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Philip K. Dick was a seminal science fiction author with much interest in theological and philosophical questions. This essay is interested in what Dick’s novel Counter-Clock World expresses about two themes: “time and eternity” along with “omniscience”. The purpose is to come closer to an understanding of the theology expressed in the novel, in relation to the theology of Augustine and Eriugene, who are two of the theologians mentioned in the novel. In the analysis a hybrid text-centered method of hermeneutics is used with some regards to the authors point of view, a method inspired by professor of literature Torsten Pettersson.  The result of the analysis shows that the resurrection described in the novel is central in the matter of time perception. Augustine’s presentism is clear. The characters have been part of eternity and God while being dead, which is related to Eriugene’s thought about the close relationship between the created and the uncreated. The contemplative knowledge of God is recurrent. The resurrected have received a part of God’s secret and by extension his omniscience. The head character, the anarch Thomas Peak, is a clear example of this. Moreover, Augustine’s thought of the divine gaze is recurrent.  The essay argues that academic scholars can find inspiration from fiction. Fiction authors have the possibility to explore theological questions in a way that scholars may have a hard time doing. This because there are neither requirements for coherence in fiction nor a need for responsibility in terms of the consequences of the concepts being explored. This is a creativity that can give fuel to a stagnated theology.

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This work examines the effect of participants' gender and handedness on the perception of short intervals of time. The time estimation task consisted of an empty production procedure with forty trials at each of four intervals of one, three, seven, and twenty seconds. The four target intervals represent a natural logarithmic progression and a series that bracket important temporal thresholds. The order of presentation of those intervals was randomized across participants but yoked across the sexes in each of the respective dominant hand groups. The two between-subject factors, with two levels each, were sex and handedness. Participants produced forty estimates at each of the required intervals, which was the first within-subject factor, estimated interval being the other. T-tests were conducted on the dependent measures, the time estimates in terms of their variability and their central tendency with respect to the target duration. If handedness plays a significant role in timing, this may indicate differences between hemispheric functioning as a possible causal mechanism. If there is cerebral asymmetry in time perception, namely if one hemisphere is more competent regarding time perception, accuracy in judging duration should be higher for the contralateral hand. The results of the present study indicated that there are no significant differences in performance between right-handed and left-handed participants, or between male and female participants, in the estimation of short intervals of time.

When formulating an estimate of event time, the human sensory system has been shown to possess a degree of perceptual flexibility. Specifically, the perceived relative timing of auditory and visual stimuli is, to some extent, a product of recent experience. It has been suggested that this form of sensory recalibration may be peculiar to the audiovisual domain. Here we investigate how adaptation to sensory asynchrony influences the perceived temporal order of audiovisual, audiotactile and visuotactile stimulus pairs. Our data show that a brief period of repeated exposure to asynchrony in any of these sensory pairings results in marked changes in subsequent temporal order judgments: the point of perceived simultaneity shifts toward the level of adaptation asynchrony. We find that the size and nature of this shift is very similar in all three pairings and that sensitivity to asynchrony is unaffected by the adaptation process. In light of these findings we suggest that a single supramodal mechanism may be responsible for the observed recalibration of multisensory perceived time.

No / Our sensory systems face a daily barrage of auditory and visual signals whose arrival times form a wide range of audiovisual asynchronies. These temporal relationships constitute an important metric for the nervous system when surmising which signals originate from common external events. Internal consistency is known to be aided by sensory adaptation: repeated exposure to consistent asynchrony brings perceived arrival times closer to simultaneity. However, given the diverse nature of our audiovisual environment, functionally useful adaptation would need to be constrained to signals that were generated together. In the current study, we investigate the role of two potential constraining factors: spatial and contextual correspondence. By employing an experimental design that allows independent control of both factors, we show that observers are able to simultaneously adapt to two opposing temporal relationships, provided they are segregated in space. No such recalibration was observed when spatial segregation was replaced by contextual stimulus features (in this case, pitch and spatial frequency). These effects provide support for dedicated asynchrony mechanisms that interact with spatially selective mechanisms early in visual and auditory sensory pathways.

The task of deciding how long sensory events seem to last is one that the human nervous system appears to perform rapidly and, for sub-second intervals, seemingly without conscious effort. That these estimates can be performed within and between multiple sensory and motor domains suggest time perception forms one of the core, fundamental processes of our perception of the world around us. Given this significance, the current paucity in our understanding of how this process operates is surprising. One candidate mechanism for duration perception posits that duration may be mediated via a system of duration-selective 'channels', which are differentially activated depending on the match between afferent duration information and the channels' 'preferred' duration. However, this model awaits experimental validation. In the current study, we use the technique of sensory adaptation, and we present data that are well described by banks of duration channels that are limited in their bandwidth, sensory-specific, and appear to operate at a relatively early stage of visual and auditory sensory processing. Our results suggest that many of the computational principles the nervous system applies to coding visual spatial and auditory spectral information are common to its processing of temporal extent.

Yes / Accurate time perception is critical for a number of human behaviours, such as understanding speech and the appreciation of music. However, it remains unresolved whether sensory time perception is mediated by a central timing component regulating all senses, or by a set of distributed mechanisms, each dedicated to a single sensory modality and operating in a largely independent manner. To address this issue, we conducted a range of unimodal and cross-modal rate adaptation experiments, in order to establish the degree of specificity of classical after-effects of sensory adaptation. Adapting to a fast rate of sensory stimulation typically makes a moderate rate appear slower (repulsive after-effect), and vice versa. A central timing hypothesis predicts general transfer of adaptation effects across modalities, whilst distributed mechanisms predict a high degree of sensory selectivity. Rate perception was quantified by a method of temporal reproduction across all combinations of visual, auditory and tactile senses. Robust repulsive after-effects were observed in all unimodal rate conditions, but were not observed for any cross-modal pairings. Our results show that sensory timing abilities are adaptable but, crucially, that this change is modality-specific - an outcome that is consistent with a distributed sensory timing hypothesis.

Research suggests a relationship between time distortion and mental health disorders, and the present study sought to examine this proposition. Prior research suggests that negative emotions are associated with the slowing down of time. Because mental health disorder symptomology is associated with more negative emotions, it was predicted that negative emotions would mediate the relationship between mental health disorder symptomology and time distortion. A survey was administered to university students that contained measures of anxiety, depression, emotional experiences, and time perception. Mental health disorder symptomology was found to be related to negative emotions. However, negative emotions and mental health disorder symptomology were not related to time distortion. Thus, the proposed mediation model was not supported. The primary reason for these results likely lies in the challenges of measuring time distortion. Despite the lack of effects found in the present study, investigating this topic is crucial for understanding the perceptual experiences of those with mental health disorders.

The experiments described in this thesis use psychophysical techniques and human observers to investigate temporal processing in the millisecond range. The thesis contains five main sections. Introductory chapters provide a brief overview of the visual and auditory systems, before detailing our current understanding of duration processing. During the course of this review, several important questions are highlighted. The experiments detailed in Chapters 8-11 seek to address these questions using the psychophysical techniques outlined in Chapter 7. The results of these experiments increase our understanding of duration perception in several areas. Firstly, Experiments 1 and 2 (Chapter 8) highlight the role of low level stimulus features: even when equated for visibility stimuli of differing spatial frequency have different perceived durations. Secondly, a psychophysical hypothesis arising from the ¿duration channels¿ or ¿labelled lines¿ model of duration perception is given strong support by the adaptation experiments detailed in Chapter 9 and 10. Specifically, adaptation to durations of a fixed temporal extent induces repulsive duration aftereffects that are sensory specific and bandwidth limited around the adapted duration. Finally Chapter 11 describes the results of experiments designed to probe the processing hierarchy within duration perception by measuring the interdependency of illusions generated via duration adaptation and via multisensory cue combination. The results of these experiments demonstrate that duration adaptation is a relatively early component of temporal processing and is likely to be sub served by duration selective neurons situated in early sections of the visual and auditory systems.