You know, how when you where a kid time appeared to move so s.l.o.w.l.y?
I wonder if that happens with animals that live less then 20 years? Rats/mice rarely live past 3, dogs and cats usually live to their mid-teens (some cats go to their 20s).
Does it feel sped up to animals that can live 100+? Some species of turtles (one GalapagosTortoise lived to be 255) and Bowheadwhales can live to be 200.
Just something I wondered about.
I don’t think there’s much research support for the idea that most animals have any sense of the passage of time at all. AFAIK, what science we have on this issue tells us that for most critters in most circumstances the here and now is all they have.
Well, they have memories (even goldfish do, contrary to urban legend, and more primitive animals than that), and many animals clearly have at least some ability to plan for the future. However, I do not think we have have any idea, or any way to tell, how fast time goes for them subjectively. We do not really have any way to tell how fast time time is subjectively passing for other humans, except asking them, and even then they tend to give vague, metaphorical, and inconsistent answers. Often, when minutes and hours seem to go very slowly, the weeks, months and years seem to go very fast.
Besides time actually appearing to move faster there are a couple of other things:
adults usually fall into routine. I’ll bet if you did all the things you did as a kid, your days would seem incredibly full.
I have this theory that adults also gain the ability to turn off the dullness of routine.
But the OP is a damn good question.
Household dogs and cats certainly have some awareness of time – they know when to start demanding food!
But do they sense the passage of time? Very hard to tell. Dogs and cats seem pretty good at letting the hours go by. They’re superb at just snoozing the day away. They also get a lot of utility out of merely walking back and forth around the house.
Walking into the bedroom, sniffing at the laundry basket, and then wandering back into the living room appears to provide, for them, about the same overall satisfaction that I get out of an hour on the SDMB.
This is purely anecdotal on my part, but for the past several years, I was working second shift. I have two cats, and one of them was always nearby the door when it was time for me to get home. If I got home early, she would come running from wherever she was in the house, but wasn’t ready by the door.
I don’t know if she had an awareness of the passage of time, but it certainly seemed like she did.
Studies on dogs have determined that they sense when you are coming home when your “personal residual oder” in the house falls to a certain level, not that they sense time. They learn to associate “smell level X” with “master is coming home now”. I suspect it would be the same for cats.
Not aware of the passage of time maybe, but they sure do seem to have accurate internal clocks. My own dog is always waiting by the door, according to my wife, about an hour before I usually get home and seems awfully miffed if I’m late. Dogs must wonder why humans can’t stay on a freakin’ schedule!
My question is do dogs wish they had hands. Do they look at us eating and wish they could hold a spoon instead of having to push their face into their food.
If he is waiting an hour ahead of time how can you claim he seems to have an accurate clock? Years ago my wife worked as a nurse at a hospital 5 blocks away from the house. At first when she started working there I and the dog would walk to the hospital and walk her home, but she and I discussed and decided not to leave the kids alone while I made the walk. SO the next night I stayed sitting reading and Brutus came up op me at 10:55 and let me know it was time to go. I decided to let him out and he went to the hospital and waited for her to come out and walked her home. That was the routine ever after as long as she worked there, but he didn’t get up an hour ahead of time but right on the minute.
When their claws evolve into can openers, then they will rise up! :eek:
I’ve wondered if it’s that they see the sun’s shadows on the walls throughout the day and get ready for my hubby to come home, and beg for meals, based on how dark it’s getting. We notice they’re thrown off schedule when the time changes twice a year.
Anything that lives in the mountains experiences time as being faster than a creature at lower elevations, due to the effects of gravity on space-time.
Of course it is impossible to know what creatures unable to report their sensations experience or even if they have conscious experiences.
We do know that even insects as simple as the Drosophila have biological clocks. Even fungi do.
We also know that humans can have altered time perception in various neuropsychiatric condtions and as the result of particular brain injuries. And time “really does seem to slow down for athletes.”
The phenomenom described by the op is also something to note: it does seem that our perception of time is a function of the fraction it is of our past life - thus a year when I was five seemed as long to me as a decade does now that I am in my 50s.
It seems reasonable that IF a creature has a sentient experience that it experiences the passing of time, and there is no reason to believe that it experiences the passing of time the same as we do given that not all of us experience it consistently. It also seems reasonable to assume that an organism that lives fast (short lifetime and with great need to react quickly) would experience time differently than a very longlived species. Testing such? I don’t know how. But it has been the premise of several decent SF stories including creatures existing in the same space but on different clocks unaware of each other as sentient entities - the slow clocks experiencing the fast clocks as brief flickers of light and the fast clocks experiencing the slow clocks as stationary objects.
Research suggests that the perception of time is variable according to a creature’s metabolic rate. (the actual, very technical journal article can be read here)
Oh definitely life seems faster or slower, You know how they say dog years is 7 to our 1 year? Just like that.