Two- and three-year-olds understanding of time is mainly limited to "now and not now". Five- and six-year-olds can grasp the ideas of past, present, and future. Seven- to ten-year-olds can use clocks and calendars. Alterations
In addition to psychoactive drugs, judgments of time can be altered by temporal illusions (like the kappa effect), age, and hypnosis. The sense of time is impaired in some people with neurological diseases such as Parkinsons disease and attention deficit disorder. Psychologists assert that time seems to go faster with age, but the literature on this age-related perception of time remains controversial. Those who support this notion argue that young people, having more excitatory neurotransmitters, are able to cope with faster external events. Spatial conceptualization
Although time is regarded as an abstract concept, there is increasing evidence that time is conceptualized in the mind in terms of space. That is, instead of thinking about time in a general, abstract way, humans think about time in a spatial way and mentally organize it as such. Using space to think about time allows humans to mentally organize temporal events in a specific way. This spatial representation of time is often represented in the mind as a Mental Time Line (MTL). Using space to think about time allows humans to mentally organize temporal order. These origins are shaped by many environmental factors––for example, literacy appears to play a large role in the different types of MTLs, as reading/writing direction provides an everyday temporal orientation that differs from culture to culture.
During the French Revolution, a new clock and calendar were invented in an attempt to de-Christianize time and create a more rational system in order to replace the Gregorian calendar. The French Republican Calendars days consisted of ten hours of a hundred minutes of a hundred seconds, which marked a deviation from the base 12 (duodecimal) system used in many other devices by many cultures. The system was abolished in 1806. History of other devices
A large variety of devices have been invented to measure time. The study of these devices is called horology.An Egyptian device that dates to c. 1500 BC, similar in shape to a bent T-square, measured the passage of time from the shadow cast by its crossbar on a nonlinear rule. The T was oriented eastward in the mornings. At noon, the device was turned around so that it could cast its shadow in the evening direction.A sundial uses a gnomon to cast a shadow on a set of markings calibrated to the hour. The position of the shadow marks the hour in local time. The idea to separate the day into smaller parts is credited to Egyptians because of their sundials, which operated on a duodecimal system.