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Subjective temporal phenomenology, rather than being the product of a unitary chronometric apparatus, emerges from the intricately choreographed, multi-scalar interplay of distributed neurocognitive circuits—namely, cortico-striatal-thalamo-cortical loops, cerebellar timing modules, interoceptive insular hubs, hippocampal-entorhinal memory systems, and salience-oriented switching networks—each of which operates on discrete yet overlapping temporal grains, from subsecond sensorimotor calibration to extended episodic duration reconstruction, thereby creating a temporally laminated and experientially fragmented internal chronostasis that is anything but linear, homogenous, or metrically objective.

This dynamic integration is further modulated by neurochemical gradients, particularly dopaminergic tonicity within the nigrostriatal and mesocorticolimbic pathways, which recalibrates the pacemaker-accumulator models underlying internal clock speed, where increased dopaminergic activity hyperaccelerates perceived interval length through striatal beat-frequency synchronization, while hypoactivity attenuates pulse accumulation, producing a temporal contraction or flattening of event perception; meanwhile, serotonergic flux within the raphe-prefrontal axis orchestrates affective weighting and future-oriented temporal discounting, and noradrenergic excitation from the locus coeruleus introduces attentional saliency and event segmentation during heightened arousal states, thereby recalibrating the brain's predictive coding of duration under stress-laden contexts.