We feel time passing every day, and since we have become used to it over the entirety of our lives, we are unlikely to think twice about it. But psychological research has uncovered many fascinating facts about the way we experience time that can help us to understand and appreciate why we feel what we feel when it comes to our journey through time.

1. The present is the future and the past.

Admittedly, that is a really bad way to explain this first fact. But it sounded way too cool and psychedelic for me to phrase it any other way.

Basically, what we experience as the "present" is actually a tenth-of-a-second-long memory that incorporates information from after the time period that it represents. Visually speaking, we see one moment but motion from the next moment is used by the present moment to anticipate that next moment. Back in the early days of TV, engineers worried about how to sync up audio and video so that people would see it as real. They came to realize that, as long as the audio was delayed from the video by a tenth of a second, people would not perceive any kind of delay.

2. Time feels faster as you grow older because your neurons are slower and your brain uses less energy.

An idea floating around which you may have heard of is that time feels faster as we get older because each year you live represents a decreasing fraction of your life. When you are three years old, a year is one third of your life, but when you are twenty, a year is one twentieth. But if you plot out that curve mathematically, that idea implies that you would judge one half of your life as occurring before age six.

Recent research has provided a better explanation. Since the firing speed of brain neurons decreases with age, our brains take more time to process experiences. Also, since our sense of an experience's length and brain energy usage are correlated and our brains use less energy as we age, we feel like our experiences are shorter as we age.

3. Your baby memories were lost due to brain growth.

If you are in or past your teenage years, then you probably have no memories from before you were three or four years old — unless you made them up, which is entirely plausible. You cannot remember anything from being a baby because the large amount of new neurons forming made it difficult for the mind to locate individual memories in certain groups of neurons. It seems that the more that your brain changes, grows and reshapes itself, the harder it is to find old memories.

Those three facts apply to just about any properly functioning brain. For people with exactly the wrong type of traumatic brain damage, though, there are plenty of morbidly fascinating ways that their perception of time can be distorted.

4. Some kinds of brain injuries could make you see everything as still images.

Motion blindness (or, as it is schmancily referred to, "akinetopsia") is one example of a rare condition emerging from traumatic brain injury. If your visual cortex is damaged in the exact wrong way, you could see life as a strobe light — in other words, everything you see would always be stationary. One akinetopsia patient, referred to as "LM," was extremely frightened of crossing the street because cars would look like they were far away and suddenly appear right in front of her. She eventually learned to track movement using her hearing, though, so she was able to cope with her condition.

And finally, to end on a dramatic note:

5. Certain types of brain trauma make time meaningless.

This condition, referred to as "time agnosia," is another rare disorder that we cannot even imagine experiencing unless we have already felt it. It prevents the brain from sequencing events at all. Ben Smith described it pretty well on the website "Cracked":

"People with this disorder are unable to sequence events at all, even big chunks of time like the seasons, much less describe the order of the day. In other words, it's not that people with time agnosia don't remember eating eggs and bacon for breakfast, it's that they don't know if they ate eggs and bacon an hour ago or 10 years ago. Can you imagine all of your memories existing in a jumbled timeless hodgepodge? Fortunately, time agnosia usually heals gradually over time, depending on how severe the original injury was. But, you know, good luck trying to explain that to the patient."

In light of these facts and more, I hope you would agree with me that brain is a strange and fascinating organ. The more that I learn about it, the more it — well — blows my mind.