we do not experience it as stopping and starting, or darting about at random), and that it has an intrinsic direction or order (i.e. There is general agreement among philosophers that time is continuous (i.e. Does time have a substance and, if so, what is it made of? How do we know that time really exists? Does time have a beginning and an end? Is it a straight line or a circle? It comes as no surprise, then, that from time immemorial, philosophers, teachers and theologians have speculated on the true nature of time. Our consciousness of time is therefore one of the most important distinguishing features of humankind, and one of the things that truly separates us from the lower animals.
The most commonly encountered examples are the effects of ageing and psychoactive drugs on time perception, but there are several other interesting effects, such as the kappa effect, the stopped clock illusion, the oddball effect, etc.Ĭhronophobia is the fear of time or the passing of time, a specific and well-documented psychological phobia which principally affects the elderly and those incarcerated in prisons.Īll animals except humans live in a continual present, with no sense of the temporal distinctions of past, present and future. Temporal illusions are distortions and misconceptions of time that arise from a variety of psychological and other causes. A whole field of chronology has grown up to exploit our increasing knowledge of these biological rhythms. The best known of these is the circadian clock, which maintains daily biological rhythms and regulates sleep, hormone production, etc, but there are also other peripheral biological clocks, some of which follow ultradian or infradian rhythms. Most organisms have an internal sense of time generated by endogenous biological clocks, completely independent of ambient temperatures, sunlight, etc. It looks at the way our brain processes time and time intervals, and the brain’s built-in expectation of the order and speed of events, as well as the field of mental chronometry. The bio psychology of our perception of time is a fascinating but little understood area of psychology and neuroscience.
Although physical time appears to be more or less objective, psychological time is subjective and potentially malleable. Time perception refers to the subjective experience of the passage of time, or the perceived duration of events, which can differ significantly between different individuals and/or in different circumstances. Here, however, we turn to matters of how an individual experiences and perceives time, and here things become even less definite and concrete. Various aspects of time – whether it is absolute or relative, real or unreal, etc – have been discussed in some detail in the sections on Philosophy of Time and Physics of Time. It investigates various attempts at a definition of time it looks at the history and methods of time measurement it summaries the different views of time in philosophy and religion over the centuries it considers the scientific basis of time, particularly as regards physics and psychology (both our perception of time and the neurology involved) and it throws in a variety of other aspects of time and our uses of it. This website looks at many different aspects of time, and, although it too may ultimately fail to “tame the beast”, it aims to give at least a reasonably comprehensive review of the many different facets that comprise this most enigmatic of subjects. Time is a ubiquitous and essential ingredient of both everyday life and all manner of academic thought, but its fundamental nature remains tantalizingly difficult to encapsulate.
But really these are just incidental physical manifestations of the underlying concept. Nearly two and a half thousand years ago, Aristotle contended that, “time is the most unknown of all unknown things”, and arguably not much has changed since then.Īt first glance, it seems obvious, what time is: it is the ticking of the clock, the turning of the pages of a calendar. We are told that time is “enigmatic” and “ineffable”, but that does not help us much in our search for the true nature of time. Most websites and books on the subject begin with a candid admission that time is a curious and slippery concept which continues to defy definitive explanation despite hundreds, even thousands, of years of trying.