An update on time1

The brief history of this panel was not free of the vicissitudes of time. It was originally intended to take place in another place and at another time. This unpredictable change had as a consequence the loss of two of the presenters originally scheduled to participate who, now, were unable to attend. Thus, change and loss—two indissociable parameters of time—have indelibly marked our meeting. An update on time signifies an attempt to recapture time gone by, time that left us behind, or to reappropriate time left behind, time forever lost. Proustian concerns, however, reappear today unveiled, their electronic infrastructure provocatively scintillating on the neuroscientist's monitor, hence the felicitous presence of a research neuroscientist amongst us.

Kafka opened the session by pointing to the need for a fresh look on time after recent developments in related disciplines. Our common-sense understanding of time has been challenged by revolutions in physics. There are psychoanalytic theorists today who stress the centrality of the concept of indeterminacy (Heisenberg) and who consider chaos theory as the basic science of psychoanalysis. In neurobiology, there is a new focus on time because discoveries of rhythmic integration of different regions of the brain have major implications for our understanding of perception and memory. Within psychoanalysis itself there is a renewed interest in time as the result, among others, of a re-examination of Freud's Nachträglichkeit. Kafka, then, introduced the presenters and indicated that the orienting themes in our panel would be uncertainty and time, considerations relating to the origins of our sense of time, pathologies of time sense and their neurological substrate.

The first paper, entitled ‘Is time real? Thoughts on the origin of our sense of time’, was presented by Konstantinos Arvanitakis. The author began by referring to a scene in Book 13 of The Odyssey in which, after 20 long years of nostalgic yearning for his return