People often describe time as passing quickly or slowly. This article examines how judgments of time passage relate to judgments of physical durations, including during meditation when consciousness is altered. The authors distinguish between the "self-time perspective," "self-duration" (internal duration), and "world-duration" (external duration). They link self-time perspective to the narrative self and self-duration to the minimal self, a connection supported by qualitative analysis of testimonials from four meditators. Awareness of self-duration is tied to awareness of the embodied self; when bodily consciousness decreases, the subjective experience of internal time changes. The mechanisms by which the sense of self disappears and one feels outside time during meditation remain unclear.
People who experienced an out-of-body illusion in virtual reality judged time intervals as longer when they felt a stronger sense of body ownership over a mannequin. Participants viewed a mannequin's arm as if it were their own while receiving synchronous or asynchronous strokes on their actual body. After synchronous stroking, they felt touches on the mannequin more intensely and estimated the interval between two touches as longer. The more pronounced the out-of-body experience, the greater the time distortion. These results suggest that awareness of the body-self is important for time perception, supporting the theory of embodied time.
The sense of time is strongly embodied, rooted in the temporal dynamics of ascending physiological signals from the body. Functional neuroimaging and psychophysiological evidence show that subjective time judgments depend on the physical and emotional self. Emotions and related body feelings shape subjective time, and altered states of consciousness, such as meditative states, modulate perception of the physical state, thereby affecting the experience of time. The authors conclude that time perception is fundamentally based on bodily signals.