Now/Specious Present/Psychological Present – Shale Yamada

Now, Specious Present, and Psychological Present are concepts used to describe the experience of the present moment, which is perceived as the current state of existence.

The Specious Present refers to the concept that our perception of the present has a certain duration. Thus, “now” is not a singular, instantaneous point but rather a span of time, encompassing the exact present, a very recent past, and the immediate future. This “now” forms the basis of our immediate conscious experience of time.

The Psychological Present is a term used similarly to describe the duration over which an individual’s immediate experiences and perceptions are integrated into a unified, continuous conscious experience. The distinction of the Psychological Present is the cutoff point of when memory becomes necessary for further consideration. During the psychological present, our experiences and perceptions seem to exist in a continuous and immediate field of awareness. Beyond this, they become part of the past, and we need to use memory to retrieve them.

There is no exact timeframe for the specious or psychological present, it can vary by individual, and is debated by researchers. On average, we take around three seconds to be the time interval of the perceived “now.” During this ‘window of the present,’ events and sensations are integrated and processed as a single, coherent experience. The idea of the three-second “now” is corroborated by the tendency of music and poetry to rely on a “3-second moment” for the listener that can be aligned into a continuous “stream of consciousness.” This allows us to integrate the current sensory input with the recent past that occurred just prior, and experience the piece as a flow, rather than a collection of words and sounds with no connection to each other other than the memory of which came first.

References:

Grondin, Simon. “Is Psychological Time Punctuated With Critical Durations?” The Perception of Time: Your Questions Answered, Routledge, Abingdon, Oxon, 2020.

Whittmann, Marc, and Erik Butler. “Felt Time.” MIT Press, 2017. Project MUSE http://muse.jhu.edu/book/46969.