Where did the time go?

Benedict Carey offers a nice piece on our sense of time. The article relates a number of interesting experiments on the variety of ways in which our brains expand or contact our sense of time:

...emotional events — a breakup, a promotion, a transformative trip abroad — tend to be perceived as more recent than they actually are, by months or even years...the findings support the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s observation that time “persists merely as a consequence of the events taking place in it.”...the reverse may also be true: if very few events come to mind, then the perception of time does not persist; the brain telescopes the interval that has passed.