How Do Animals Perceive Time?
I’m writing this on a Tuesday, at 2:26 p.m. Minutes ago, it was 9 a.m., or so it feels; back then, I was enjoying the delusion, refreshed each morning, that I’d accomplish what I needed to do today. I still might there are hours left in the workday but I’m wiser than I was when I woke up five hours ago: it’ll be 7pm soon, the day definitively in tatters. Another of Time’s routine beatdowns.
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One advantage of being a cat, or a stingray, is not having to think about time this way (and, by extension, death). But are they entirely free from the temporal plane? Do they perceive it in any way? Do some species perceive it more acutely than others? For this week’s Giz Asks, we reached out to a number of experts to find out.