Time Opined: A Being in the Moment

Abstract

Over the last 10–15 years there has been a growing interest in psychological time, particularly time ‘perception.’ On the periphery of this debate have been developments in dynamical-systems analysis, relevant because in a functional sense dynamical systems are a basic level of explanation for all psychological events. One might ask—if the neural algorithm underlying dynamical-systems operation is the same, irrespective of the psychological event it supports—is there a special case to be made for time as a psychological construct? Of course, this refers to a more general question, but in the present context it concerns psychological events that may be described in terms of the operation of memory or attentional processing with a validity equal to description in terms of time perception. Perhaps there is a need for ontological clarity. In the present contribution, I elaborate on the idea that immediate experience concerns criteria related to a serial event structure as well as criteria related to our sense of the passage of time. In the laboratory we tend to ignore the ecological validity required for these two sets of criteria to be meaningful, which leads to theoretical issues with some experimental data interpretation. I conclude by acceding we require terms of reference to understand how it is we function in time: these should define something beyond the neurocognitive to be meaningful psychologically, but at the same time we require a rigor in our definitions that allow multi-level research (brain, cognition, psychological experience) to be both relatable and meaningful.