http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/time/grand-illusion
EXCERPT: What science can tell us something about is the psychology of time’s passage. Our conscious now—what William James dubbed the “specious present”—is actually an interval of about three seconds. That is the span over which our brains knit up arriving sense data into a unified experience. It is also pretty clear that the nature of memory has something to do with the feeling that we are moving in time. The past and the future might be equally real, but—for reasons traceable, oddly enough, to the second law of thermodynamics—we cannot “remember” events in the future, only ones in the past. Memories accumulate in one temporal direction and not in the other. This seems to explain the psychological arrow of time. It does not, unfortunately, explain why that arrow seems to fly....
EXCERPT: What science can tell us something about is the psychology of time’s passage. Our conscious now—what William James dubbed the “specious present”—is actually an interval of about three seconds. That is the span over which our brains knit up arriving sense data into a unified experience. It is also pretty clear that the nature of memory has something to do with the feeling that we are moving in time. The past and the future might be equally real, but—for reasons traceable, oddly enough, to the second law of thermodynamics—we cannot “remember” events in the future, only ones in the past. Memories accumulate in one temporal direction and not in the other. This seems to explain the psychological arrow of time. It does not, unfortunately, explain why that arrow seems to fly....