An important feature of conscious experience is the subjectivity of time. Even within short durations, ranging from milliseconds to a few seconds, time slows down in threatening situations, while it compresses during familiar tasks. Do these temporal distortions have a function? In this article, I argue that they do. Because the perceived duration of events is often in line with what seems adaptive, subjective time is an efficiency amplifier for agency, enhancing temporal control, learning and prediction. Time illusion and other perceptual distortions, then, are not system malfunctions or epiphenomena, but demonstrations of the system’s ability to adapt to different conditions and construct a subjectively meaningful reality that enhances the organism’s potential for action. By analysing changes in temporal experiences through phylogeny, we can understand whether other animals beyond humans possess experience of the temporal structure of the world as a requirement for predicting, responding to and evaluating interactions between self and the world. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary functions of consciousness’.
Antonella Tramacere (2025) studied this question.