If tomorrow wasn’t such a long time, then lonesome would mean nothing to me at all.

–Bob Dylan

Great achievements often take time. For instance, many hours of work went into finding a genetic basis for small fiber neuropathy or discovering more effective management strategies for chronic headache patients. A creator must have the ability to persevere until the plan is completed.

On the other hand, not all plans prove to be practical, and a creator must have a sense of when insufficient progress has been made for the time invested. Time is a parameter of many neurophysiological functions, such as a recycling neuronal current, electroencephalographic waveforms, or entrainment to a light-dark cycle. Most relevant for our understanding of the role time plays in creativity is our perception and mental image of time, or what we might term "cognitive time."

Cognitive time is the duration of an event. Perceived and mental images often contain a sequence of events. Each event, the time between events, and the entire sequence of events has a specific duration or chronological distance that is inherent in the mental image. We compare the chronological distance of our perceived "what is" with our imagined "what should be." I envision that it takes 10 minutes to walk the dog, so when my son fails to return after an hour, I am worried.

The perceived passage of time is a quantity, and quantity is a property shared by all of our sensory modalities. Whether something is brighter or darker, louder or quieter, heavier or lighter, faster or slower are examples of quantified perceptions. Quantity for any sense is abstracted by our multimodal parietal lobe (Curr. Opin. Neurobiol. 2004;14:218-24).

Our conscious estimation of time is influenced by our circadian rhythms. When people are isolated in a chamber without any time cues and allowed to wake and sleep as they desire, their bodies unconsciously maintain biological rhythms, for example in body temperature fluctuation. The nadir of our body temperature corresponds literally to the darkest hours just before the dawn and quickly rises after that. When asked to judge the passage of time, we overestimate during periods of higher body temperature and maximal wakefulness, and underestimate during periods of lower body temperature and greater sleepiness (Physiol. Behav. 2001;72:589-93). The hour my son spent walking the dog would have seemed longer to me at 4 a.m. than at 4 p.m.

All creative plans have a time frame. We decide whether the progress gained over the time spent on a creative effort matches the chronology embedded within our envisioned action plan. How we react to the progress of our creative effort within the perceived time frame is influenced by our temperament. Dr. C. Robert Cloninger defines temperament as an unconscious property based on our automatic responses to perceived stimuli. Such responses determine whether we are driven more by the search for reward vs. the avoidance of punishment, and how well we tolerate and persist in the face of "frustrative nonreward."