Do Cats Perceive Time 4 Times Faster Than Us?

[WhatchaCallKitty]

A cat's life only lasts 1/4th of ours, on average. Do they therefore experience things at 4 times the rate as we do?

For example, if I pet one of my cats for 5 minutes, then does it perceive it as 20 minutes?

 

[susanm9006]

I don’t think so. Life doesn’t move faster. It is simply shorter.

 

[rubysmama]

Interesting question. Another reason why it would be helpful if cats could talk. Then again, we can't be sure all humans perceive time the same way, so even if cats could talk, we'd probably still not know for sure.

 

[mightyboosh]

I've heard that animals have a quota of around 1 billion heartbeats in a lifetime.

 

[FeebysOwner]

Think of an alternative perspective, for me anyway. Days, even weeks/months seem to fly by now that I am older compared to what a day/week/month seemed like when I was decades younger.

The longer I am alive, the more days I have lived and therefore, a single day is a much smaller ratio of the overall days of my existence to date. That is why a day seems to go by so much faster than it seemed to do when I was younger.

Assuming that a cat thinks of time as we do - and that is a HUGE assumption - time passes by faster as they age only because of that same ratio factor. So, theoretically, when you are petting a 20 year old cat for 5 minutes they could view that as a lot shorter pet than they 'remembered' it to be when they were 1yo!!

 

[KarenKat]

No.

Sure, time is relative but only in relation to how we perceive it compared with how we perceive it previously. “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it feels like an hour - talk to a pretty girl for an hour and it feels like a minute”. But time is still constant - I don’t believe cats perceive it any differently because of a shorter lifespan. Human life expectancy is not a constant that determines how perception of time works - that’s a human concept. If that were true than a kid that dies an early death would have a faster perceived time because of an arbitrary concept of how long he should experience?

Cats seem to live in the moment, but that moment is likely the same duration as human moments. The concept of “cat years” is simply to normalize the lifespan of a cat compared to a human so we understand physical and mental development (ie 1 year old cat is more like a 4 year old human and still is a “kid”, a 10 year old cat has conditions such as arthritis because of the physical toll on the body of living that long compared to what it was “designed for”). Time moves the same.

 

[WhatchaCallKitty]

My view is that since cats mature at an extremely faster rate than us (ready to have babies at 6 months, and we're still babies) it seems likely that they forget much, much faster than us. A teenager doesn't think much of their childhood, but rather things that teenagers do... Such as learn to drive, going to high school, etc. Therefore, kittens likely do perceive a 5 minute pet as much, much longer.

However, the tricky part is the length of days on Earth being the same. 1 day is the same to us as 1 day to them. Yet they experience 4 days of "maturity" for every 1 of ours.

 

[KarenKat]

Therefore, kittens likely do perceive a 5 minute pet as much, much longer.

If you knew my kitties they would tell you that we hardly pet them, that snuggling them for an hour was no time at all and we should pet them longer