Estimating the duration of time is essential for self-regulation and survival. The human body does not have a sensory organ for the passage of time in the same way that we have eyes and ears because time, ultimately, is not a material object within the world for which would have caused the appearance of a specialized receptor organ.
The flow of time is measured by our inner experience. Subjective time is not the same as physical time as the former does not pass as a steady flow, but contracts and elongates. Positive and negative emotions are especially influential on the experience of time passing. Emotionally-painful states drive a person’s attention away from their meaningful thoughts and actions toward the awareness of passing time. People in fear or anxiety overestimate the duration of time. Vice versa for positive emotional and physiological states.
Many neuroimaging studies have pointed to time perception being a neural process distributed within the brain. The exact core neural correlates of time consciousness are unknown, but the evidence is pointing to the insula as the main timekeeping, “neural clock.” Brain scans of subjects listening to audio tones presented in nine or 18 second intervals reveal a buildup of neural activity at the end of the test interval in the bilateral posterior insula along with the superior temporal and inferior parietal cortices. The neural signals seem to “accumulate” to a peak and such physiological changes may give us a sensation of time passing.
Physical and mental activities modulate the experience of time. A phenomenon long known as everyone has had the experience—many of them probably—of compressing time when occupied with an engrossing task (Ueda & Shimoda, 2021). Consequently, the more activities one performs the more their sense of time may alter. This could be the reason why subjectively time seems to move faster for adults as they enter middle age and are occupied with the many responsibilities related to job and family. Studies show that accuracy of time perception does not differ between the old and the young assuming there is no cognitive deterioration. Test subjects in both groups perform equally well on prospective memory of self-referring topics.
The body has several different “clocks” for running cycles of biological rhythms. Circadian rhythm runs in approximately 24 hours to govern sleep cycles. It is influenced by the suprachiasmatic nucleus connected to the optic nerve and the melatonin regulation by the pineal gland. Infradian rhythms occur perhaps once a month or once every season. Examples would be the 28-day menstrual cycle and the migration of birds. Ultradian rhythms occur more than once a day as in the case of rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep cycles. These biological wheels are intended for organismic self-regulation through homeodynamic monitoring by the hypothalamus. They are not the basis for time perception although the awareness of cyclic changes certainly contributes to it.
Emotional body experiences are an integral part of time perception. Time passing can be painful when in a fearful or physically uncomfortable situation. Emotions are an essential aspect of the physiological condition of the body. Somatosensory feedback and visceral signals identify subjective feelings from the body such as thirst, itch, touch, temperature, visceral sensations as well as emotional feelings. The insula of primates is considered the primary interoceptive area for physiological states (Craig, 2002). Conscious awareness of complex feeling states and the self is based on a posterior-to-mid-to-anterior progression of bodily impressions through the insula that progressively integrate thoughts and motivations that all come together in the anterior insula (Craig, 2009a). These neural slices of increasingly “thicker” body experiences give us a feeling of homeostatic operations and a strong sense of being embodied. These feelings underlie and guide the fulfillment immediate needs and desires for decision-making. According to Craig (2009b), the anterior insula builds a unified meta-representation of homeostatic feelings that constitutes the experienced self at one moment. These successive impressions are emotionally tinged and give us a sense of time passing. Time perception changes during moments of stronger emotional experience. Each passing second is an “emotional body moment” which form the building blocks from which our experience of the present moment of now comes from. The experience of now is a function of higher-cortical integration of chunks of experience lasting between 2-3 seconds.
Closing Thoughts
An informal assessment of all this leads to several conclusions. First, time perception is a body sense. It is constructed from successive moments of immediate experience that are sandwiched together by the insula. These moments of now each have an emotional tone and this influences the sense of the duration of each now moment. The sense of time moving (or slowing down or speeding up) is determined in the brain and is compared against the background experience of the flow of real, physical time exterior to the body. Although body feelings offer strong evidence against it, time doesn’t really go anywhere, but flows out of us with each breath and heartbeat
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
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References
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Wittmann, M. (2009). The inner experience of time. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Biological Sciences 12(1525), p. 1955-1967.
—– (2014). Embodied time: The experience of time, the body, and the self. In V. Arstila & D. Lloyd (Eds.), The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality, Boston, MA: The MIT Press, pp. 507-523.
Wittmann, M., Simmons, A., Aron, J., & Paulus, M. (2010). Accumulation of neural activity in the posterior insula encodes the passage of time. Neuropsychologia 48(10), p. 3110-3120.
Revised on 02-18-25