Temporal Grammar: Five Scales of Human Time Perception and the Tic as Atomic Unit

We propose a five-level temporal grammar for human time perception, grounded in the displacement framework. The atomic unit is the tic: the smallest temporal interval that produces a perceptible state change, defined at. Five hierarchical levels emerge from psychophysical evidence: tic (detection), moment (order), beat (cross-modal binding), phrase (motor action), and breath (conscious presence).

Each level represents a qualitatively distinct temporal operation, not merely a longer duration. We show that the breath is the natural reference unit from which all others can be derived top-down (), and that rates are properly expressed as frequencies in. The grammar unifies phenomena from auditory gap detection through the Pöppel window under a single cost-theoretic account. We further note that tic is onomatopoeic --- a clock sounds like a tic --- making it the ground-state word for the ground-state temporal unit: zero displacement between signifier and referent.