Hi Reader,

Dogs can tell the time. They can't read a clock, and yet they keep a surprisingly accurate sense of how long things last.

When researchers test dogs on timing tasks, judging whether a sound was short or long, they perform about as well as a lot of other species. So interval timing, the ability to estimate seconds to minutes, is just a normal part of how a dog navigates the world.

This matters more than it sounds (pun intended), because timing is really a survival tool. It lets a dog anticipate what's coming so he can prepare for it. Picture a dog caught outside as a storm rolls in. He has to make a rough calculation. Is there time to get home before the next thunderclap, or is it safer to take cover now? That decision is mainly a timing problem.

So what happens to that clock when a dog is frightened?

In people, fear speeds the internal clock up. The pacemaker that generates our sense of time runs faster, more "ticks" accumulate in the same stretch of time, and the moment gets judged as longer than it really was.

A frightening minute reliably feels longer than a calm one. We see the same patterns in rats. When they're expecting something unpleasant like a mild shock, their internal clock runs ahead and they start responding early, timed to the moment the threat is due.

The amygdala, the brain's threat centre, is responsible for this. And because it develops so early in life, the effect shows up young, in human children and in young animals, and it happens automatically.

So, a pup in the middle of a storm can't talk himself down with "it'll pass", because the prefrontal cortex, the part that would steady his attention and take the longer view, is slow to mature and easily pushed offline by fear. The accelerator is wired up long before the brakes.

There's one more finding I find quite striking. Timing isn't purely a mental stopwatch. Animals seem to keep time partly through their own movement, using simple repeated actions as a kind of metronome, and some researchers now think the sense of duration is controlled partly outside the brain altogether.

So a dog pacing through fireworks may be doing two things at once. Keeping rough track of time, and reaching for a scrap of control over something he can't control. The pacing might help him cope.

I want to be careful here, because the exact study hasn't been done in dogs yet, and across rat studies the direction isn't perfectly clean. But put the evidence together with what we see in people, and it points one way. A frightened dog is quite likely experiencing that storm as longer than it really is.

Of course, this is something I want to study as a scientist… and I have a grant due on Tuesday that proposes exactly this. With a success rate of less than 10%, the chances aren’t great but I’m going to try anyway!

But what I want you to take home is that we tend to measure a dog's difficult moments in objective minutes. So many minutes alone, so many minutes in the storm.

But for the dogs’ welfare it’s more important how long those minutes feel to him. And when you build a protocol for a noise-phobic dog, you're shaping exactly that. Recovery after a spike, a sense of control, predictability. Those are the things that change subjective time.

Cheers, Dr. Else

P.S. This is the thinking behind Noise Phobias in Dogs, where I go into the mechanism underneath the behaviour and what to do with it in real cases. Enrolment opens on the 10th (yes, right after I send in my grant application), you can join the waitlist here:

Cheers,

Dr. Else

Sources:

Boulanger Bertolus, J., Knippenberg, J., Verschueren, A., Le Blanc, P., Brown, B. L., Mouly, A. M., & Doyère, V. (2015). Temporal behavior in auditory fear conditioning: Stimulus property matters. International Journal of Comparative Psychology, 28. https://doi.org/10.46867/ijcp.2015.28.02.04​

Domeniconi, C., & Machado, A. (2017). Temporal bisection task with dogs: An exploratory study. Psychology & Neuroscience. https://doi.org/10.1037/pne0000080​

Doyère, V., & Droit-Volet, S. (2025). When emotion and time meet from human and rodent perspectives: a central role for the amygdala? Cerebral Cortex. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhae454​

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