What Does Time Feel Like?
The theme of the month here in Rhombus House is ADHD. Between assessments for family members, an ADHD certification course I’m taking for work, my regular workload, and voice-editing Issac’s point of view in Names in Their Blood/planning his character arc for book three, it’s been top of mind all month.
I won’t go in to the whole rant about how some of the presenters for my course talked about people with ADHD- if you’ve seen me on Tumblr or BlueSky you’ve seen my ranting already. And I’m not going to do a deep dive on ADHD coping mechanisms because, to be frank, I’m writing to you under an assumed name and I try not to give out too much mental health advice under the name that’s not associated with my therapist license. That gets ethically and legally dicey.
But one aspect of my training and discussions this month stood out to me as especially fascinating, and it’s about a phenomenon known as “time blindness”.
Most people think about people with ADHD as “having a hard time focusing” or “being forgetful and disorganized.”
But that doesn’t get down to the core of things, and part of the core of the matter is that, as it turns out, we’re not all experiencing time in the same way. Which, as someone who grew up with Star Trek and Dr Who and all that timey-wimey stuff, is fascinating.
I mean, we kind of already knew this, right? We know that often, the first time driving someplace completely unfamiliar takes, subjectively, twice as long as driving to the same location once it’s familiar. A half an hour waiting at the DMV lasts three times as long as half an hour hanging out with our nearest and dearest.
But it turns out our brains fundamentally vary from each other in how we process and feel time. These differences aren’t just cognitive- they’re biological; even to the extent that kids with ADHD tend to have their growth spurts either very early or very late compared to other kids.
That factoid really floored me- that the brain’s perception of time is even correlated with when big biological events happen.
I’ve been introduced to the idea of “time blindness” which is the inability to subjectively feel time passing. That applies both someone's in-the-moment feeling and their ability to feel like things in the future are actively approaching. They can know, intellectually, that the future is approaching, but their feelings can’t connect to that.
I was talking to my wife about this, because I know she has pretty significant time blindness. And she asked me what time feels like.
So I had to sit and think about that.
Because although my brain weirdness sometimes looks like ADHD, my internal sense of time is pretty reliable! I can estimate an hour long therapy session without looking at a clock. I can estimate how long things have taken or are likely to take.
Time is a very diffuse feeling. There are so many clocks going on in the human body- circadian rhythms, hormonal cycles, metabolic cycles. It turns out that mice who had their “clock genes” (genes that we know control biological rhythms) altered had a variety of metabolic and sleep disturbances.
So, if your brain as a whole doesn’t track time, that matters.
And I think that my way of understanding time comes partly from this innate sense of timing that my conscious brain can handle, but also my ability to track internal bodily systems. Some research also suggests that folks with ADHD might have fewer connections in the part of their brain that interprets bodily signals- and that would close another door to tracking time.
And if you can’t feel the passage of time, things are either right now, or utterly abstract and hypothetical.
Which would make stuff like using schedules, doing things when you’re supposed to, planning ahead, putting things in order and a lot of other tasks we associate with “being organized” in a very new light.
In my own experience, eventually people who have problems in these areas learn that they are “bad at” these things and develop a persistent sense of being behind, or that are things they should be doing. But then, future-oriented anxiety becomes abstract and persistent, instead of useful triggers to connect you to what you need to do.
As a scifi writer who is interested in neurology, I’m kind of nerding out about the subjectivity of time and the implications.
If time is a breakable on a biological level then we can mess with it on a biological level- no tardis required.
And doesn’t that just put my little cyberpunk-loving heart aflutter.
So stay tuned to see more of that.
If you have anything to say on the subject, you can, as always email me, or, you are invited to leave your thoughts in the brand new comment section!
I now have comments enabled on my whole archive, including this post! I have dreams of you lovely folks not just responding to me, which is always appreciated, but to each other!
I trust you all to be civil and kind.
Otherwise, I’ll see you next month.
Best Wishes,
Lee Brontide
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