What exactly is time perception?
In an age-old debate, philosophers and scientists alike have had a difficult time pinpointing what it means to perceive time. Unlike shape perception, color perception, depth perception, pitch, volume, and motion perception, time perception does not involve any one sense. There are no specific sensory receptors associated with it; it is ephemeral and invisible. Do life forms possess some special capacity, independent of the original five senses that exists solely to perceive time? Or do we integrate perceptual knowledge through the senses to paint of picture of time?
Some suggest that we do not actually perceive time itself; instead, we perceive events or changes in temporal space and how they relate to one another. In his seminal paper Time Perception, Ernst Poppel explains that there are a number of elementary aspects of time that fundamentally contribute to how we perceive it: duration, non-simultaneity, order, past and present (tense), and change. These fundamentals are concerned with time itself, how it is structured and how that subsequently leads us to experience it. In relation, R.A. Block, identifies four factors that give us the context within which to perceive time: characteristics of the time experiencer, time-related behavioral judgments, contents of a time period, and activities during a time period.
When considered together, Poppel and Block’s arguments provide a robust, yet complicated, picture of what time is and why we perceive it in different ways. The faculties needed to fully consider the relationship between time and the perceiver are complex; the interrelatedness between each factor spins an intricate web.
If one factor changes in some way, another is bound to be affected. Just some food for thought. Don't spend too much time thinking about it.
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