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In a previous presentation (Gifford, 1971) I attempted to connect: (1) the origins of time perception in the newborn infant's adaptation to the biological rhythms of the 24-hour solar day; (2) experiences from everyday life in which the subjective duration of time is altered, including both the periodic need for escape from the 24-hour cycle (in weekends, vacations, drug states, and religious ecstasies) and reactions to imposed changes in temporal landmarks (jet lag, solitary confinement, and experimental sensory deprivation); and (3) the familiar phenomenon of time passing more quickly with advancing age, which is usually associated with a gradual reduction in the variety and intensity of sensory stimulation. The apparent acceleration in the passage of time in old age was interpreted as a possible adaptation to the involutional phase of life. Changes in time perception with aging were discussed in terms of Freud's theory of the life and death instincts, in which both a predetermined life span and the aging process itself were considered innate tendencies of the biological organism.
For various reasons my efforts to connect these phenomena were not successful, and the manuscript remained an incomplete and unpublished torso. As a collection of raw data from widely scattered fields, uneven in quality and reliability, it represented little attempt at assimilation and synthesis. I came to see that the theoretical connections between infancy and old age were encumbered by two areas of investigation that are not necessarily related to the subjective duration of time. The experimental studies on the perception of short time intervals may well be unrelated to the sense of time over longer periods (days, years, even decades). The possible metabolic, hormonal, and physiologic substrates for time