Time perception

The study of time perception or chronoception is a field within psychology, cognitive linguistics and neuroscience that refers to the subjective experience, or sense, of time, which is measured by someone's own perception of the duration of the indefinite and unfolding of events. The perceived time interval between two successive events is referred to as perceived duration. Though directly experiencing or understanding another person's perception of time is not possible, perception can be objectively studied and inferred through a number of scientific experiments. Some temporal illusions help to expose the underlying neural mechanisms of time perception. The ancient Greeks recognized the difference between chronological time (chronos) and subjective time (kairos). Pioneering work on time perception, emphasizing species-specific differences, was conducted by Karl Ernst von Baer. Time perception is typically categorized in three distinct ranges, because different ranges of duration are processed in different areas of the brain: Sub-second timing or millisecond timing Interval timing or seconds-to-minutes timing Circadian timing There are many theories and computational models for time perception mechanisms in the brain. William J. Friedman (1993) contrasted two theories of the sense of time: The strength model of time memory. This posits a memory trace that persists over time, by which one might judge the age of a memory (and therefore how long ago the event remembered occurred) from the strength of the trace. This conflicts with the fact that memories of recent events may fade more quickly than more distant memories. The inference model suggests the time of an event is inferred from information about relations between the event in question and other events whose date or time is known. Another hypothesis involves the brain's subconscious tallying of "pulses" during a specific interval, forming a biological stopwatch. This theory proposes that the brain can run multiple biological stopwatches independently depending on the type of tasks being tracked.