The fundamental nature of human time experience has concerned artists, poets, philosophers, and scientists throughout the ages. Any consideration of human action requires awareness of its temporal aspects. However, simply to view time in the same units and dimensions as the physicist employs in describing events robs personal time of its "lived" quality. The use of physical time concepts in the description of human events is often artificial and misleading. It fails to account for the facts that human time estimates rarely match clock and calendar time; that societies and individuals demonstrate vast differences in their constructions and uses of time; and that temporal perceptions and attitudes change within an individual both during a single day and throughout his life span. The present volume does not view time as something that is sensed in the same way that one would sense or perceive spatial or sensory stimuli. Rather, it views time as a complex set of personally experienced cognitive constructs used by individuals and cultures to account for the order, the duration, and the organization of events. The authors in this book take a strong departure from earlier psychophysical studies of a "time sense" and address themselves to the uses and elaborations of time concepts in personal and social functioning.

How do we experience time? What do we use to experience it? In a series of remarkable experiments, Robert Ornstein shows that it is difficult to maintain an "inner clock" explanation of the experience of time & postulates a cognitive, information-processing approach. This approach alone makes sense out of the very different data of the experience of time & in particular of the experience of duration-the lengthening of duration under LSD, for example, or the effects of an experience felt to be a success rather than a failure, time in sensory deprivation, the time-order effect, or the influence of the administration of a sedative or stimulant drug. Contents: The Problem of Temporal Experience. The "Sensory Process" Metaphor. The "Storage Size" Metaphor. Four Studies of the Stimulus Determinants of Duration Experience. Two Studies of Coding Processes & Duration Experience. Three Studies of Storage Size. Summary, Conclusion, & Some Speculation on Future Directions.

An expert explores the riddle of subjective time, from why time speeds up as we grow older to the connection between time and consciousness.

We are obsessed with time. However hard we might try, it is almost impossible to spend even one day without the marker of a clock. But how much do we understand about time, and is it possible to retrain our brains and improve our relationship with it? Drawing on the latest research from the fields of psychology, neuroscience, and biology, and using original research on the way memory shapes our understanding of time, acclaimed writer and broadcaster Claudia Hammond delves into the mysteries of time perception. Along the way, she introduces us to an extraordinary array of colourful characters willing to go to great lengths in the interests of research, such as the French speleologist Michel, who spends two months in an ice cave in complete darkness. Time Warped shows us how to manage our time more efficiently, speed time up and slow it down at will, plan for the future with more accuracy, and, ultimately, use the warping of time to our own advantage.

First published in 1975 and still without equal, The Human Experience of Time provides a thorough review of the concept of time in the Western philosophic tradition. Encompassing a wide range of writings, from the Book of Genesis and the classical thinkers to the work of such twentieth-century philosophers as Collingwood and McKeon, all with introductory essays by the editor, this classic anthology offers a synoptic view of the changing philosophic notions of time.

“[Why Time Flies] captures us. Because it opens up a well of fascinating queries and gives us a glimpse of what has become an ever more deepening mystery for humans: the nature of time.” —The New York Times Book Review “Erudite and informative, a joy with many small treasures.” —Science “Time” is the most commonly used noun in the English language; it’s always on our minds and it advances through every living moment. But what is time, exactly? Do children experience it the same way adults do? Why does it seem to slow down when we’re bored and speed by as we get older? How and why does time fly? In this witty and meditative exploration, award-winning author and New Yorker staff writer Alan Burdick takes readers on a personal quest to understand how time gets in us and why we perceive it the way we do. In the company of scientists, he visits the most accurate clock in the world (which exists only on paper); discovers that “now” actually happened a split-second ago; finds a twenty-fifth hour in the day; lives in the Arctic to lose all sense of time; and, for one fleeting moment in a neuroscientist’s lab, even makes time go backward. Why Time Flies is an instant classic, a vivid and intimate examination of the clocks that tick inside us all.

Given that a representational system's phenomenal experience must be intrinsic to it and must therefore arise from its own temporal dynamics, consciousness is best understood — indeed, can only be understood — as being in time. Despite that, it is still acceptable for theories of consciousness to be summarily exempted from addressing the temporality of phenomenal experience. The chapters comprising this book represent a collective attempt on the part of their authors to redress this aberration. The diverse treatments of phenomenal consciousness range in their methodology from philosophy, through surveys and synthesis of behavioral and neuroscientific findings, to computational analysis. This collection's broad scope and integrative approach, characterized by the view of the brain as a dynamical system that computes the mind's representation space, will be of interest to researchers, instructors, and students in the cognitive sciences wishing to acquaint themselves with the current thinking in consciousness research. Series B.