Time, from psychology to neurophysiology: a historical view

Two aspects of psychology and physiology of time are dealt with in this paper: the way time perception was increasingly studied during the 19th century by scientists, including many physicists, and the way the temporal properties of the nervous system were discovered and explored by physiologists. The neurophysiological correlation between both aspects still remains to be explained. The relationship between time consciousness and consciousness mechanisms was often guessed by philosophers and looked for by scientists. It remains a major subject of investigation in neuroscience as well as a philosophical puzzle.