H

ave you ever looked at one eye in the mirror
and shifted your gaze to the other eye, surpris-
ingly seeing no movement of your eyes? Or
misheard something, such as the Jimi
Hendrix lyric, ‘scuse me while I kiss the sky
for ‘scuse me while I kiss this guy? At first glance these are simply
sensory limitations, but when we look under the hood these
are clues about how we process time.
Unlike other senses, time is directional; it unfolds as one
event after another. Psychologists have pondered how the sense
of time arises as, unlike the traditional senses, there is appar-
ently no receptor or sensory system capable of signifying time.
And yet time must arise from somewhere, as we can track
durations ranging from fractions of a millisecond to days with
considerable accuracy. The former is the time it takes sound
to travel between our ears, the detection of this difference
enabling us to localise sound. The latter is demonstrated by
our ever-changing circadian rhythms. This article will focus on
time events that unfold in the past 2–3 seconds, dubbed by
psychologists as the subjective present.

Free Will

Philosophers have debated for hundreds of years whether we

have the free will to do what we wish or if our actions are pre -

determined. The question was pigeonholed away as a thought-

experiment until Benjamin Libet of The University of

California, Los Angeles (UCLA) devised a clever experiment

to test it. Libet’s interest in studying consciousness was sparked

when he spent a year in Australia in the 1950s with Nobel Prize

winner John Eccles. It was not until 1983 that Libet published

his seminal paper on consciousness. He measured activity in

the brain using electroencephalography (EEG). Participants

watched a single-handed clock that completed a revolution

every 3 seconds, and were instructed to make a fist at any time

they chose. Afterwards, participants reported the clock position

when they had made the decision to make a fist.

The EEG recordings showed that neural activity associated

with making the fist started as much as 1 second before partic-

ipants were aware they had made a decision. This suggests that

an unconscious decision was made, and that only then was the

mind made aware of the decision. Some considered this conclu-

MAY/JUNE 2017 | | 25

How

We

Sense

Time

JACK BROOKS

Our sense of time is critical to
our everyday experience, from
consciousness to movement
and learning.

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