How do we perceive time?
Given that our neurons are physical matter existing only in the present, how is the perception of past, present and future possible?
A solution would be to model perception as neurons containing (or instantiating) a non-physical.
The general form would be perception as [neurons,(an instantiated non-physical)].
And the specifics would be:
-The past is modeled as [neurons,(content dealing with the past)].
-The present is modeled as [neurons,(content dealing with the present)].
-The future is modeled as [neurons,(content dealing with the future)].
Is this a good model? Are there problems with it? Do you have an alternative?
In another post I discussed how the philosophy of physicalism could lead to the study of physically instantiated non-physicals and this is a related topic.
A solution would be to model perception as neurons containing (or instantiating) a non-physical.
The general form would be perception as [neurons,(an instantiated non-physical)].
And the specifics would be:
-The past is modeled as [neurons,(content dealing with the past)].
-The present is modeled as [neurons,(content dealing with the present)].
-The future is modeled as [neurons,(content dealing with the future)].
Is this a good model? Are there problems with it? Do you have an alternative?
In another post I discussed how the philosophy of physicalism could lead to the study of physically instantiated non-physicals and this is a related topic.
Comments (79)
How does the physical matter of neurons instantiate the non-physical content of future perception?
Sounds an awful lot like epiphenomenalism, doesn’t it? Also sounds an awful lot like a re-write of the “hard problem of consciousness”.
Interesting subject, nonetheless. Doesn’t have any good answers, but still interesting to think about, up to a point anyway.
I agree the question stated your way is a hard problem that science doesn't have an answer to. There is a simpler question I was thinking about. That would just be, if time perception is (or is not) observable evidence that our brains actually use instantiated non-physicals? I would answer yes and our brains do a lot of it and the neurons of our cerebral cortex are specialized to do exactly that.
I've been looking and haven't found any treatment of the hard problem that looks at instantiated non-physicals by that or any other name. I will look at epiphenomenalism... heard of it but not familiar with it.
If I read that as....does the brain use a kind of instantiated non-physical evidence, such as time....then I would say, yes it does. Thing is, though, we do not perceive time, but only perceive one occurrence in relation to another, and that relation is what we call “time”.
But yes, it does seem as if the brain constructs of its own accord, that which we as functioning rational beings, think we need.
Dualism might have some general solution to time perception in the form of mind but I don't see any specific mechanism. Physicalism fails because you only have the physical present to work with. Presentism fails for the same reason. Eternamism fails if you don't accept past and future matter as existing.
You’re a member of a rather large crowd.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
There's a metaphysical argument which posits mind as a logical causality.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
Yeah.....unfortunate that speculative pure reason has declined in philosophical standing, despite the fact people still think. I at least, hold that reason is sufficient “specific mechanism” for “time perception”, as you call it.
It seems time is a psychological movement having it's base in memory.
Something to consider is the things being instantiated cannot/could not exist without neurons to contains them and in you model of philosophy is that something to give up. To me it just seems more rigorous to acknowledge or at least explore this possibility.
In general, if you think your brain has mental content, you need a philosophy that accounts for this and it needs to recognize content has both input and output capabilities.
What I'd meant to say is this:
Organisms have their own biological-homeostatic rhythms, or cycles, somewhat synchronized as 'muscle (endochrine) memories' by local, recurring environmental cycles like diurnal, lunar-tidal, seasonal & annual regularities which, in effect, schedule opportunities for nutrition, shelter, reproduction, migration, etc. I suspect human perception, no matter how metacognitive it has evolved to be, is structured – modulated – by (limbic) homeostatic states: 'time' perception tell us how we are changing and not only (or precisely) how our natural environment changes.
NB: This speculation is influenced by neuroscientists / philosophers like Eric Kandel, Antonia Damasio, Patricia Churchland, Owen Flanagan, Daniel Dennett, George Lakoff, Derek Parfit, Daniel Kahneman, Thomas Metzinger, et al.
In a stimulus-free situation we still experience time. This may be explained by internal changes in the brain, such as a sort of time-keeping piece pulsating. After all, we only have a sense of rhythm, each person, because we have an internal metronome.
It, the Metronome, that is, the internal metronome, probably occupies a delineatable area or volume in the brain, if anyone ever wants to try to mine for it.
Humans: Homo temporus, the being of time. (Time being.)
Nuff! Stop the puns.
Then it may be more proper to say it is those changes that is the experience, not time itself.
What is rhythm but an event in succession to a similar event in a uniform series of such events?
Quoting god must be atheist
Gonna be a long time coming, I’m thinkin’. Finding that physical stuff.
Yep. Sounds about right.
Or you could walk around with one of those new-dangled machines strapped to your head, with a platoon of geeky lab-coated pencil-pushers in tow, taking turns telling you what’s reallyreallyreally going on between your ears.
(See? Right there! Apple tastes good = 2.5uv in zone 5 of area 2 of region 3; 14 phosphate ions over 10nm cleft!!! TaaaaDaaaaaa!!!!)
In my OP, I used the notation [neurons, (an instantiated non-physical)].
Would changing the words to [neurons, (mental content)] be more understandable?
And give an example of how this notation could give insight into mental process:
-[your neurons, (mental content)] could be expanded to the specific [your neurons, (a platoon of geeky lab-coated pencil-pushers)]
-Through physical process you type (you are doing physical encoding) and send a physical signal.
-I receive the physical signal and decode it.
-[my neurons, (mental content)] becomes specifically [my neurons,(a platoon of geeky lab-coated pencil-pushers)].
Of course his is common place, your idea becomes my idea sort of thing. It's just normally we wouldn't note the neurons being present, but to do rigorous philosophy, we should.
I think it also identifies an area that neuro philosophy is not addressing.
The brain/mind can be subdivided into 3 parts:
1. Memory [the past]
2. Executive functions [the present]
3. Imagination [the future]
Sadly, there's not much neuroscience done on imagination but, if it's any consolation, it seems to overlap with executive functions, specifically planning [for the future I suppose].
Does memory involve neurons? Does memory involve mental content?
If yes and yes then memory is in the form [neurons, (mental content)].
Does executive function involve neurons? Does executive function involve mental content?
If yes and yes then executive function is in the form [neurons, (mental content)].
Does imagination involve neurons? Does imagination involve mental content?
If yes and yes then imagination is in the form [neurons, (mental content)].
Ok, I know I go on and on. It's habit. For my benefit maybe. Or just because something interesting might come up. Can I point out there might be something more universal here with mental capabilities than all the things we give names to.
You have a suspicion that "...there might be something more universal here with mental capabilities than all the things we give names to" but what are your reasons for it?
I don't think you guys are still talking about how we perceive time.
Then again, why should we? We either find our trains of thought run into a conceptual cul-de-sac or else run along into infinity in an infinite regress.
So the upshot is that nobody knows how we perceive time, and we instead let our talk migrate over to discussing the hunting and nesting practices of the North American Chiphawk missiles.
Yes, definitely. We can name all 214 unnamed concepts humanity is currently struggling with, and the 34419 ones we are going to challenge ourselves with, before the extinction of the human race.
Really? "Not much" in the way of studies on REM sleep, visualization (readiness activation), post traumatic stress disorder, suicidal / sexual / religious ideating, schizophrenic / psychoactive hallucinating, vision processing, affective expectation / prediction, etc? :chin:
Maybe you're too "pure like a freshly frozen rose petal", @god must be atheist, to see me slap your blushing face with it.
Am I wrong? I am not sure.
Yeah. That's what ideating means in my book.
Looks like a work in progress. I hope we get done with the preliminaries ASAP so that we can finally get down to the brass tacks of time perception.
@Mark Nyquist framed his question in a past-present-future context and I did the best I could manage. It wasn't enough to get the topic off the ground...too bad.
Quoting 180 Proof
You know more than me so, I plead no contest. For what it's worth though the Wikipedia page doesn't seem to contain any mentions of serious research into imagination. I must've missed them as I only gave the page a cursory reading.
I like to use the metaphor of a skyscraper where every floor contains a small model of the whole skyscraper with a little "you are here" marker on the equivalent floor of the model. Each floor is a moment in time, and the tiny model skyscraper on each floor is a model of the whole time-line contained entirely within that moment of time. (And of course, the tiny models might not be, and probably aren't, perfectly accurate models of the actual entire building).
Not in my case; I understand mental content as instantiated non-physical. And neurons are just neurons in any case.
Quoting Mark Nyquist
True, we don’t normally consider neurons in rigorous philosophy; that’s the purview and professional domain of empirical scientists. There’s a reason for that, I think, insofar as humans do not...and perhaps do not even possess the ability...to think in terms of the very natural laws by which the brain operates. And if that’s the case, how does the explanatory gap ever close, between the physical operation of the brain and the appearance of us as apparent manifestations of the non-physical operation of the brain?
Quoting Mark Nyquist
That was never in doubt; the problem is in translation of one input type to a completely different output type. The type of input as energy, that translates to a type of output as motion, is quite comprehensible, but the type of input as energy that translates to a type of output as “fascination”, “anxiety”, “freedom”.......well, that just doesn’t work so well, does it.
Fun stuff.....
I’ll cop to that. I reject that we perceive time in the first place, so don’t bother with talking about how we do it.
That, and I reject that missiles nest. How absurd!!!!
I would equate the skyscraper example to a virtual network that is capable of time perception, imaging, decision making...or everything the cerebral cortex is known to do.
And not in modules like the evolutionary psychologists would theorize...what are they thinking? Would you grab a hand shovel if you had a D8 Cat dozer ready in the back lot? Of course not. How silly.
Think of it as a vast virtual network with enormous capabilities in one package.
Time is an imaginary (PSYCHE = inside-brain effect = undetectable) -
elicited, made up, fabricated,
FROM/ABOUT things changing.
These things can be PHYSIS = non manmade fraactions of the universe
or manmade things called clocks.
Manmade things are LOGOI = the expression- = assertion of the evolved-primate PSYCHE.
any precise measurement of time is just a proclamation of time,
and not in the least a detection let alone an observation of time.
The essential answer is:
Time is per se = as such, it-self, on its own, in its own right, in its very essence
undetectable = cannot be investigated in the slightest.
Many people have a hard time at understanding
that, while time does not exist
the proclamation (LOGOI) !!!OF!!! time are extremely useful = TRUE.
This assertion is applicable to each and every element of physche,
for an example to other parameters in the language of physics, to laws, and to gods
It seems you sort of restated my original premise, maybe, maybe not. But why would you give up on understanding the psychology of time?
My view is physical matter exists only in the present and that leads to the question of why and how we perceive past, present and future.
We perceive in the present, remember the past, and anticipate the future.
If I remember correctly, until now, physical matter has always been found to exist in the future.
As for psychology, I think it might be correct.
We don't need to perceive it directly. We can compute it, and we do. You don't perceive three-D images, either, but you put the two 2-D images your eyes receive and then compute it into three dimensions.
Sure we perceive time, one way or anther. If we did not, why would we have a word and a concept attached to it? Human language is the extension of models of reality, and for what we don't perceive, and for what we can't conceptualize, we don't have a name.
Aside from that, the very title of the thread is "How do we perceive time?"
Maybe that's why.
I did get through your list of neuro philosophers on Wikipedia. Too much there to comment on. I do like bringing other fields into philosophy to get perspective. Did you know the average mass density of the universe is about one hydrogen atom per four cubic meters? Really sparse. Seems significant to philosophy. We are kind of in a sweet spot here on the surface of planet earth.
What am I going to eat for my next meal? I have forty dollars in my wallet. Where are my car keys? What time is it? I should get a hair cut. I need new shoes.
Do you see, the way we actually deal with time it's just part of the mix, like car keys or shoes.
No, technically, we do not; we compute duration or succession, and represent such computations with everything from clocks to scratches on a wall. Flowers bloom under conditions right for them, but it is only with respect to humans, that flowers bloom in the spring. Spring, of course, a human conception, having absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with flowers themselves. Just as the first directly visible light from the sun on Earth itself has nothing to do with “morning”.
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Quoting god must be atheist
Not “and for”. “Or for”. Your language makes explicit we must perceive all we name, which is obviously not the case. It follows that iff there is no perception of time as such, and yet time is nonetheless a name for something, it only names a conception, which can be argued to be the case without contradiction. Whereas time as a perception, is full of them, one for each and every instance of treating time as an object. Misplaced concreteness writ large? I mean....if time is perceivable, shouldn’t we be able to smell it?
What we don’t understand and for what we can’t conceptualize, we don’t have a name....is perhaps a better description of the human condition. Now, if time is something merely understood, we have reason to name it, but we have no occasion for, and are relieved of the absurdity of, smelling it.
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Quoting god must be atheist
Absolutely. Human models described by human language derived from human experience.
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Quoting god must be atheist
Yep, and I understand you mean that to ask that question presupposes the truth of it, in that we actually do perceive time, and the query simple asks about the means by which such perception occurs. That being the case, I must admit I don’t know how we perceive time.
Quoting god must be atheist
Quoting Mww
Why is it only me who sees you agree with what I say, yet you say we don't agree?
Quoting Mww
Actually, no, you must follow conventional protocol.
[b]
[i](1) I have a name for what I perceive.
(2) I have a name for what I conceptualize.[/i]
Combining (1) and (2),
I don't have a name for what I don't (perceive or conceptualize). < this is always true only if I have no perception and no conceptualization. If you doubt, build a truth table.
I don't have a name for what I don't perceive and I don't conceptualize.
Therefore I used "and" properly.
[/b]
Quoting Mww
Again you and I agree.
Why this series of refuting my arguments with arguments that state the same things as I have? Except of course for the negation of the combined condition.
Or you could ask 180 Proof how it works through homeostasis.
Why didn’t you just say for what we CANNOT perceive and for what we cannot conceptualize, we don’t have a name. No one can beat that horse beyond its expiration date, or, as in my case, no proper yankeevirgobabyboomer can analyze that such that the logical inconsistency of what you did say, becomes glaringly obvious. (Grin)
True enough, but we don't care that time is how we perceive, when we wish to know how time is perceived.
In terms of consciousness our perception of time today (for most of us) is quiet different than several thousand years ago. Today we walk around with beeps, rings and buzzes to enforce the idea of ‘home time,’ ‘lunch break’ or ‘Sunday service’. These cultural traditions imposed on us alter our perception of change.
We ‘perceive time’ today through our traditionally imposed lens (including clocks, timetables and more long running traditions). We have always ‘marked out’ changes in our personal journey as well as out communal journey ... in todays world we’ve carried over certain tokens of this nature and mechanised it.
Our cosmological perspective (our grasping at infinity) is probably a large reason why we’re obsessed with measuring and partitioning time just as it has more recently become a tradition we impose upon the physical Earth with concepts of ‘borders’ and ‘boundaries’ taking a physical significance where in the past they were more fluid or even metaphorical.
If you were talking about something else you’ll have to make it clearer. Anyway, food for thought :)
Oh. Psychological matter.
That lets me out.
Thinking as mental content...ok;
Thinking of time as mental content....ok;
Thinking of time perception as mental content....not ok.
Because thinking of time as mental content is already granted, the only way thinking of time perception as mental content can be consistently affirmed, is to treat perception as a function of the mind. If perception is a function of the mind.....what are the senses for?
The way I see it is that time for the purposes of the external world minus consciousness time doesn’t really exist. Things just change. Constant creation and destruction happening simultaneously. Physics demonstrates that a definitive “now” doesn’t even exist due to time dilation under the influence of gravity.
As for the mind and how it perceives time: I think it’s all down to memory. If we did not have memories we would never be aware of a past. And therefore because we do not have a past to compare to the present we also wouldn’t be aware of a future. Future necessitates and awareness of a then and now and then doing simple maths to deduct that now will become a then. Therefore there is an anticipatory element of nows yet to come (the future).
I like to think of the brain as operating like a semi crystalline fluid. A biphasic phenomenon. The “crystals” are the structurally static memories we form from synapses and the fluid is the active present reformation and transformation of those structures constantly being modified. In this case the past are those parts of the brain not actively demonstrating their “plasticity” - ability to remould. This is demonstrated by the fact that every time you revisit a memory you change it because you incidentally add in current perspective, mood and knowledge. This is like the clarity of hindsight. Looking back at something often makes more sense than when it is the present moment because from the present we can track the linear progression of past.
So what makes sense to me is based on a definition that fits my purpose and I try but don't always specify. You have some ability to pick the best meaning by context. If you're asking if my usage involves the senses, then, no it does not.
Personal time vs someonelses design
a.k.a
1. when in someonelse's watch (at a job, personal perceptions change and come under compromise)
2. When on your parent's watch( in development)
1. On the heaven;s watch ( centuries a /incl decades eenergies hcange in the centuries in biblical times and changees occur from century to century, denoting several angelical adminsitrations ranging from God to Demons - divided celestial government)
2 city- specific watch ( patterns and behaviorof people for a specific municipality)
Time perceptions and "clocks" change in marriage or parenthood
I understand all that. I’m not begrudging your definitions.
Still, granting that the senses aren’t used in your system of mental content, what part do they play?
Also, on the output side there are our muscles fully connected to mental content. This is important as it gives full loop capabilities, control of physical objects...a lot to explore here...things like feedback, motor control, coordination...it's great if you can understand it all working together.
Things like our eyes are a special case. They use muscle output to aim and select input.
Hehe... this claims we can only name things that we can both conceptualize and perceive at the same time and at the same respect... hehe, connectives are tricky, but they do behave consistently by consensus of their usus. :grin:
So the senses pass physical information that can be used as input, presumably for mental content, which the dictionary (sigh) terms “perception”. As well, apparently, perception can comprise mental content without the passing of physical information, insofar as at least one kind of perception doesn’t use the senses. Where does the mental content come from that isn’t passed by physical information? I suppose thinking can provide mental content, but still, what kind of content can it be, if not physical information from sensory inputs?
Perception as mental content comprised of physical information passed by the senses, and perception as mental content comprised of something other than physical information not passed by the senses. Seems like there should be a difference, so how does the mind tell the difference, and how does the mind treat one differently than the other, if there is one?
So a claim for what cannot be named is at the same time claim for what can? Nope, ain’t buyin’ it.
The first is quite obviously true insofar as that which is neither perceivable nor conceivable cannot be known to exist as far as we’re concerned, while the latter is quite obviously false insofar as we can certainly name things conceived long before that thing is ever perceived, if it ever is.
Connective consistency is important; logical consistency is paramount.
If notation isn't your thing just skip it. Most people don't like it but I do.
I use:
x , (lower case) for all physical matter
Y , (upper case) for sufficiently large neuron groups
(o) , (lower case in parenthesis) for mental content
So, [neurons, (mental content)] in notation is Y(o).
Thinking would be Y(content; initial) ---> Y(content; step 1, step 2, etc.) ---> Y(content; final).
Input would be x ---> senses ---> Y(o).
Output would be Y(o; activate muscles) ---> muscles ---> x.
So this is a process notation with just three basic elements, that's all you need. I use a semi colon to clarify or add detail. There is never a situation were (o) is separated from it's supporting neurons so it's entirely physically based. I do more complicated ones by adding known details and writing in the margins but those get messy. Seems to be useful and I seem to make progress faster.
Communication would be [person 1; Y(o; Hello) -->x; voice] -->x; sound waves --> (To person 2)
x; sound waves --> [person 2; -->x; hearing --> Y(o; Person 1 is saying 'Hello').
All well and good. Now insert time in there somehow.
Yeah......and?
I don’t care what the occipital lobe is doing. When I close my eyes I know why I can’t see.
We do not have senses that directly measure a specific physical dimension. Even for the 3-dimensional space around us, our brain tries to reconstruct it based on input from the senses. Some senses give more information about the dimensions than others. For example taste/olfaction have no information about 3D space, sound a bit more (for humans because for bats this is the best), vision even more and the somatosensory system is the most accurate when compared to others but is limited in how much can provide at each second.
So coming to the original question, how is time perceived? Or better put, how is time reconstructed? Let's start from the present. As with the spatial dimensions there is no sensory system that directly estimates time. But time information is part of some sensory stimuli like sounds (it after all the changes of sound pressure over time), or vision (movement is change in position over time) and the brain is capable of extracting this information to infer (& perceive) time. There are also plenty of internal rhythms that can be used to estimate time such as breathing, heart rate, attentional shifts, thought progression and lastly specific activation patterns within some brain areas.
Time perception of the past is mostly based on episodic memory and a sequence of events. Also part of the "qualia" of time is the fact that past memories are faded. For example if you can't place something in some temporal time frame with respect to some other events, it should bare no time "qualia".
Finally, perception of the future is mostly the inference of time that we can have based on our models of our every day life. Perceiving "Tomorrow" has to do with things like "Tonight I will go to sleep", "Tomorrow morning I will wake up in my bed", "After that I have drive to work", "For lunch I will cook spaghetti" etc. So based on our previous episodic memories we can have a fairly decent prediction of the future (not too far of course).
There hasn't been found a specific area that processes time information and generates the perceptual qualities of time, but there are probably plenty of areas involved in this such as frontal cortex, parietal, basal ganglia, cerebellum and hippocampus (perception generally involves multiple areas anyways). So there are (most likely) not distinct neurons for the perception of past, present and future.
Sure it does. Reality is what appears to awareness as it appears to awareness. Reality isn’t a thing in itself out there that we try and ‘fit’ our representations to. It is the interaction itself between organism and environment.
Francisco Varela and other researchers integrating enactive cognitive neuroscience with phenomenology have embraced dynamical systems models of time perception which emphasize the interactive no -linear element over the linear computational representationalist approach of classical cognitive science.
Varela writes:”In fact, we have inherited from classical physics a notion of time as an arrow of infinitesimal moments, which flows in a constant stream. It is based on sequences of finite or infinitesimal elements, which are even reversible for a large part of physics. This view of time is entirely homologous to that developed by the modern theory of computation. […] This strict adherence to a computational scheme will be, in fact, one of the research frameworks that needs to be abandoned as a result of the neuro-phenomenological examination proposed here” ( The specious present: a neurophenomenology of time consciousness p. 112)
The traditional sequentialistic idea is anchored in a framework in which the computer metaphor is central, with its associated idea that information flows up-stream . Here, in contrast, I emphasize a strong dominance of dynamical network properties where sequentiality is replaced by reciprocal determination and relaxation time.”
Check out the following link. It introduces Husserl’s phenomecological model of time consciousness and integrates it with neuroscientific research.
https://fdocuments.in/document/the-specious-present-a-neurophenomenology-of-time-the-specious-present
Authors are another interesting example. They actually make their living on mental content and time details would be part of any writing. The amount an author can write in a year also might give a benchmark for what all of us are capable of in terms of mental content
Reality exists independent of us. We have no way to perceive the majority of things around us. We cannot perceive the UV spectrum as bees can or the majority of the electromagnetic spectrum that is such as Wifi frequencies, radio frequencies and so on. Our visual acuity is not good enough to see anything in the microscopic level. Our sense of smell is pitiful compared to the one that a dog or a mouse has. We hear a tiny fraction of the sound waves. If we sit across a person, we have no idea about the myriad of processes that exist in their head.
We just don't have the sensors to sample everything that exists in the world around us. We "feel" that what we sample is all there is, but there is so much more.
Ok. Thanks.
I’m going to self-plagiarize here and re-post a comment from an earlier thread.
Here’s Husserl’s critique of representationalism, the idea that reality exists independent of us:
Representationalism notoriously courts scepticism: Why should awareness of one thing (an inner object) enable awareness of a quite different thing (an external object), and how can we ever know that what is internally accessible actually corresponds to something external? On Husserl's anti-representationalist view, however, the fit and link between mind and world – between perception and reality – isn't merely external or coincidental: “consciousness (mental process) and real being are anything but coordinate kinds of being, which dwell peaceably side by side and occasionally become ‘related to' or ‘connected with' one another” (Husserl 1982: 111
“For Husserl, physical nature makes itself known in what appears perceptually. The very idea of defining the really real reality as the unknown cause of our experience, and to suggest that the investigated object is a mere sign of a distinct hidden object whose real nature must remain unknown and which can never be apprehended according to its own determinations, is for Husserl nothing but a piece of mythologizing (Husserl 1982: 122). Rather than defining objective reality as what is there in itself, rather than distinguishing how things are for us from how they are simpliciter in order then to insist that
the investigation of the latter is the truly important one, Husserl urges us to face up to the fact that our
access to as well as the very nature of objectivity necessarily involves both subjectivity and
intersubjectivity. Indeed, rather than being the antipode of objectivity, rather than constituting an obstacle and hindrance to scientific knowledge, (inter)subjectivity is for Husserl a necessary enabling condition. “
That said. The speed in which one perceives it is directly proportional with the amount of information you retain and go through. for example if you watch a clock (analog) and only remember the 5s (5 10 15) and someone else remembers only the ones (1 2 3) the person that remembers the 1s will feel like its much longer than the one that only remembers the 5s.