Abstract

Time consciousness may elicit different concepts for each of us: some may imagine a directional flow mapping life events, others may think of the time needed to accomplish a task, or hear the musical tempo pacing their morning jogs. While we are all experts in experiencing time, introspection provides little intuition regarding the mechanisms supporting psychological time. Being conscious of time is to render intelligible the non-stationarities of brain activity with respect to its homeostatic time bases: specifically, while clocking mechanisms provide operational timescales for brain computations, they do not count time per se; rather, they implement internal time metrics for the representation of events in the mind. To understand a conscious mind, using the brain's internal time metrics -- as opposed to a physical time arrow -- is essential. Still, it remains insufficient to provide insights on how the time dimension of becomes conscious content in the human mind.