Abstract

The impression of time continuity is a pervasive and given property of our subjective life. However, it appears to be compromised in patients with schizophrenia who experience what has been labelled 'self-disturbances'. We propose that the gaps in the continuity of self-experience in schizophrenia reflect disruption of non-conscious levels of temporal processing and indicate how this view is supported by experimental, phenomenological, and predictive coding approaches. Both experimental data and the phenomenology of time support the same surprising findings, i.e. the unconscious, automatic processing of time is more accurate than conscious processing. These observations are also concordant with hierarchical predictive coding accounts of brain function, i.e. processing is more local or granular, with briefer timescales lower in the hierarchy. Automatic, or 'passive' integration of information over time at a high temporal resolution would ensure any gap arising when coding events consciously, i.e. at a larger timescale, are smoothed over. We suggest this to involve both retentional and protentional mechanisms.