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 Time is something that has also been on my mind recently.  Similar to the notion of activating time I have really been wondering about our perception of the present the present.  What is the present?  I suppose the most correct answer is NOW, but in a theory applicable to our lives where do the boundaries of the present time period exist.? Does yesterday count? Or is yesterday already in the past?  How about the upcoming exam weeks?  From an emotional/personal perspective they seem so close, I just can't wait to be finished! But from an academic perspective they seem far off, I can only worry about my work for this week.  So does time exist differently depending on what perspective we are coming from?  In this way I think we do activate our perception of time.  I'm not sure I would agree with you in saying that time is man made, we see things changing and change can only happen over time (in the sense that time distinguishes one moment from the next), but the way in which we measure time or the meme of time is sort of "man made".  I also don't think you can have memory without time, memory forms from the passage of time, and it is usually very aware of the passage of time. I believe a man in a room would have some account of time, if he had no way to keep track he would naturally fall into a time kept schedule of eating & sleeping, but like you said because he is experiencing no landmark events he would probably encode very little of the time period.  Without formalized time keeping we would certainly have memory and would probably find our own ways to encode time.... otherwise what did our long ago ancestors do?