Epilepsy and multidimensional time:a perspective inspired by theoretical physics

A conceptual framework redefines subjective time as the emergent product of coordinated but partially independent neural and bodily rhythms operating across hierarchical timescales. Neural mechanisms - intrinsic neural timescales, oscillatory coordination across frequency bands, and brain-body rhythms including respiration, cardiac cycles and circadian processes - construct temporal experience by nesting fast sensory integration within slower narrative and self-referential windows. Epileptic seizures, driven by hypersynchronous neuronal activity, shifts in excitation-inhibition balance, and disrupted large-scale synchronization, produce striking distortions of temporal experience such as déjà vu, jamais vu, acceleration or slowing of time, looping, and fragmentation. Kletetschka’s multidimensional time model is invoked strictly as a conceptual analogy to illustrate how these partially independent temporal processes can transiently decouple under pathological conditions without implying a literal mapping onto physical time dimensions.

Phenomenological analysis brings Husserlian structures of retentio, protentio and presentatio to bear on how seizures fragment the synthesis of temporal consciousness, showing that seizure states act as natural experiments that expose alternative modes of temporal organization. The synthesis integrates neuroscience, brain-body dynamics and phenomenology, arguing that epilepsy provides a productive model for studying the plasticity, plurality and multi-scale organization of temporal experience and for probing how transient disruptions of temporal integration reveal underlying temporal architecture.