Time perception in humans seems to be locked to language processing
I have been thinking about this for a while. We now know that time is in reality something probably very different to our perception of time. Each animal with cognition has developed some cognitive mechanism to perceive time, but because the environmental pressure is different for every animal, they all developed different perceptions of time.
In the case of humans, time (or its passing) seem to be noticeable in most phenomena. If I move, for example, I notice how time passes as/while I move. If I think, I also think across time. If I eat, or if I meditate.... these are all activities that allow the perception of the passing of time.
Senses seem to be immediate though. If something makes a sound, I do not perceive the passing of time between the source of the sound and its perception. Same with vision, smell, touch and taste.
However, notice that when it comes to meaningful linguistic stimulation, be it by means of acoustic or visual means, we do not experience additional time in the extraction of content from the input. Let me break this down:
- We know that it actually takes time from sound and light to travel from its source to our sense organs, and that it takes more time for us to transform these vibrations into electrical activity that results in sound/visual perception.
- 1 above is true for meaningless sounds. In the case of meaningful stimuli, it is also obvious that content extraction from the stimulus must necessarily take more time than the time needed to process meaningless sensory stimulation.
It thus follows that sound and light perception take time, and that whatever time this takes, it is less than the time it takes to extract meaning out of sound and light.
However, we do not perceive the passing of time at all when we do processing language. When we process language, we experience it automatically. If you are talking to someone, there is no perceived time between the perception of the act that originates the stimulus (visual presentation of a sentence, or articulatory activity of a speaker) and the comprehension of the content conveyed by the physical stimulus.
This makes me think that time perception in humans might have taken the time it takes humans to process language as the "zero" point of human time perception. Whatever lasts less than language processing, is also not perceived, and whatever lasts more than language processing, can be perceived across time.
This results in empirical predictions. I will now go check the research on the threshold of conscious time perception in humans to see what is known to this day, and to see whether someone has made the link with language processing before.
#Language #Theory #Science #psycholinguistics #linguistics #CognitiveScience #Cognition #mind #time #TimePerception #perception #speech #processing
