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Chapter Title: Embodied Time: The Experience of Time, the Body, and the Self
Chapter Author(s): Marc Wittmann
Book Title: Subjective Time
Book Subtitle: The Philosophy, Psychology, and Neuroscience of Temporality
Book Editor(s): Valtteri Arstila, Dan Lloyd
Published by: . (2014) The MIT Press
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24 Embodied Time: The Experience of Time, the Body, and the Self
Marc Wittmann
24.1 Psychological and Neural Models of Time Perception
Daily rhythms of many biological and psychological functions are controlled by an endog-
enous biological clock with a period of approximately 24 h ( Roenneberg, Daan, & Merrow,
2003 ). Circadian clocks, which are entrained by light, regulate physiology and behavior over
the course of the day and enable an organism to anticipate and prepare for regular envi-
ronmental changes. Circadian physiological rhythms define time units of a day that are
biologically determined and have an impact on human experience and behavior ( Wittmann
et al., 2006a ). Notably, the circadian clock seems to be related to human time perception
for intervals in the hours range. Whereas the production of an hour interval has been shown
to be proportional to the duration of wake time in human subjects living in experimental
isolation, the production of 5 and 10 second intervals was not related to individual sleep-
wake cycles ( Aschoff, 1998 ). The circadian clock has long been described, and its structural
and molecular properties are currently being deciphered ( Merrow, Spoelstra, & Roenneberg,
2005 ); however, the neurobiological basis for the sense of time and the ability of prospective
interval timing regarding durations of milliseconds, seconds, or minutes has yet to be
identified.
1
Since events occur over time, an organism has to adequately process temporal informa-
tion in order to anticipate environmental demands and to plan actions. In humans, precise
timing of intervals ranging from hundreds of milliseconds to a few seconds is essential for
controlling complex behavior, for example when we communicate with others through
music, dance, or conversation ( Trevarthen, 1999 ; Wittmann & P ö ppel, 1999). But time is
also an experience; we sense the passage of time and feel the duration of events. A few
minutes of a boring situation feel unbearably long. In contrast, we may wish that the
encounter with a beloved person would last longer. The experience and anticipation of
duration also influences decisions about how to act, such as whether to wait for the elevator
or to take the stairs, whether to stand in line at the post office or to come back later. We
make temporal decisions as we consider the temporal delay of different potential outcomes
associated with our choices ( Wittmann & Paulus, 2008 ; 2009 ). Although we are only
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508 Marc Wittmann
transiently aware of time, the experience of duration can function as an error signal indicat-
ing that an event did not occur at the anticipated point in time. Reports of subjective time
often express the difference between expected and objective time, the comparison of our
sense of duration with clock time ( Wackermann, 2008 ). Subjective time also relates to
intrinsically felt disturbances of how long time intervals should last. When the pause in a
conversation exceeds only a few seconds we become awkwardly aware of time. On the scale
of several minutes, we suddenly experience duration when the ordered meal at a restaurant
appears too early and thus interrupts the conversation that has just begun.
However essential the dimension of time is for human cognitive functioning, its neural
basis is still unknown. On reviewing the diversity of sometimes competing psychological
and neurophysiological models, it becomes clear that there is no consensus on how and
where in the brain temporal information is processed ( Wittmann & van Wassenhove, 2009 ).
The most influential model for prospective time perception is based on the idea of a pace-
maker-accumulator clock, whereby a pacemaker produces a series of pulses, analogous to
the ticks of a clock, and the number of pulses recorded over a certain interval represents
experienced duration (e.g., Gibbon, Church, & Meck, 1984 ; Treisman et al., 1990 ). In some
variants of this cognitive model, an attentional gate opens when attention is directed to
time. Only then are time units accumulated in the counter ( Zakay & Block, 1997 ). Accord-
ing to this type of model, an observer divides attention between temporal and nontemporal
processes ( Grondin & Macar, 1992 ). The more attention is paid to the passage of time, the
longer duration is experienced. In case we are distracted from paying attention to time,
when one is absorbed in other activities, duration is relatively underestimated.
An alternative idea assumes that the amount of energy spent during cognitive and emo-
tional processes defines the subjective experience of duration ( Mach, 1911 ; Eagleman &
Pariyadath, 2009 ; Marchetti, 2009 ). Novel experiences last relatively longer because of the
greater demand of mental activities involved in analyzing a more complex or novel situa-
tion. In experiments probing milliseconds timing, the duration of an oddball (a rare event)
in a series of identical stimuli is relatively overestimated as compared to standard stimuli
( van Wassenhove et al., 2008 ). A greater amount of energy expenditure for the encoding of
a deviant stimulus dilates experienced duration; repetition results in higher coding effi-
ciency and in turn leads to comparably shorter estimates of duration ( Eagleman & Pariya-
dath, 2009 ).
In another attempt to replace the pacemaker-accumulator clock model with more biologi-
cally plausible concepts, memory decay has been proposed to cause our experience of time
(Staddon, 2005). Since memory strength decreases with time, memory decay could function
as a clock. That way, the same processes would underlie forgetting as well as time percep-
tion. In a model of internal time representation, the dual klepsydra model ( Wackermann &
Ehm, 2006 ; Wackermann, 2008 ), subjective duration is represented by the state of a lossy
accumulator, which receives inflow during the presentation of a stimulus that has to be
judged. A simultaneous constant outflow reflects the loss of representation, leading to
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Embodied Time 509
typical responses in psychophysical tasks that are indicative of subjective shortening of
stored duration over time.
Regarding the neuroanatomical question of which brain areas are dominantly involved
in prospective duration judgments, a number of candidate brain sites have been identified
and discussed together with assumed functional properties; for example, coincidence detec-
tion mechanisms using oscillatory signals in cortico-striatal circuits ( Matell & Meck, 2004 );
generalized magnitude processing for time, space, and number in the right posterior parietal
cortex ( Bueti & Walsh, 2009 ); event timing in the cerebellum ( Ivry et al., 2002 ); and working
memory – related integration in the right prefrontal cortex ( Lewis & Miall, 2006 ). Alterna-
tively, it has been proposed that if neural networks possess intrinsic temporal-processing
properties, many brain areas would contribute to the perception of time, depending on the
modality and the type of task. The perception of time would not be related to a central
clock, but time-dependent neural changes such as short-term synaptic plasticity would
define subjective duration. In the state-dependent network model, the experience of dura-
tion would result as an emergent property from specific stimulus- and modality-related
processes ( Buonomano, Bramen, & Khodadadifar, 2009 ). This is in line with the notion put
forward in the two-step model by van Wassenhove (2009), in which (1) automatic processes
of the brain that have specific temporal properties (but do not lead to conscious perception
of time per se) (2) are read out as abstract representations during an attention based re-
encoding process, which in turn leads to an explicit sense of duration.
A number of reasons can be identified to explain why it is so difficult to find an agree-
ment on how and where in the brain time is processed (for a detailed discussion, see Witt-
mann, 2009 ). One way to reduce the apparent variance of theories is to assign different time
scales to different temporal processing mechanisms in the brain ( P ö ppel, 1997 , 2009 ;
Gibbon et al. 1997 ). It is unlikely that all durations, ranging from tens of milliseconds to
seconds and minutes, would be under the control of the same process.
2
For example, empiri-
cal evidence suggests that state-dependent networks might only be responsible for the
encoding of durations not exceeding 300 ms ( Buonomano et al., 2009 ). A similar time range
of integration for intervals of 200 to 300 ms has been proposed for sensorimotor processing
( Wittmann, von Steinb ü chel, & Szelag, 2001 ) and for auditory-visual integration ( van Was-
senhove, Grant, & Poeppel, 2007 ). Additional evidence comes from a meta-analysis of
neuroimaging data suggesting the existence of two distinct neural timing systems: an auto-
matic timing system for shorter intervals up to approximately one second, which recruits
motor systems of the brain (supplementary motor area, basal ganglia, cerebellum), and a
more cognitively controlled system for time intervals with durations up to a few seconds
(the maximum range of most neuroimaging studies) related to right prefrontal and parietal
cortical areas ( Lewis & Miall, 2003 ). In another line of research, it has repeatedly been argued
that sensorimotor processing of temporal intervals up to 2 to 3 seconds is governed by dif-
ferent mechanisms than intervals exceeding this approximate time limit (for overviews, see
P ö ppel, 1978 , 1997 ; Fraisse, 1984 ; Szelag et al., 2004 ); that is, an integration mechanism of
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510 Marc Wittmann
2 to 3 seconds duration is a prerequisite for temporally structuring perception and action.
This integration mechanism will be discussed more thoroughly below.
Findings across studies regarding the identification of different temporal processes for
different time scales are not unequivocal, since “ break points ” in performance on time
perception tasks are not always detected, or they are dependent on the specifics of the task
and modality ( Noulhiane, Pouthas, & Samson, 2008 ; Lewis & Miall, 2009 ). In summary, the
core neural substrates and the processes accounting for the encoding of duration on differ-
ent time scales, which form a timekeeping mechanism, are still debated.
25.2 Body Signals, Feelings, and Time
The experience of time can be painful. When we are bored, we have the impression that
time passes too slowly. We feel “ trapped ” in time. Impulsive individuals, when they are not
able to act on their impulsive urges, are even more likely to feel trapped in time and over-
estimate presented time intervals considerably ( Wittmann & Paulus, 2008 ). The perception
of time is intimately tied to our emotional states. In periods of mental distress such as
depressed mood or anxiety, the passage of time slows down and subjective duration expands
(Bschor et al., 2004; Wittmann et al., 2006b ). The absence of a stimulating environment
and the feeling of meaninglessness both can manifest themselves in a state of distress and
an existential vacuum that leads to the impression of time passing too slowly.
In laboratory experiments exploring the relationship between emotion and the experi-
ence of time, subjects overestimate the duration of highly unpleasant emotional stimuli
that last several hundred milliseconds to a few seconds ( Noulhiane et al., 2007 ; Droit-Volet
& Gil, 2009 ). Depending on induced arousal levels and emotional valence, under- or over-
estimations of duration can occur, paradoxical effects that are interpreted as indicative of
attention- or arousal-driven modulations of perception. The experiences of time and emotion
are both embodied. An overestimation of duration of presented emotional faces is only
detected when an observer can spontaneously imitate perceived facial expressions. When
subjects are requested to hold a pen in their mouth while perceiving the stimuli and thus
cannot mimic the faces, relative overestimation of duration does not occur ( Effron et al.,
2006 ). A temporal limit of affective states on time perception seems to exist, since only
durations filled with emotional content up to approximately 3 seconds are overestimated;
longer emotional stimuli are not overestimated as compared with more neutral stimuli
( Noulhiane et al., 2007 ).
Emotions are inseparable from the physiological condition of the body. Bodily signals
and visceral and somatosensory feedback from the peripheral nervous system enact subjec-
tive feelings from the body (such as thirst, itch, touch, temperature, visceral sensations) as
well as emotional feelings — the latter through integration with contextual information
( Damasio, 1999 ). The insular cortex of primates is considered the primary interoceptive
cortex, the receptive area for physiological states of the body ( Craig, 2002 ; Critchley et al.,
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Embodied Time 511
2004 ). Conscious awareness of complex feeling states and the self is based on a posterior-
to-mid-to-anterior progression of bodily representations in the insula, in a progressive
integration with cognitive and motivational information that culminates in the anterior
insula ( Craig, 2009a ; Singer, Critchley, & Preuschoff, 2009 ). These processes enable a feeling
for the homeostatic condition of the body and the self, the material me , expressed as imme-
diate needs and desires, which guide decision making and initiate behavior. According
to Craig (2009b) , the anterior insula builds a unified meta-representation of homeostatic
feelings that constitutes the experienced self at one moment. A succession of meta-
representations of the self across time provides a continuity of subjective awareness, a series
of elementary emotional moments. Moreover, the experience of time would be created by
these successive moments of self-realization, informed by the body. Generally speaking, our
experience of time is related to the temporal integration of emotional and visceral processes
linked to the interoceptive system.
In a recent study employing fMRI, time-activity curves of neural activation during an
auditory duration-reproduction task showed that bilateral dorsal parts of the posterior insula
built up activation when individuals were presented with 9 and 18 second tone intervals
( Wittmann et al., 2010a ). Since the build-up of neuronal activation peaked at the end of
the encoding interval, this neural signature was interpreted as an accumulator-type activity
used to encode duration. In the reproduction interval, where subjects had to stop the tone
when they felt it had reached the length of the encoding interval, similar time-activity
curves that peaked shortly before the button press were detected in the bilateral anterior
insula and frontal cortex. Neurophysiological studies in animals have shown the relation
of increasing neuronal activity, interpreted as a temporal integration function, with the
encoding and production of shorter intervals ( Durstewitz, 2003 ; Reutimann et al., 2004 ).
Because of the close connection between the dorsal posterior insula and ascending body
signals, it was suggested that the accumulation of physiological changes in body states
encodes subjective duration ( Wittmann et al., 2010a ). Once a representation of duration
has been established, the anterior insula and areas of the frontal cortex get engaged in the
reproduction phase, potentially requiring a stronger awareness of actual duration due to
motor demands and decision processes.
The idea expressed here is that physiological changes form an internal signal to encode
the passage of time and the duration of external events ( Craig, 2009b ; Wittmann, 2009 ).
The ascending pathways to the insular cortex signal the ongoing status of the body and
could be used as a timekeeping system when we transiently focus our attention to time and
estimate duration. Similar to the aforementioned pacemaker-accumulator model, the number
and rate of accumulated body signals over a given time span could define duration. When
attending to time, a neural system in the brain transiently taps into the ongoing interocep-
tive signaling and accumulates this bodily information over the given time span. This sketch
of a model would also be in line with empirical findings showing that increased attention
to time as well as increased arousal levels lead to longer estimates of duration. In both cases,
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512 Marc Wittmann
more bodily signals would be registered in an assumed temporal integrator. Complementing
findings of the strong association between time and embodied emotion ( Droit-Volet & Gil,
2009 ), evidence of a direct relationship between body temperature and the estimation of
time supports this idea. Individuals with increased body temperature typically overestimate
duration. A higher arousal level with higher body temperature leads to the production of
shorter time intervals, which is interpreted as resulting from a higher pacemaker rate
( Wearden & Penton-Voak, 1995 ). Similarly, the circadian fluctuations in normal body tem-
perature correlate negatively with the length of produced time intervals in the seconds
range; the higher the temperature, the shorter the intervals produced ( Aschoff, 1998 ).
Ultimately, one has to ask what we refer to by the expression attention to time . Time is
not a property of the external world that we could attend to. Time is not perceived in the
outside world, but, according to this idea, through the inner sense, the material substrate
of the self. Many thinkers have related the experience of time to the experience of a self
that unfolds in time; that is, the feeling of a self is only possible as an entity over time.
Hartocollis (1983 , 17) summarizes this philosophical tradition as follows: “ Inner time and
duration is virtually indistinguishable from the awareness of the self, the experience of the
self as an enduring, unitary entity that is constantly becoming. ” Modern neurobiology has
contributed knowledge of the neuroanatomical and neurophysiological substrates related
to the awareness of a material self ( Craig, 2009a ). The bodily self, the continuous visceral
and proprioceptive input from the body, which is a basis for our mental self, is the functional
anchor of phenomenal experience ( Metzinger, 2008 ). Subjective time emerges through (or
is bound to) the existence of the self across time as an enduring and embodied entity.
25.3 Time Consciousness, the Present Moment, and the Self
Phenomenal analyses of time experience by Edmund Husserl (1928) or William James (1890)
discerned two complementary aspects of temporality. Subjective time is described as a con-
tinuous flow and with the feeling of a present. Events that have a certain duration and are
experienced constantly slip into the past. The flow constitutes itself through an event that
is anticipated, then experienced, and later remembered. Nevertheless, and paradoxically, we
simultaneously seem to feel the unity of the present moment, or nowness, as a basic property
of consciousness that distinguishes past and future and contains the qualitative (phenom-
enal) character of subjective experience ( Varela, 1999 ; Lloyd, 2004; Franck & Atmanspacher,
2009 ).
The experience of a present moment seems a convincing intuition, and it is comple-
mented by many empirical findings pointing to the existence of discrete windows or pro-
cessing epochs that fuse successive events into a unitary experience ( P ö ppel, 1978 ; Ruhnau,
1995 ). Several temporal thresholds of perception in the subsecond range (e.g., at 30 ms
and 300 ms) have been determined that are related to mechanisms integrating sensory
information ( Poeppel, 2003 ; Ulbrich et al., 2009 ; Wackermann, 2007 ). These thresholds are
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Embodied Time 513
indicative of elementary temporal building blocks of perception, because below such a
temporal threshold a succession of events, their temporal order, is not perceived. In several
different conceptualizations, these elementary units have been termed subjective time
quanta, perceptual moments, or snapshots of experience ( Varela, 1999 ; van Wassenhove,
2009 ). Yet one temporal mechanism seems to exist that integrates these successive units
into a perceptual gestalt with a duration of approximately 2 to 3 seconds ( P ö ppel, 1978 ;
1997 ; Fraisse, 1984 ). We do not perceive the world as a sequence of individual events, but
as a temporally integrated whole. Music and language are only conceivable as consisting
of larger units, melodies and phrases, which interconnect individual musical and linguistic
elements (Wittmann & P ö ppel, 1999). Since this temporal segmentation has been reported
in many qualitatively different experiments and settings in perception and movement
control, these findings have led to the suggestion that a universal mechanism in the brain
exists that creates temporal windows within which conscious activity is implemented
( P ö ppel, 2009 ). This temporal integration mechanism in the range of 2 to 3 seconds pro-
vides a logistical basis for conscious representation and for the phenomenal present, the
feeling of nowness .
However, it has been argued that the existence of temporal integration in the brain does
not necessarily entail a uniquely distinguished present; that is, events are perceived at
present, experiences are confined to the present, but the present is not experienced — being
present is not a phenomenal property of experience ( Callender, 2008 ). In other words, evi-
dence for the discreteness of temporal processing does not necessarily entail the existence
of discreteness in the subjective experience of time ( van Wassenhove, 2009 ). Moreover, there
are many conceptual pitfalls concerning the notion of a distinct phenomenal present,
notably how to conceive of an experiential connectedness (a phenomenal continuity) across
successive presents ( Dainton, 2009 ). In more general terms, there is a puzzle of how we can
have the experience of a continuous flow of time when we process the world through indi-
vidual snapshots ( Kelly, 2005 ). Even under the assumption that several static snapshots are
integrated to form experiential units of a felt presence with 2 to 3 second duration, which
bind individual moments in a higher-order unit, the problem remains how these individual
phenomenal nows are processed to generate the experience of continuity of perception and
the flow of time. Dainton (2009) provides a thorough discussion of several conceptual
models that aim at resolving this issue.
Our experience is not temporally punctual, a static snapshot, a durationless instant in
time. Our experience is embedded in a temporal field; that is, the content of experience is
always extended through time reaching both into the past and into the future (Lloyd, 2004;
Kiverstein, 2009 ). Experiences intrinsically possess a quantifiable limit of extension. When
listening to a metronome, which produces a train of beats with regular interstimulus inter-
vals, perceptual units are formed, such as that an accent on every other or every third beat
is perceived (1 – 2, 1 – 2 or 1-2-3, 1-2-3). This temporal grouping is a mental construct, because
physically speaking there is no discrete structure. The duration of these perceptual units
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514 Marc Wittmann
varies with the speed of the metronome, but has a lower limit of around 250 ms and an
upper limit of approximately 2 seconds (Szelag et al. 1996; London, 2002 ). If interbeat
intervals are shorter than the lower limit, the perceived train of beats is too fast and subjec-
tive accentuation is no longer possible. If interbeat intervals exceed the upper limit (i.e.,
the beat is too slow), we perceive individual events that are subjectively not related with
each other. Similarly, the ability to synchronize one ’ s own movements (finger taps) to a
regular beat is only possible with interstimulus and respective intertap intervals above 250
ms ( Peters, 1989 ). Effortless and automatic synchronization breaks down with interbeat
intervals longer than 2 seconds ( Mates et al., 1994 ). These limits of beat perception and
subjective rhythmization are taken as paradigmatic examples of an automatic integration
process that defines the present moment in experience ( P ö ppel, 2009 ).
Ultimately, phenomenal consciousness is the generation of a world that is present: that
is, it is the generation of an island of presence in the continuous flow of time, a window
of presence concerned with what is happening right now ( Metzinger, 2004 ; Revonsuo,
2006 ). To have conscious experiences implies “ that there is something it is like to be that
organism — something it is like for that organism ” ( Nagel, 1974 ). Conscious states have a
first-person mode of givenness , an experience inherently given to me; phenomenal experience
is mine ( Metzinger, 2008 ; Kiverstein, 2009 ). This quality of mineness in experience thus
includes a minimal sense of self. An object x that I perceive appears to me and, therefore,
includes a basic form of (pre-reflective) self-consciousness ( Zahavi, 2005 ). Moreover, I can
be self-aware that I am perceiving object x , and I can be self-reflective — that is, conscious
that I am having certain experiences. As stated above, complex experiences are per definitio-
nem temporally extended. The temporal property of any experience, its perceived duration,
is a combination of memory of the past moments of an ongoing event, present awareness
of the event, and anticipation of the further duration of that event (in Husserl ’ s [1928]
terms: retention , impression , protention ). In other words, the experienced present of an event
always carries the event ’ s history and possible future ( Lloyd, 2002 ). This is an implicit tem-
poral structure of any conscious experience. It has been argued that this awareness of
ongoing experience, with its tripartite structure, enables self-reflective consciousness ( Kiver-
stein, 2009 ). I become aware of what is happening now to me through memory of what
happened (to me) and expectations of what might happen (to me). Only through this tem-
poral structure of consciousness can the realization of a self emerge. According to Kiver-
stein ’ s (2009) idea, time consciousness and the experience of a self are manifestations of the
same underlying process.
3
In other words, the present experience is a stage where the self
emerges through the retentional and protentional part of an experience, which reflects what
happened to me and what might come about for me.
As discussed in the previous chapter, philosophical insight has long assumed a connec-
tion between the perception of time and the self. Moreover, in the search for the neural
basis of time experience, self-referential processes have been implicated ( Craig, 2009b ;
Wittmann, 2009 ). The insular cortex of primates has been identified as the primary recep-
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Embodied Time 515
tive area for sensory activity representing the physiological condition of the body, and re-
representations of this homeostatic afferent activity have been proposed to provide the basis
for self-awareness ( Craig, 2002 , 2009a ). In this model of consciousness, the anterior insula
creates a series of emotional moments across time. It has been suggested that this continu-
ous processing from moment to moment that establishes our capacity to experience the self
advances with a frame rate of ~8 Hz; thus, the temporal building blocks of perception would
lie in the range of ca. 125 ms ( Picard & Craig, 2009 ). Fusing these lines of research, one
could argue that the individual processing units or building blocks are integrated to form
the present moment of conscious experience with an approximate duration of 2 to 3 seconds
( P ö ppel, 2009 ) as well as integrated as mental presence within the working-memory span of
multiple seconds duration (Wittmann, 2011).
In the context of the tripartite structure of time, analyses of functional neuroimaging
data support the view that time consciousness — that is, the experience of the flow of events
and of nowness — can be mapped onto brain function ( Lloyd, 2002 ). The proposal made here
is that empirical evidence points to the insular cortex as the neural basis of time conscious-
ness. The insula is dominantly activated when the duration of a continuous tone of several
seconds ’ duration has to be timed ( Wittmann et al., 2010a ). To speak in the terminology of
the phenomenological approach, when perceiving a tone we are conscious of this experience
as having started a while ago, as continuing in the present and going on for some time
more; and we are not only conscious of the temporality of the tone but of its mode of
givenness (Lloyd, 2004; Kiverstein, 2009 ). Retention, primal impression, and protention are
continuously part of tone perception.
Moreover, through the specifics of the duration-reproduction task, it is perhaps possible
to assume a stronger part of retention during the encoding phase and a relatively stronger
part of protention during the reproduction phase. In the duration-reproduction study men-
tioned above (Wittmann et al., 2010a), participants were instructed to reproduce the dura-
tion of tones by pressing a key when they believed that a second comparison tone
(reproduction interval) had reached the length of a previously presented tone (encoding
interval; Wittmann et al., 2010a ). In the encoding phase, individuals do not yet know how
long the tone will last; in the reproduction phase, they have a representation of tone dura-
tion that is used to reproduce the length of the first tone. Time intervals of 9 and 18 seconds
had to be encoded and, therefore, necessitated the integration of several present moments
(retention), an integration that, according to the results, was related to the accumulation
of (posterior) insular cortex activation. Anticipation of duration (protention) comes rela-
tively stronger into play with an accumulation of activity in the reproduction phase of the
task, when individuals actively stop the second tone (the subject has to estimate when the
second tone has reached the length of the first tone). In this latter phase, an accumulation
of anterior insula and frontal cortex activation was recorded.
In a neuroimaging study on temporal decision making, in which individuals had to make
choices between monetary options with different delays that varied in the time range of
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516 Marc Wittmann
multiple seconds, the anterior insula (together with the striatum) was active during the
decision phase, when subjects had to take into account anticipated delays (Wittmann et al.
2010a). The anterior insula, along with the striatum, has repeatedly been identified with
the anticipation of rewards and the expectation and evaluation of upcoming events ( Lovero
et al., 2009 ). Therefore, the anterior insula has been hypothesized to generate a predictive
model that provides an individual with a signal of how she will feel ( Paulus & Stein, 2006 ).
The integration of the phenomenology and the neuroscience approaches provides us with
the sketch of a model on how and where time consciousness is implemented in the brain,
namely through insular activity in a posterior-to-mid-to-anterior progression that culmi-
nates in the anterior insula ( Craig, 2009b ). In cognitive neuroscience, the anterior insula
(as well as the striatum) has long been identified as associated with the anticipation of
rewards and the expectation of events. The insular cortex has also been implicated in the
explicit perception of time. This brain structure thus seems to be a prime candidate for the
neural correlates of time consciousness.
25.4 Concluding Remarks
The ideas brought forward are rather speculative. I have put together several lines of research
in neuroscience and psychology on time perception and the present moment and related
them to the philosophical concept of time consciousness. First, there is the notion of the
emotional moment, which provides the basis for the experience of the mental and bodily self
and of time ( Craig, 2009a , 2009b ), and which is identified with the insular cortex as locus
of control. It is suggested that the emotional moment as conceptualized by Craig (2009a ,
2009b ) forms elementary building blocks which — following the concept of P ö ppel (1997 ,
2009 ) — are integrated by a higher-order mechanism with a range of 2 to 3 seconds that
defines the present moment or the feeling of nowness . Moreover, working memory which
integrates events over multiple seconds forms a further higher-order mechanism for creating
mental presence (Wittmann 2011). Empirical evidence is provided that links the insular
cortex to implicit temporal mechanisms such as the anticipation of events as well as explicit
judgments of time. Moreover, the phenomenological analysis of the temporal structure of
conscious experience is related to the abovementioned theoretical and empirical approaches
in neuroscience.
The following points summarize the line of thought presented here.
(i) The bodily self and time perception. Neural signals from the body as integrated in the
insular cortex constitute the material me, and they are the basis for the representation of a
self ( Craig, 2009a ). This ongoing creation of a self over time could function as a measure
of time by matching the duration of external events with interoceptive afferent activity.
Subjective time, the experience of duration, is generated through the existence of the self
across time.
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Embodied Time 517
(ii) Integration of successive moments into the extended present moment. Phenomenologi-
cal analysis points to two complementary aspects of time consciousness, namely the flow
of time and the present moment . In the conceptualization of P ö ppel (2009), a temporal inte-
gration mechanism binds elementary perceptual units into a perceptual gestalt of 2 to 3
second duration, and provides the basis for the phenomenal (conscious) present.
(iii) Philosophical inquiry links time consciousness with self awareness. What is experienced
at the present moment reaches into the future (the expectation of what is about to occur)
and past (the awareness that an experience has been going on for some time). Conscious
experience includes a minimal sense of self because an experience is inherently given to the
perceiver as extended through time. That is, self-reflective consciousness might emerge
through the temporal structure of conscious experience. Time consciousness and the self
are determined by the same underlying process.
(iv) The insula as primary interoceptive cortex. Empirical evidence points to the insular
cortex as the neural basis of the phenomenological concept of time consciousness; that is,
the experience of the present moment, which involves what is just passed and what is about
to occur. It has been linked to the perception of time and conscious awareness ( Craig, 2009b ).
The integration of all these concepts to some extent has to remain a daring undertaking.
For example, the equalization of protention with mechanisms of anticipation and expecta-
tion is questionable. Usually, protention is seen as an experiential part of the present
moment, spanning several seconds, and related to the minimal self. The minimal self refers
to the immediate experience of a self and can be discerned from the narrative self that is
made up of the various stories we tell about ourselves ( Gallagher, 2000 ). There are several
temporal levels of prediction concerned with one ’ s life that can span a few seconds to, in
principle, decades. Typical investigations that show anterior insula involvement in the
expectation of rewards lie in the seconds to minutes range ( Wittmann et al., 2010b ). That
is, it is debatable whether all these phenomena fall into the same category. In fact, it has
been argued that protention in Husserl ’ s sense refers more to openness to what is about to
happen than to a kind of expectation or concrete prediction ( Varela, 1999 ). Besides, although
I have concentrated on theoretical assumptions and empirical evidence concerning the
insular cortex as locus of control for the perception of time and time consciousness, an
elaborate model of the relation between time, the self, and consciousness will integrate a
wider range of brain structures; that is, mesial brain regions of the so-called “ default mode
network ” are also implicated in the perception of time and self-referential processing ( Moril-
lon, Kell, & Giraud, 2009 ; Wittmann et al., 2010c ).
Ultimately, the basic question as to how and where time is processed in the brain remains
unresolved. In contrast to most other fields of expertise in the cognitive neurosciences
concerning a fundamental aspect of our experience, there is no consensus among researchers
on psychological or neurophysiological mechanisms ( Wittmann & van Wassenhove, 2009 ).
At this stage, a speculative element in conceptualizing cannot do any damage; however,
empirical evidence will have to be collected to substantiate these ideas.
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518 Marc Wittmann
Acknowledgments
The author ’ s research was supported by Bundesministerium f ü r Bildung und Forschung
Germany, the Max Kade Foundation, the National Institute of Drug Abuse, and the Kavli
Institute for Brain and Mind. I am indebted to Jan Churan for continuous support in tech-
nical issues and to Virginie van Wassenhove for many discussions on the matter of time
perception. I would like to thank Ji
ř í Wackermann, A.D. (Bud) Craig, and Julian Kiverstein
for many helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript.
Notes
1. Note that in cognitive models of time perception, prospective and retrospective time perception is
distinguished ( Zakay & Block, 1997 ). Prospective time perception (also referred to as timing-with-a-
timer) is concerned with the phenomenon under discussion in this paper: the perception of duration
as presently experienced. In retrospective time perception (also referred to as timing-without-a-timer),
duration is reconstructed from memory. The more changes we perceived during a certain time span —
which are stored in memory and later retrieved — the longer the duration is subjectively experienced in
retrospect ( Flaherty, Freidin, & Sautu, 2005 ; Bailey & Areni, 2006 ). Whereas prospective time perception
only applies to intervals up to a few minutes (an assumed prospective timing mechanism has a limit
of temporal integration), retrospective time perception can refer to an individual ’ s lifetime ( Wittmann
& Lehnhoff, 2005 ).
2. The upper limit of integration for prospective time perception mechanism might be bound to the
duration of a few minutes. Neurological patients who suffer from anterograde amnesia are reported to
live within a moving temporal window of their short-term memory; i.e., events cannot be recalled after
a few minutes because they are not stored in long-term memory ( Damasio, 1999 ). This time span could
also represent the limit of integration for prospective time perception. An upper limit also follows from
duration-reproduction experiments, in which a decreasing steepness of duration reproduction with
increasing intervals suggests an ultimate temporal horizon ( Wackermann, 2007 ).
3. As an aside: drug-induced altered states of consciousness typically are associated with a distortion
in the experience of time (Wittmann et al. 2007). In extreme drug-induced states, an experienced
annihilation of self-identity is accompanied by a feeling of atemporality ( Shanon, 2001 ).
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