The experienced speed of the passage of time is not constant as time can seem to fly or slow down depending on the circumstances we are in. Anecdotally accidents and other frightening events are extreme examples of the latter; people who have survived accidents often report altered phenomenology including how everything appeared to happen in slow motion. While the experienced phenomenology has been investigated, there are no explanations about how one can have these experiences. Instead, the only recently discussed explanation suggests that the anecdotal phenomenology is due to memory effects and hence not really experienced during the accidents. The purpose of this article is (i) to reintroduce the currently forgotten comprehensively altered phenomenology that some people experience during the accidents, (ii) to explain why the recent experiments fail to address the issue at hand, and (iii) to suggest a new framework to explain what happens when people report having experiences of time slowing down in these cases. According to the suggested framework, our cognitive processes become rapidly enhanced. As a result, the relation between the temporal properties of events in the external world and in internal states becomes distorted with the consequence of external world appearing to slow down. That is, the presented solution is a realist one in a sense that it maintains that sometimes people really do have experiences of time slowing down.

Individuals with ASD have abnormal motor and perceptual functions that do not currently form diagnostic criteria of ASD, but nevertheless may affect everyday behaviour. Temporal processing seems to be one of such non-diagnostic yet impaired domains, although the lack of systematic studies testing different aspects of timing in the same sample of participants prevents a conclusive assessment of whether there is a generalized temporal deficit in ASD associated with diagnostic symptoms. 17 children diagnosed with ASD and 18 typically developing age- and IQ-matched controls carried out a set of motor and perceptual timing tasks: free tapping, simultaneity judgment, auditory duration discrimination, and verbal duration estimation. Parents of participants filled in a questionnaire assessing the sense and management of time. Children with ASD showed faster and more variable free tapping than controls. Auditory duration discrimination thresholds were higher in the ASD group than controls in a sub-second version of the task, while there were no group differences in a supra-second discrimination of intervals. Children with ASD showed more variable thresholds of simultaneity judgment, and they received lower parental scores for their sense and management of time. No group differences were observed in the verbal duration estimation task in the minute-range. Different timing functions were correlated in the ASD group but not among controls, whilst several timing measures correlated with ASD symptoms. We conclude that children with ASD show a broad range of abnormalities in temporal processing tasks including motor timing, perceptual timing, and temporal perspective.

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Philosophers have usually approached the concept of timing of experiences by addressing the question how the experiences of temporal phenomena can be explained. As a result, the issue of timing has been addressed in two different ways. The first, similar to the questions posed in sciences, concerns the relationship between the experienced time of events and the objective time of events. The second approach is more specific to philosophers' debates, and concerns the phenomenology of experiences: how is the apparent temporal structure of experiences constituted? In regard to both questions, this article shows why and how philosophers' views differ from those held by most scientists. To conclude, I present a combination of views that is not only compatible with that of scientists, but also addresses the problems that engage philosophers.

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