Sense of time - encyclopedia article about Sense of time.

Although the sense of time is not associated with a specific sensory system, the work of psychologists and neuroscientists indicates that our brains do have a system governing the perception of time. This is a highly distributed system including the cerebral cortex, cerebellum and basal ganglia as its components. One particular component, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, is responsible for the circadian (or daily) rhythm, while other cell clusters appear to be capable of shorter-range timekeeping. The sense of time is impaired in some patients with neurological diseases such as Parkinson's Disease and Attention Deficit Disorder.

Psychoactive drugs can also impair a person's perception of time, as those on stimulants tend to underestimate time intervals, whereas those on depressants tend to overestimate them. Those lack of proper estimations are generally attributed to the idea that the number of neurotransmitters active in our brain determines the ratio to which our conscious and sub-conscious selves can perceive perception in relation to time. Neurotransmitters such as dopamine and adrenaline are also thought to be partly responsible for one's perception of time.

Imagine you are travelling in a car, without a speedometer, at a speed of 100km/h. You then pass a road sign telling you the speed limit is now 50km/h. You will find that without the aid of the speedometer you will slow to a speed of around 70km/h. This phenomenon is due to the mind's ability to alter conscious perception, much in the way that when you watch the ending credits of a movie and then redirect your vision elsewhere, your vision appears to roll in the reverse direction of that in which the credits were moving. This is a function of the brain believed to be used for the maintenance of a perceived balance adapted to our environment. Without this mechanism, we would be unable to attune to our current environment with its day-long and year-long cycles.

Steven Hawking's book, 'A Brief History Of Time', touches briefly on the subject. Hawking suggests that the perception of time is a ratio; Unit of Time : Time Lived. For example, one hour to a six-month-old person would be approximately "1:4032", while one hour to a 40-year-old person would be "1:349,440" Obviously, an hour is much longer to a young child, or infant than to an aged adult, even though it is the exact same amount of "Time".

References

http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/bicpapers/pdf/memoryfortime.pdf "A Cognitive Model of Retrospective Duration Estimations", Hee-Kyung Ahn, et al, March 7, 2006.
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/homepages/wildgen/pdf/antwerpen_time.pdf "Time, Force, Motion, and the Semantics of Natural Languages", Wolfgang Wildgen, Antwerp Papers in Linguistics, 2003/2004.

A psychologist is a person who studies psychology, the systematic investigation of the human mind, including behavior, cognition, and affect. Psychologists are usually categorized under a number of different fields, the most well-recognized being clinical
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A neuroscientist is an individual who studies the scientific field of neuroscience or any of its related sub-fields. Neuroscience as a distinct discipline separate from anatomy, neurology, physiology, psychology, or psychiatry is fairly recent, aided in large part by the advent of
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perception is the process of acquiring, interpreting, selecting, and organizing sensory information. It is a task far more complex than was imagined in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was proclaimed that building perceiving machines would take about a decade, but, needless to say,
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time.

One view is that time is part of the fundamental structure of the universe, a dimension in which events occur in sequence, and time itself is something that can be measured.
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cerebral cortex is a structure within the vertebrate brain with distinct structural and functional properties. In non-living, preserved brains, the outermost layers of the cerebrum has a grey color, hence the name "grey matter".
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The cerebellum (Latin: "little brain") is a region of the brain that plays an important role in the integration of sensory perception and motor output. Many neural pathways link the cerebellum with the motor cortex—which sends information to the muscles causing them
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The basal ganglia (or basal nuclei) are a group of nuclei in the brain interconnected with the cerebral cortex, thalamus and brainstem. Mammalian basal ganglia are associated with a variety of functions: motor control, cognition, emotions and learning.
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The suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) is a region of the brain, located in the hypothalamus, that is responsible for controlling endogenous circadian rhythms. The neuronal and hormonal activities it generates regulate many different body functions over a 24-hour period.
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A circadian rhythm is a roughly-24-hour cycle in the physiological processes of living beings, including plants, animals, fungi and cyanobacteria. The term "circadian", coined by Franz Halberg,^[1] comes from the Latin circa, "around", and diem or
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Stimulants are drugs that temporarily increase alertness and awareness. They usually have increased side-effects with increased effectiveness, and the more powerful variants are therefore often prescription medicines or illegal drugs.
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A depressant, referred to in slang as a "downer," is a chemical agent that diminishes the function or activity of a specific part of the body. (See also sedative.) The term is used in particular with regard to the central nervous system (CNS).
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IDEA may refer to:

Electronic Directory of the European Institutions
IDEA Center
IDEA League
Ieros Desmos Ellinon Axiomatikon
Improvement and Development Agency
Individuals with Disabilities Education Act
Indian Distance Education Association

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Neurotransmitters are chemicals that are used to relay, amplify and modulate signals between a neuron and another cell. According to the prevailing beliefs of the 1960s, a chemical can be classified as a neurotransmitter if it meets the following conditions:

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Dopamine is a hormone and neurotransmitter occurring in a wide variety of animals, including both vertebrates and invertebrates. In chemical structure, it is a phenethylamine.
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Epinephrine (INN) (IPA: [ˌɛpɪˈnɛfrən]) or adrenaline (European Pharmacopoeia and BAN) (IPA: [əˈdrɛnələn]
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speedometer is a vehicle instrument that measures the instantaneous speed.

Traditional automotive speedometers are driven by a flexible, sleeved cable that is rotated by a set of small gears in the tail shaft of a transmission.
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