In pulling together a very short talk for the Notions of Time event tomorrow, I came across this section of text, from the introduction to a paper The experience of time: neural mechanisms and the interplay of emotion, cognition and embodiment by Marc Wittmann, PhD Psychology, UC San Diego. I've removed the citations for clarity. Thought some of the more philosophical among you might find it interesting, or at least worth a shot of good whiskey...

> Throughout history, philosophers have been intrigued by the nature of time and how we, as humans, experience its progression. The perception of time is part of human experience; it is essential for everyday behaviour and for the survival of the individual organism. Yet, and surprisingly enough, its neural basis is still unknown. Temporal intervals, lasting only seconds or spanning a lifetime, are judged according to their perceived duration—often regarded as painfully long or, the reverse, as lasting too short. Everyday decisions we make, as simple as either waiting for the elevator or taking the stairs, are based on the experienced passage of time and anticipated duration. The importance of our temporal experiences for daily living is strikingly documented in individual neurological cases where patients report of an accelerated progression of time and, consequently, have troubles in adequately interacting with the environment, i.e. driving a car. Although we doubtless have a time sense, our bodies are not equipped with a sensory organ for the passage of time in the same way that we have eyes and ears—and the respective sensory cortices—for detecting light and sound. Time, ultimately, is not a material object of the world for which we could have a unique receptor system.
         Nevertheless, we speak of the perception of time.
When we talk about time (‘an event lasted long’, ‘time flew by’), we use linguistic structures that refer to motion events and to locations and measures in space; a further indication that time itself is not a property in the empirical world. Despite a growing body of knowledge on the psychology and on the neural basis of the experience of time, the riddle for philosophers and scientists alike is still unsolved: how does the mind (or, for that matter, the brain) create time?
        Martin Heidegger's paraphrase of St Augustine's famous quotation
‘In you, my spirit, I measure times; I measure myself, as I measure time’ reflects a theoretical approach—founded in western philosophical tradition—which states that time is a construction of the self. Perceived time, thereafter, represents the mental status of the beholder. In terms of a functional equation, one could state that time T is a function F of the self, where the self stands for all possible psychological (i.e. empirical and theoretical) properties of an individual who perceives time.


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