There's an argument that our intuitive understanding of time is essentially evolutionary driven.
For most people anything less than a tenth of a second is instantaneous (the conscious mind is still making some plausible story round what's noted), anything much more than a lifetime is a very long time - look at the problems otherwise perfectly intelligent people have between something around 7500 thousand years ago roughly when we are known to have cheese to heading out of Africa 60000 to 125000 years ago, or even 65 million years ago - they're all just a long time.
I was reminded of this again in an email interchange with a well known market data supplier in an attempt to discover what the accuracy of a timestamp as I was told "difference is generally very small and in most cases, it is less than a second", presumably completely unaware that worldwide the peak pricing message rates have been above 6 million a second, Europe will peak over 80-100 thousand a day with a historic high over 300 thousand. A second may be a small time for us, but it's an age working in computer time - light can get nearly 7.5 times around the equator.
I think there is a similar issue when people ask "where are you from?" Essentially we're all from Africa but that's going back the 60 to 125 thousand years. Where I was born is identifiable and succinct, where I stay is also, but where am I from is a question that has no simple answer.The centroid of the places I've lived? The heartland of the cultural identify I feel closest to? Where I feel I have roots? Where I work? Where I had lunch? I don't know, but should I launch into an exploration of the question on being asked, I see eyes glaze over and the person drawn magnetically to the nearest exit, so I find it hard to discover what they were really asking.
