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How do dogs perceive time?

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Leave your house for five minutes or eight hours, and your dog will probably have the same wiggly response to your return. Do dogs sense the passing of time?

To understand how dogs perceive time, we first need to understand how humans perceive time. Arguably, each person experiences the passing of time in different ways at different times. Even though the experience of time is relative for every individual, all humans think about time in similar ways. For instance, our memories are inextricably tied to how we understand the passing of time. In turn, memory and prediction allow us to have a sense of continuity, personal history and self-awareness.

Do dogs and other animals have these same abilities? If you climbed inside a dog's mind, would you be presented with the memory of eating a raw hide bone earlier this morning? Read the next page to find out what it would feel like to be a dog.

Full article at HowStuffWorks.com.

Total aggregation of HowStuffWorks.com.

Photo credit: Fotolia


Comments (4)

May 21, 2010
Steve Blethyn said...
Don't know how dogs get through the day without a watch, but my big fella wakes me at 6am every day without fail. BUT... (now get this, it's freaky) when the clocks went forwards, day one he was only 10 minutes out and day 2 he was bang on 6am again. How?
http://twitpic.com/1ol151
May 21, 2010
Inez said...
It's like this: our bodies have an awareness far beyond what we can imagine. Although we simulate death when we sleep, we/our bodies are very much aware of the world and programmed to return to it; so, we're always going to wake up and with a fair amount of consistency. Left on our own, we can even program ourselves to either wake at a certain hour, or to depend on a clock every morning.

Now, try this on:
I think your inner program is set to 6 am-with-back-up, your psychically connected dog picks up your vibrational time command, like a tweet, and boom -- he's on it! ('Perfectly understandable, BTW, that YOU may be thrown off a little with the time change, thus alarmDog was a bit late the morning you were adjusting...)

Of course, you can always just say you have a magical pup who can tell time and put him on youtube... ;D

May 22, 2010
David Whitehead said...
A nice thought provoking comment Inez
May 22, 2010
Sanjay Singh said...
Fully agree with Inez. In fact, the moment I read Steve's comment, I'd begun thinking the same. There is unbeleivable amount of feedback from humans to dogs. I'd seen a TV programme of a dog that would go out to the window and wait for its master the moment she THOUGHT of getting back home from wherever she was in the city.

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