Acknowledgments

My research at the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, began in October 2004 with a stipend from the Max Kade Foundation in New York, which enabled me to spend a year at the lab of the psychiatrist Martin Paulus. This contact was arranged by Franz Vollenweider, a psychiatrist at the “Burghölzli,” the Psychiatric University Clinic of Zurich, with whom I had conducted a research project on the effects of hallucinogens on temporal perception.

A new stage of research, based on many discussions with Martin Paulus and Alan Simmons, began in La Jolla, near San Diego. Given the structure of the German university system, my scientific career would have been over had the stipend not been granted. One year in San Diego turned into five. In the course of research conducted during this period, from 2004 to 2009, the thesis emerged that temporal experience depends on emotional and bodily states. We were able to show that bodily sense, emotions, and the sense of time are all closely tied to the activities of a structure in the brain, the insular cortex. I am indebted to Martin Paulus and Alan Simmons for support in performing and interpreting studies conducted by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging. Moreover, I received support for programming from Jan Churan. The success of my stay was assured by grants Martin Paulus and I obtained from two third-party sources. The National Institute of Health NIH/NIDA and the KAVLI Institute for Brain and Mind, San Diego, backed the project financially.

I was also able to develop my ideas about how the brain represents time through ongoing collaboration with Virginie van Wassenhove (then at the California Institute of Technology, now at the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit INSERM-CEA, Paris) and A. D. (Bud) Craig of the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix, Arizona. Bud Craig is the first researcher, drawing on understanding of the neuroanatomic and neurofunctional bases of bodily sense, to have advanced the thesis that the insular cortex is the decisive neural structure for the feeling of time.

My research on the phenomenon of time began earlier, first as a research assistant and then as a degree candidate working for Ernst Pöppel at the Institute of Medical Psychology at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Professor Pöppel, who oversaw my PhD in 1997 and my Habilitation in 2007, has always been a mentor.

From 2000 to 2004, I directed the research group “Time and Cognition” at the Generation Research Program, Bad Tölz, of the Ludwig Maximilian University. Martina Fink, Jan Churan, and Pamela Ulbrich were part of the team who developed test procedures and obtained funding for two projects from the Federal Ministry for Education and Research (Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung, BMBF). Two proposals submitted to the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) were rejected. During the same period, Tanja Vollmer and I also pursued another project: “Time Perception in Patients Near Death.” The study was conducted at Medical Clinic III at the Clinic Grosshadern and was financed by the Else Kröner-Fresenius Foundation.

Since October 2009, I have been employed at the Freiburg Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health (IGPP). Thanks go to Jiří Wackermann who invited me to come and work at the IGPP Freiburg, where I continue to focus on developing concepts of time perception and finding new fields of application. Important professional contacts and collaborators for the current studies include Karin Meissner (Institute of Medical Psychology) at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Niko Kohls (University of Applied Sciences, Coburg), Stefan Schmidt (University of Freiburg), and Anne Giersch of the Psychiatric University Clinic Strasbourg. In Freiburg I have been funded by two grants from the BIAL Foundation in Portugal as well as by the trinational neuroscience network NEUREX of the Upper Rhine Valley. I have also been supported by the European project COST ISCH Action TD0904 “Time in Mental Activity: Theoretical, Behavioral, Bioimaging, and Clinical Perspectives” (TIMELY). Thanks go to Argiro Vatakis who started and managed this network activity for researchers in the field of time perception. I benefited enormously from countless exchanges with like-minded colleagues.

Chapters of this book were read by my colleagues, whose expertise yielded valuable suggestions: Isabell Winkler, Dorothe Poggel, Karin Meissner, Katya Rubia, Evgeny Gutyrchik, Tanja Vollmer, Jakob Pacer, Niko Kohls, and Martin Paulus.

In addition, I received criticism and encouragement from friends who read the manuscript very attentively: Katharina Weikl, Jochen Rack, Klaus Meffert, and, of course, Oksana. Thanks go to my mother for helping me edit the English translation.

Years ago, I told my friend Dirk Thiel that I was looking for the internal clock governing the perception of time. His response was curt: “That’s obvious: the heart.” I didn’t believe so then, but he might be right.