Funny you should ask. This will trigger some people. So, that’s a warning.
Everything!! Because I’m timeblind. Why does that bother people so much? It’s almost worse than mentioning ADHD. They make everything about them including so-called time blindness. Some people may add to this by using the term when they are just in flow, but still why does Peter get so triggered?
I have my theories, but this isn’t about Jane or Peter. It’s about not being able to track time. At all. Because I’m hyposensitive to it. Simple. (But not good enough for Peter…or anyone.)
Today, I was thinking about how everything seems like it has always been this way, because I don’t remember when it started. So, if someone asks me when I started something, the real answer is, “I don’t know,” or “I can’t remember.’ or closer to my reality is, “It seems like it’s always been this way.”
It’s probably due to a lack of dopamine, which is associated with Parkinson’s and ADHD. Not enough autistic people have time perception issues for it to be a symptom. But there are a few studies exclusively done with autistic individuals that show this, like this study done with autistic kids in 2016. But it’s not the majority.
The motor system is intricately associated with the processing of temporal information in the brain. Among them, the striatum and dopamine have been assigned a central role in processing explicit timing.
Dopamine (a neurotransmitter) affects time perception. By all indications, mine is always low so that + losing my memory from acute stress or PTSD is what is believed to make my time perception worse.
Memory is fundamental to capturing and using temporal information to guide behavior.
I can’t predict when 5 minutes has passed. Or a month or a week. If I didn’t have things due, I wouldn’t even bother with time, but I have to because that is how most people track things. Measuring time has always felt unnatural to me.
Time perception is hard to research because it involves so many parts of the brain so even if a researcher has access to an MRI or PET, what are they looking at? All of the cortical and subcortical structures? Or is it one thing? (I doubt it.) Are they including memory too? Does it have to be included?
So, “time blindness” isn’t meant to harm Peter. Or anyone!
Weird, right?
People with dogs and other animals, might wonder why their dog is so excited to see them when they have only been gone for 5 minutes? Hello, your pup can’t perceive time.
I relate to Fido in too many ways. But most probably have a better memory than me. And a better sense of smell, but I need to end this post.
Correspondingly, the judgment of time is central to virtually all behaviors, from basic tasks like foraging and communication, to uniquely human activities like deciding which stock portfolio to invest in or whether to close a slow-loading web page. However, unlike other basic dimensions, there is no dedicated sense organ for time. Rather, psychological time is an abstraction, a construct or epiphenomenon of our mind’s functioning that we create in order to explain the coherence of events.
Time. What a b^$&*.
Writer Ocean Vuong In an Intense Reading of “Nothing” ‘Time Is a Mother’