The psychology of plain old everyday psychological time, the real, non-science-fictional stuff passing us by is the subject of British science journalist Claudia Hammond’s lively book Time Warped: Unlocking the Mysteries of Time Perception. It’s a book about mental apparatus. How do we know a moment has passed? Hammond’s best bet is that we use the brain’s dopamine system along with a few other brain components. “We are creating our own perception of time,” she writes, “based on the neuronal activity in our brains with input from the physiological symptoms of our bodies.” The answer is not in our stars but in “the cerebellum, the basal ganglia, the frontal lobe and the anterior insular cortex.”
