"Language and Time"

Post Reply New Topic

Why must time be dealt with by language or anything else is it a fear of mortality?

Many people on the spectrum seem to have trouble organising their time; handling tasks which involve time-limits/pressures; coping with deadlines; spend "abnormal" amounts of energy/attention, and ironically, time, ( for instance turning up very early for things so as to be "on time" ), on day to day activities which need to be done at certain times, and either easily lose track of time or are obsessively aware of it. Many of us are also hypersensitive to what we experience as "NT waste of time", what seems to us like meaningless conversations or rituals, and find it difficult to spend time on anything unless we are convinced of its importance, as if time were worth more to us than it is to most people, ( which reminds me of how many Aspergers/HFA's also think language is worth more than NTs do, and resent/are constantly annoyed/confused by NT's casual use of language ).

If asked what "time" means to me, I would say it meant a highly desirable "material"/resource, like money. That is what language says it is. I want as much of it as possible, ... but, like a miser, I hate spending it, except on language-use, so that I spend many many hours just sitting and thinking, and reading, when I don't "have" to be doing anything else that is. I feel "safe" when I have "lots of time", ( or comparatively safe when someone/something takes over the business of organising most of my time for me, as school and my parents did to a large extent for many years ).

It occurred to me that my earliest and most important experiences of "time" were of waiting, waiting to be fed, ( because I was fed at fixed times, 5 times a day, not when I felt the need to suckle ). And, as babies experience their parent's/carer's treatment of them as "right/good, I think that I have finished by believing that if you love/care about something/someone you make it/them wait. You wait until it/they are screaming with "need"/urgency before satisfying them. The "proper" use of time ( to me ), thus seems to be a bizarre mixture of waiting, and/or ( depending on what the activity/situation is ), making something or "someone" wait. I therefore experience deadlines, for example, ( especially when it is something I care a lot about ), as the next clock-feed which I must keep myself waiting for until the last moment, when I absolutely cannot resist the screaming need to do it.

The problem is that this experience, my infant/preverbal experience of time, has connected up with the social construct "time", something which is repeatedly described by language as desirable/valuable, in the same way as the abused child is taught, by language, to see their parental treatment of them as good, ( because language says that parent love their children, and love is good ), and to seek it out. So I seek out time, not to use it in the "usual" sense of the term, but for "waiting", to keep myself waiting. It makes me feel safe because that is the way I experienced time as a baby.

I was also thinking that perhaps an easy relationship with the passage of time relies on having a fairly reliable connection with the physical world, so that time is grounded in the circadian rhythms/sleep cycles, ( which it is well known are often disturbed in people on the spectrum ), etc, and that perhaps calendars and clocks were actually invented by people on the spectrum as a prosthetic device to compensate for a "poor", ( or disorientatingly different from NTs ), physical sense of time. Which would make us ultra-dependent on such markers, and all the language/terms of value relating to time, with all the anxiety and hypersensitivity to them which would follow from that.

.

Aside from other very questionable comments on time, the comment that clocks and calendars are some sort of superficial apparatus to social life indicates no comprehension at all about the necessity for a sensible relationship that a social organism requires discernible coordination capabilities to function economically and rationally. Valuable processes for the production of basic necessities, aside from other products and activities, have discrete temporal paces which all participants must be aware of and work with. Otherwise civilization simply would not function.

Honestly, to the best of my knowledge, no such concept exists. The time concepts I am familiar with are derived from and utterly dependent on exactly these things.

Industrialization is the cause of both increased levels of literacy and increased “fine” time keeping in these societies (rather than literacy being the cause of time keeping which your comments appear to suggest you assume). Hence my earlier reference to trains.

Some of the problems you mention are actually the result of different causes. In the first instance. among a population who are characterized by being subject to intense preoccupying, all encompassing interests, to the extent that these interests interfere in other activities, being late and having trouble tracking time seems reasonably inevitable to me.

Another “problem” you refer to is time-tracking using time tables etc. We are talking here about a population that is clinically described as having a propensity towards this kind of sorting and tracking behavior with all kinds of things. Coins in row, extensive listing and categorization of person possessions, etc, are predicted of us, what is special about time that these predictions made about things "not time", somehow need special explanation when some of us do the same things with time? What you are describing is common behavior_for_us, whether the subject is time or not, so why would you assume some deeper meaning is involved when the subject happens to be time?

The same is true of guesstimating the passage of time. Some experts estimate 80% of those with AS have Non verbal learning disorder, and this impairs ones ability to guesstimate quantities of all kinds, from number of items, to weight, length, volume distance from observer or between objects, etc. If someone struggles to guess the_quantity of something they can see, feel and hold in their hand, why would they not struggle to guesstimate quantities of something that cannot be seen directly, felt directly, or held in their hand?


It seems odd that there such a correlation between spatial and time cognitive_competencies such as manifested in NLD unless there is a some underlying co processing at a cognitive level.

Evidently many “calendar savants” actually perceive time spatially in a very literal sense (as a form if synthenasia).

When we consider how or why we could come to appreciate time cognitively, it is reasonable to assume that the necessity to do is related to a transition from "trigger to behavior” modes of behavior (aka strictly instinctual), to being planners, that is beings that predict things and act on predictions to bring about particular results. You do not need to appreciate time to act on seasonal triggers to behave in a particular way (ie the shortening of days triggering migration behavior). You do need to appreciate time if you are going to migrate as the result of planning.

Spatial cognitive skills however, do have a role to play even for creatures relying on instinct rather than planning. So we can be confident that neurological traits facilitating spatial cognition were already extant when our ancestors transitioned from instinct only to planning creatures.

Current evidence is that the cognitive processes used for spatial cognition organization/conceptualization can be adapted for the purposes of organizing and conceptualizing time. Does it not make sense that these processes would be co-opted to such tasks rather than some mysterious other alternative_suddenly popping into existence_only then to be magically replaced (for no apparent reason and in the absence of any apparent or sufficient cause) all of a sudden, a couple of thousand years ago? This does not seem remotely plausible to me.

Consider your other notions as to how one might “pre linguistically” sense or cognate time. They are not sufficient for planning models of action because planning requires comparisons, for instance between quantities (such as the quantity of time to get from place A through space B to place C and the quantity of time before some seasonal climate variation makes travel through space B impossible) and other complex elements that such means of sensing or conceiving time simply do not facilitate.

I do not see any evidence of that.

I know that “waste of time” is a turn of phrase that_very_often means “pointless/not worth the effort” and that often when people say this, it is not about time but about resenting something they perceive is not worth the effort, or which they do not understand or perceive there being any sensible point to.

Just because the word time appears, does not mean time is actually being referenced_as_valuable_resource. “Waste of time” is commonly employed to communicate and understood to mean “pointless activity not worth the least resource to achieve, including time”. In some sense the phrase is actually belittling time, as though if something is not worth spending even time on it, then inter alia it’s not worth more important resources, like effort.


Again, this is not a conclusion that seems sensible unless you first assume that we are as able as others to shift attention and choose what we focus on. This is just not the case though is it? By definition many of us experience all encompassing interests that prevent us from engaging in other activities. We enjoy our interests, it is a huge and often unsuccessful effort to focus on other things, and this entirely independent of some hyper sensitivity to or hyper valuing of time.

It’s not waste of time that is an issue, it is being required to exert huge effort to focus on something we do not enjoy or care for, while under the constraint of an encompassing interest that intrudes and constantly compels us to attend to it. Not attending to these interests is often_very difficult and quite discomforting. That ‘s what the part of definition referring to all encompassing interests is describing in the AS criteria.


I do not believe that the kittens do not experience the nurturing of their mothers as a positive (good) thing, or that they rely on language to do so. Do you think that kittens do not experience their_mother's nurture as "good", or that language is involved in their doing so?

It seems very obvious to me that in species where mothers invest significant resources in early rearing of their young, that this is experienced positively by the young, aka it is “good” to them, and that no linguistic input or intervention is required for this to occur.