Sense of Time Information

The sense of time can refer either to the perception of relatively short periods of time, or the perception of times which are a significant fraction of a person's lifetime.

When asked to place the time of a past event, people have a systematic tendency to recall that recent events occurred farther back in time (backward telescoping) and distant events occurred more recently (forward telescoping) than is actually the case.^[1]

Experiments have shown rats successfully estimating intervals of time.^[2][3]

Theory

William J. Friedman contrasted two theories for a sense of time:^[4]

• The strength model of time memory. Posits such a thing as a memory trace that persists over time, where one could judge the age of a memory (and therefore how long ago the event remembered occurred) from the strength of the trace. The longer ago the event, the weaker the trace.

Unfortunately, the trace model comes into conflict with a very familiar feature of our experience: that some memories of recent events may fade more quickly than memories of more distant events.

• The inference model suggests the time of an event is not simply read off from some aspect of the memory of it, but is inferred from information about relations between the event in question and other events whose date or time is known.

Short-term

Although the sense of time is not associated with a specific sensory system, the work of psychologists and neuroscientists indicates that human brains do have a system governing the perception of time.^[5] This is a highly distributed system including the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia as its components. One particular component, the suprachiasmatic nuclei, is responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range (ultradian) timekeeping. The sense of time is impaired in some people with neurological diseases such as Parkinson's disease and attention deficit disorder.

Human perception of duration is subjective and variable. For example, time may appear to slow or drag as one eagerly anticipates the arrival of a specific event. A school day may seem endless for a student who is waiting for the bell indicating that school is finished for the day. The traditional proverb describing this effect is "a watched pot never boils".^[6][7]

Psychoactive drugs can also alter the perception of time. Stimulants can lead both humans and rats to overestimate time intervals^[8][9] while depressants can have the opposite effect.^[10] The level of activity in the brain of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and adrenaline may be the reason for this. Errors in estimated time intervals might be caused by varying levels of neurotransmitters in the brain.^[11]

People who have been hypnotized underestimate the duration of their trance.^[12]

In an experiment comparing a group of subjects aged between 19 and 24 and a group between 60 and 80 asked to estimate when they thought 3 minutes had passed, it was found that the younger group's estimate was on average 3 minutes and 3 seconds, while the older group averaged 3 minutes and 40 seconds,^[13] indicating a change in the perception of time with age.

Specious present

The specious present is the time duration wherein a state of consciousness is experienced as being in the present. The term specious present was first introduced by the psychologist E. R. Clay, and developed by William James.^[14] A version of the concept was used by Edmund Husserl in his works and discussed further by Francisco Varela based on the writings of Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty.^[15] The experienced present is an interval; it's not a momentary instant except 'speciously'.

Long-term

It is a known phenomenon that long periods of time appear to pass faster as people grow older. The time from a child's eighth birthday to the ninth seems an eternity; the time from the sixty-eighth to the sixty-ninth seems to pass in a flash.^[16] This can also be explained using logic. This phenomenon is present for the same reason that if one gave a person with no money one thousand dollars (or whatever equivalent in whatever currency one is familiar with), this sum would make a big difference. However, if one gave a billionaire one thousand dollars, it would not be a big deal. By applying this example to the concept of age, we can deduct that if a person who has lived one year lives another year, that new year will seem very long because his/her experienced life span is now doubled. If a person who has live for one-hundred years lives another year, that new year will seem very fast, and like in the money analogy, will seemingly make very little difference.^{[citation needed]}

Alterations

A form of temporal illusion verifiable by experiment is the kappa effect,^[17] whereby time intervals between visual events are perceived as relatively longer or shorter depending on the relative spatial positions of the events. In other words: the perception of temporal intervals appears to be directly affected, in these cases, by the perception of spatial intervals.

Special relativity

This common experience was used to familiarize the general public to the ideas presented by Einstein's theory of relativity in a 1930 cartoon by Sidney "George" Strube:^[18][19]

Man: Well, it's like this,—supposing I were to sit next to a pretty girl for half an hour it would seem like half a minute,— Einstein: Braffo! You haf zee ideah! [sic] Man: But if I were to sit on a hot stove for two seconds then it would seem like two hours.

Psychoactive substances

Altered states of consciousness are sometimes characterized by a different estimation of time. Some psychoactive substances – such as entheogens – may also dramatically alter a person's temporal judgement. When viewed under the influence of such substances as LSD, psychedelic mushrooms, and peyote, a clock may appear to be a strange reference point and a useless tool for measuring the passage of events as it does not correlate with the user's experience. At higher doses, time may appear to slow down, stop, speed up, go backwards and even seem out of sequence. In 1955, British MP Christopher Mayhew took mescaline hydrochloride in an experiment under the guidance of his friend, Dr Humphry Osmond. On the BBC documentary The Beyond Within, he described that half a dozen times during the experiment, he had "a period of time that didn't end for me".

See also

• Judgement of time
• Arrow of time
• Temporal illusion
• Time perception

References

1. ^ It Seems Like Only Yesterday: The Nature and Consequences of Telescoping Errors in Marketing Research. Journal of Consumer Psychology. http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst;jsessionid=KgPbgnYGLQyyHQtdPQbVMGHm5wp3tr94mQLkBF4hTvYJ09dlJx5N!-1941634607!-2081211395?docId=77055094.
2. ^ Mackintosh, N. J.. Animal Learning and Cognition. ISBN 9780121619534.
3. ^ Jaldow, Eli J.; Oakley, David A.; Davey, Graham C. L. (1989). "Performance of Decorticated Rats on Fixed Interval and Fixed Time Schedules". European Journal of Neuroscience (European Journal of Neuroscience) 1 (5): 461. doi:10.1111/j.1460-9568.1989.tb00352.x. PMID 12106131. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/119443633/abstract.
4. ^ "The Experience and Perception of Time". http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/time-experience. Retrieved 2009-10-22.
5. ^ "Brain Areas Critical To Human Time Sense Identified". UniSci - Daily University Science News. 2001-02-27. http://www.unisci.com/stories/20011/0227013.htm.
6. ^ G Underwood, RA Swain (1973). "Selectivity of attention and the perception of duration". Perception 2 (1): 101. doi:10.1068/p020101. PMID 4777562.
7. ^ SW Brown, DA Stubbs (1992). "Attention and interference in prospective and retrospective timing". Perception.
8. ^ Wittmann, M.; Leland DS, Churan J, Paulus MP. (8 October 2007). "Impaired time perception and motor timing in stimulant-dependent subjects". Drug Alcohol Depend. 90 (2-3): 183–92. doi:10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2007.03.005. PMID 17434690.
9. ^ Cheng, Ruey-Kuang; Macdonald, Christopher J.; Meck, Warren H. (2006). "Differential effects of cocaine and ketamine on time estimation : Implications for neurobiological models of interval timing". Pharmacology, biochemistry and behavior 85 (1): 114–122. doi:10.1016/j.pbb.2006.07.019. PMID 16920182. http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=18303059.
10. ^ Tinklenberg, Jared R.; Walton T. Roth1; Bert S. Kopell (January 1976). "Marijuana and ethanol: Differential effects on time perception, heart rate, and subjective response". Psychopharmacology 49 (3): 275–279. doi:10.1007/BF00426830. PMID 826945. http://www.springerlink.com/content/q1227453r481x439/.
11. ^ Arzy, Shahar; Istvan Molnar-Szakacs; Olaf Blanke (2008-06-18). "Self in Time: Imagined Self-Location Influences Neural Activity Related to Mental Time Travel". The Journal of Neuroscience 28 (25): 6502–6507. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.5712-07.2008. PMID 18562621. http://www.jneurosci.org/cgi/content/abstract/28/25/6502. Retrieved 2008-08-25.
12. ^ Bowers, Kenneth; Brenneman, HA (January 1979). "Hypnosis and the perception of time". International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis (International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis) 27 (1): 29–41. doi:10.1080/00207147908407540. PMID 541126. http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a790232921~db=all
13. ^ New Scientist magazine: Why time flies in old age
14. ^ Andersen, Holly; Rick Grush (pending). A brief history of time-consciousness: historical precursors to James and Husserl. Journal of the History of Philosophy. http://mind.ucsd.edu/papers/bhtc/Andersen&Grush.pdf. Retrieved 2008-02-02.
15. ^ "The Specious Present: A Neurophenomenology of Time Consciousness." In Petitot, Varela, Pacoud & Roy (eds.), Naturalizing Phenomenology. Stanford University Press.
16. ^ Robert, Adler. "Look how time flies . . .". http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16422180.900-look-how-time-flies. Retrieved 2009-10-22.
17. ^ Wada Y, Masuda T, Noguchi K, 2005, "Temporal illusion called 'kappa effect' in event perception" Perception 34 ECVP Abstract Supplement
18. ^ Priestley, J. B. (1964). Man and Time. New York: Crescent Books. pp. 96.
19. ^ Sunrise (2008). "Unified Field Theory: A new interpretation" (PDF). Chapter 2—The Development of the Unified Field Theory, pg. 31. Sunrise Information Services. http://www.sunrisepage.com/uft/history.pdf.

External links

• Time perception research at the University of Manchester
• "A Cognitive Model of Retrospective Duration Estimations", Hee-Kyung Ahn, et al., March 7, 2006.
• "Time, Force, Motion, and the Semantics of Natural Languages", Wolfgang Wildgen, Antwerp Papers in Linguistics, 2003/2004.
• Can Time Slow Down?
• "Interactions emerge between biological clocks", The Pharmaceutical Journal, Vol 275 No 7376 p644, 19 November 2005 Registration required.
• "Time and the Brain: How Subjective Time Relates to Neural Time" (November 9, 2005). Eagleman, David M.; Peter U. Tse, Dean Buonomano, Peter Janssen, Anna Christina Nobre, Alex O. Holcombe. (Review, full text). The Journal of Neuroscience 25 (45):10369-10371.
• "Evidence for a Short-Period Internal Clock in Humans", Tom G. Slanger, Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol. 2, N. 2, pp. 203-216, 1998
• The images of time: an essay on temporal representation.[1] By Robin Le Poidevin

Categories: Perception | Time | Unsolved problems in neuroscience

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