On subjective time

Perhaps one of the most remarkable, and under appreciated, achievements of the human brain is our capacity to be aware of the subjective time in which we exist. Although we do not think much about this sense of time, we make use of it whenever we remember something that happened to us in the past or imagine something that might happen to us in the future. In what follows, I (i) define subjective time, (ii) explicate how we might begin to understand the capacity to be aware of subjective time, also known as “chronesthesia” [a concept whose name is derived from the Greek words Chronos (time) and Aisthesis (to feel) (Tulving, 2002)], and (iii) speculate about the relation of subjective time to the human brain.