Do we perceive time? Is time real? Time has been the subject of inquiry in science, philosophy and religion through the ages. To understand time has been a difficult problem and history is testament to attempts made by scholars to understand and define time. Albert Einstein said that “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once”. Time is an instrument that separate things and allows a smooth flow of everything. One view of the philosophers is that time is the fundamental part of the design of the universe and events flow through it in a sequence. Another view is to not consider time as a container of events. Time instead is part of the intellectual structure. Immanuel Kant holds the view that time is not a thing or event and it cannot be measured. Scientist Sean Carroll is trying to understand how time works. He is interested in the ‘arrow of time’. It gives us a feeling of progression or rather it conveys the animation and flow of time. This paper is an effort to investigate the perception of time and to discover the subjective experience and psychological aspect of time as an abstract phenomenon and it is not associated with any specific sense. How we perceive time through the sequence of events, what is brain time and how brain constructs the perception, how mind can travel into the structure of memory, how imagination is able to speculate the future, these are some of the questions I have attempted to answer in my paper. The perception of time encompass areas like duration, body clock, specious present, time perception in animals, aging and effects of meditation.

This entry provides a brief overview of the most crucial milestones in the development of thought concerning children’s understanding of time.

The enigmatic question of time, essentially of a physical, psychological and social nature, occupied human since becoming aware of his existence and of the surrounding environment. Young students' conceptions may be a starting point for improving their understanding of the world. This research is interested in very young students who are in full "construction" of the concept of time. Conceptions related to time notion play a decisive role throughout learning procedure and are often incompatible with the scientific model. Conceptions' analysis is a tool for the advancement of a proximal development zone in which a first conceptual system can be built by students. We refer to the area of current or potential success of young students concerning the understanding of time notion. This paper presents findings on 5 to 7-year-old students' conceptions about the inverse relationship between time and speed. Keywords conceptions, students 5 to 7 years old, time, speed, m...

Because the general population may be familiar with the phenomenon that life appears to speed up as people become older, participants’ preconceptions may affect how they answer questionnaires about the subjective experience of time. To be able to account for these preconceptions in future research, we assessed laypeople’s beliefs about the phenomenon. Participants (N = 313) were asked whether they were familiar with the phenomenon, whether they experienced the phenomenon themselves, and what they thought that the cause or causes of the phenomenon may be. More than 80% of the participants had read or heard about the phenomenon prior to the study, suggesting that the phenomenon is well-known among the general population. Furthermore, although most participants experienced the phenomenon themselves, familiarity with the phenomenon affected whether they felt that life appeared to speeding up and whether time passed fast for them. Familiarity also affected whether participants attributed the phenomenon to changes in objective or subjective time but not the endorsement of the phenomenon’s causes. Finally, participants also had preconceptions about what time periods represent ‘the present’ and ‘the past’. Whereas nearly all participants considered the past to have lasted more than one year, two-third of the participants felt that the present represented a period less than one year.

There is little doubt that we perceive the world as tensed—that is, as consisting of a past, present and future each with a different ontological status—and transient—that is, as involving a passage of time. We also have the ability to execute precisely timed behaviors that appear to depend upon making correct temporal judgments about which changes are truly present and which are not. A common claim made by scientists and philosophers is that our experiences of entities enduring through transient changes are illusory and that our apparently accurately timed behaviors do not reflect dynamical time. We argue that our experiences of objects enduring through transient changes need not be thought of as illusory even if time is not dynamic at the fundamental level of reality. For, the dynamic properties we experience objects as having need not be fundamental properties. They could be weakly emergent from static, temporal properties. Temporal properties, on this view, are similar to ordinary properties like that of being solid, which are correctly experienced as properties of medium-sized material bodies even though they are not instantiated at the fundamental level of reality.

Many metaphor theorists argue that our mental experience of time is grounded in our understanding of space, including motion through space. Results from recent experiments – in which people think about motion, which in turn influences their thinking about time – support this position. Still, many questions remain about the nature of the metaphorical connection between time and space. Can