to which modern physics is not inhospitable. The contents of perception are best described in terms of ‘before’ and ‘after’, rather than ‘past’, ‘present, and ‘future’.

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2009

The striking diversity of psychological and neurophysiological models of 'time perception' characterizes the debate on how and where in the brain time is processed. In this review, the most prominent models of time perception will be critically discussed. Some of the variation across the proposed models will be explained, namely (i) different processes and regions of the brain are involved depending on the length of the processed time interval, and (ii) different cognitive processes may be involved that are not necessarily part of a core timekeeping system but, nevertheless, influence the experience of time. These cognitive processes are distributed over the brain and are difficult to discern from timing mechanisms. Recent developments in the research on emotional influences on time perception, which succeed decades of studies on the cognition of temporal processing, will be highlighted. Empirical findings on the relationship between affect and time, together with recent conceptualizations of self-and body processes, are integrated by viewing time perception as entailing emotional and interoceptive (within the body) states. To date, specific neurophysiological mechanisms that would account for the representation of human time have not been identified. It will be argued that neural processes in the insular cortex that are related to body signals and feeling states might constitute such a neurophysiological mechanism for the encoding of duration.

2013

It is widely assumed that time appears to be tensed, i.e. divided into a future, present and past, and transitory, i.e. involving some kind of ‘flow’ or ‘passage’ of times or events from the future into the present and away into the distant past. In this paper I provide some reasons to doubt that time appears to be tensed and transitory, or at least that philosophers who have suggested that time appears to be that way have included in ‘appearance’ everything that falls under the broad term ‘cognition’, i.e. mental processes of all kinds, including perceiving, remembering, imagining, and thinking. I argue that the tensed and transitory aspect of our experience of temporal reality is, firstly, subordinate to our experience of a world of persistent objects, secondly, in conflict with a popular conception of the nature of persistent material objects, and finally, an aspect of how we think about temporal reality than how we actually experience it. I support the last contention by a comparison with our experience of spatiality, which arguably has three distinguishable components: (i) ‘pure input perception’, (ii) ‘perceptual experience modulated by top down cognitive processes’, and (iii) a ‘pure representation of space’. For space, the modulation of our perception of space at any given moment can be attributed to our pure representation of space, but it is not clear to me that our modulated experience of time is influenced by a pure representation of time. Rather, the modulated experience of temporality, to my mind, is much more clearly an experience of continuous existence of the persisting objects that make up the world.

Frontiers in Psychology, 2023

A debate is ongoing among philosophers, theoretical physicists, psychologists, and neuroscientists regarding whether the experience of the passage of time is a veridical representation of the universe or merely an illusion. This contribution suggests that a better understanding of illusions and hallucinations can lead to a deeper examination of the role of time experience.

PsyCH Journal, 2017

This paper examines Zhou, Pöppel, and Bao's 2014 proposal ("In the Jungle of Time: The Concept of Identity as a Way Out," https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00844) to unify the psychology of time through a biological principle concerning identity and homeo-stasis. Although the present analysis largely agrees with their proposal, it argues that a Dual Model of time (see Montemayor's 2013 monograph , Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time) is needed to account for two important roles in time cognition, one related to navigation and the other to conscious awareness. In a Dual Model, the homeostatic principle plays a critical role with respect to conscious awareness, but a different principle is needed for integrating the metric constraints on navigation. (2014) use an insightful metaphor to capture the diversity of information that needs to be unified in time perception: Sources of temporal information are so varied that time perception resembles the most exuberant of ecosystems-a jungle. As Zhou et al. point out, something remarkable about the jungle of time is that we manage to refer to time as if it were a single phenomenon shaping the structure of events in the external world, which we perceive through a uniform psychological process susceptible of reliable categorization. An equally striking aspect about the diversity of time is how unified it seems to us, in our conscious experiences. Time perception and our experience of time seem unified: It is not only that we seem to perceive time through a reliable perceptual mapping, but also that we experience our identity through time in a unified fashion. But the mechanisms and sources of information underlying psychological time are far from unified-they are indeed like a jungle. How can this be? First, let us consider if the "jungle" metaphor is truly apt for characterizing the scientific findings on time perception. How exactly are the mechanisms or sources of information underlying time perception a jungle? A review of the literature on time perception indicates that this metaphor is apt. For instance, perceived simultaneity depends on the reliable mapping of synchronous stimuli in the environment and yet, the windows of time in which stimuli are perceived as synchronous differ within and across the perceptual modalities (Pöppel, 1989). In other words, what appears synchronous within a perceptual modality is in fact asynchronous, and it differs depending on the perceptual modality. Moreover , the integration of information about simultaneity and temporal order is modulated by attention, which compensates for distortions based on a prior entry bias for time order (Grabot & van Wassenhove, 2017). Proprioceptive signals for motor control also need to be integrated with sensorial information concerning duration perception, which is modulated by emotions (Droit-Volet & Meck, 2007) as well as by attention. Although a variety of mechanisms, within and cross-modally, are involved in the perception of simultaneity, temporal order, and duration, it remains unclear how all this information is integrated in order to execute reliable and sustained action, even if one focuses on a single aspect of time perception, such as temporal order (see Grabot & van Wassenhove, 2017).

The history of philosophical inquiry of time has been almost as long as the history of Western thought. Numerous concepts and ideas on the nature of time and time perception have been proposed over the centuries. Some of these ideas laid the groundwork for the psychological and neuroscientific studies of time processes. To this day, philosophical concepts inspire empirical research of time. In some cases, this interplay between philosophical ideas and neuroscientific studies of time processes occurs seamlessly. In other cases, however, attempts to directly apply philosophical concepts in the experimental research encounter impassable barriers. This commentary discusses two recent applications of philosophical frameworks of subjective time and time perception in the neuroscientific research.

This thesis argues that the actuality of time differs from our perception of time. When we talk of time, we are describing a representation of a form of change or motion. Generally, the properties of nature that people describe when they talk of time are properties of change, duration, persistence and succession. These properties are sufficiently different from our perception of time to suggest that our perception of time is describing change in our consciousness and not change in the world.

Time has been called one of the last great mysteries that human mind has not managed to resolve. This book argues that time is not so mysterious as it may seem. Time is an abstract entity, created by the human mind, by means of which people express their experience and understanding of the changing reality in which they live and die. Time is not an ingredient of the physical world; time is an element of human language, by means of which people speak of the physical world. We speak of the river of existence, instead of the river of time, because time does not flow; the world flows (changes); time is an abstract bank by means of which we measure the intensity and amount of the flow of the world. The book gives critical outlooks of various images and theories of time. We argue that the standard discourse about the relativity of time is structurally wrong, because it mixes physical reality and language. We do not question the correctness of the basic formulas of this theory, but we argue that the relativistic narrative does not give a logically consistent explanation of the allegedly correct results of its formulas.

2007

The analysis of time is vitiated very often by circularity: several disciplines, such as philosophy, psychology, linguistics, and neurosciences, analyze time by using concepts or terms which already contain in themselves, or are based, on the experience and notion of time (as when, for example, time is defined as "duration", or when our ability to estimate durations is explained by resorting to the notion of an internal clock). Some detailed examples of circularity in the analysis of time are given here and examined. A way out of circularity is then given: it is represented by the proposal of Attentional Semantics (AS) of considering words and their meanings in terms of the aim they serve, and the means and processes developed and implemented in order to achieve that aim. According to AS, the main aim of words is that of indicating to, and eliciting in, the listener or reader a specific conscious experience: namely, the conscious experience referred to by their meanings. Words achieve their main aim by conveying the condensed instructions on the attentional operations one has to perform if one wants to consciously experience what is expressed through and by them. By describing the conscious experiences elicited by words in terms of the attentional operations that are responsible for the production of such conscious experiences, AS offers an a-linguistic counterpart to language, and therefore an effective way out of circularity. Following in Mach's footsteps (1890), but slightly revising his hypothesis, AS defines time-sensation as the perception of the effort made, or alternatively the nervous energy expended, by the organ of attention when performing a "temporal activity" (for instance, estimating duration), that is, when one's own attention is focused in a continuous and incremental way on the conscious product of the ("non-temporal") activity performed by means of another portion of one's attention. A semantic analysis of some of the meanings associated with the word "time" is then given.

Gerontology, 2010

In this article we review scientific work and present new results on the perception of time, that is, on the feeling of time as perceived by individuals. The phenomenon of time being felt passing faster with growing age is well-known, and there are numerous interesting studies to shed light on the question why this is so. Many of these are based on studies in psychology and social sciences. Others range from symptoms of the ageing process to related symptoms of decreasing memory capacities. Again other explanations, quite different in nature from the preceding ones, involve event intensities in the life of individuals. The relative decrease of interesting new events as one grows older is seen as an important factor contributing to the feeling that time is thinned out. The last type of possible explanations can be made more explicit in a mathematical model. Quantitative conclusions about the rate of decrease of the feeling of time can be drawn, and, interestingly, without restrictive assumptions. It is shown that under this model the feeling of time is thinned out at least logarithmically. Numerical constants will depend on specific hypotheses which we discuss but the lower-bound logarithmic character of the thinning-out phenomenon does not depend much on these. The presented model can be generalized in several ways. In particular we prove that there are, a priori, no logical incompatibilities in a model leading to the very same distribution of time perception for individuals with completely different pace and style of life. Our model is built to explain long-time perception. No claim is made that the feeling of time being thinned out is omnipresent for very individual. However, this is typically the case and we explain why.

Minding Time: A Philosophical and Theoretical Approach to the Psychology of Time offers a theoretical account of the most fundamental kinds of time representation, drawing on philosophy, psychology, neuroscience, and biology. Recent experimental findings on creatures from bees to scrub-jays to human beings have demonstrated the complex – and astoundingly reliable – functioning of biological clocks. These clocks, Carlos Montemayor argues, make possible representations of duration that are then anchored to representations of simultaneity, and they do so independently of conscious information or representations of the self. Montemayor offers an innovative philosophical explanation of how representations of duration and simultaneity relate to the consciously experienced present moment.

In this thesis, I examine the metaphysical debate between the A-theory and the B-theory of time, first by elaborating upon its proper characterization, and then by examining the sorts of evidence that are often thought to be germane to it. This debate, as I see it, is about whether or not time passes in any objective (observer-independent) sense: the A-theory holds that it does, while the B-theory holds that it does not. I identify two opposing conceptions of time-that of the "time of ordinary experience" on one hand, and that of "scientific time" on the other-and argue that the tension between them is the driving force behind this debate. I then examine two aspects of "evidence" from the time of ordinary experience: the phenomenological experience of time (how time feels) and the linguistic experience of time (how we generally talk about time). It is often supposed, by both A-and B-theorists alike, that these sorts of evidence lend credence to the A-theory of time, since ordinary experience suggests that time passes. I hope to discredit this presumption, and so challenge the very framework in which this debate is so often carried out. In particular, by closely examining both of these kinds of experience-phenomenological and linguistic-in turn, I hope to provide a partial argument to the effect that the ordinary experience of time as a whole does not favour the A-theory over the B-theory of time. In the case of the phenomenological evidence, this is because the A-theory is just as inconsistent with such evidence as is the B-theory of time; in the case of the linguistic evidence, this is because the B-theory is equally consistent with such evidence as is the A-theory of time, particularly once it is revealed that a certain key assumption is tacitly accepted by both sides of the debate. Because of the popularity of the claim that the ordinary experience of time favours the A-theory, I take this conclusion to be something of a modest defence for the Btheory of time.

T. Teo (ed.) Encyclopedia of Critical Psychology. Dordrecht and New York: Springer. Online Springer Reference:, 2014

Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time.

Review of Philosophy and Psychology of Time