Welcome to BrainStuff, a production of I Heart Radio.

Hey Brain Stuff, Lauren Volgobom here.

Most dogs and cats are never late for a meal. They know exactly where to be at the same time every day.

They also know their owner's schedules and like clockwork will join you in or even

anticipate your daily movements, like waiting by the door when you usually get home from work, or complaining if it's bedtime and you're still up.

When you witness this behavior, you might assume that your pet has a sophisticated understanding of time, but what is time really like for a dog or cat?

To understand how animals 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.

Albert Einstein once explained the principle of relativity by saying,

when a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour,

it seems like a minute, but let him sit on a hot stove for a minute,

and it's longer than any hour.

That's relativity.

Even though the experience of time is relative for every individual, all humans probably think

about time in similar ways.

For instance, our memories are inextricably tied to how we understand the passing of time.

Our ability to remember events in a particular order plays a large part in our perception of time.

We're also able to predict things, not in a psychic way, each of us makes educated assumptions

about certain events in the future, even as simple as assuming that the sun will come up tomorrow.

These abilities have important implications.

For instance, memory and prediction allow us to have a sense of continuity,

a personal history, and self-awareness.

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