Please describe your perception of time.

Post Reply New Topic

As an NT person, I am grateful for this forum. I have learned so much about autistic perception in the last couple days. I would appreciate any and all descriptions on how persons with autism perceive time. How do you perceive time?

I don't perceive it linearly, that's for sure.

Time seems to go very slowly for me. Possibly, it is because I am young still.

I tend to think of things in events and changes rather than a neutral flow of time.

Lets say I'm in a hurry to get somewhere and I'm glancing at the clock in my car. I look and it says 7:42. I glance again and it's still 7:42. Again still 7:42. Finally it's 7:43. I glance again and it's 7:44. In my mind the length of time between glances is about the same.

I have AS and ADHD (which impacts time sense as well).

Time flies most of the time. 30 minutes or six hours can feel exactly the same to me. I can't judge how long anything might take to do and get stuck deciding what I should do because I don't feel like I have enough time to get anything done.

I can easily lose track of which day it is and even moreso what the date is. Strangely, even though I have a terrible sense of the passage of time, I can usually guess approximately the actual time, even though this is of no practical use to me.

Under some conditions, time crawls. While six hours can pass in the blink of an eye, five minutes can crawl as if they were hours.

Last edited by Verdandi on 08 Jan 2011, 6:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I have a weird relationship with time...I can sometimes know what time it is without a watch or clock. I can wake up and look at the clock at the same time every night. During the day this would be easy since I look at the clock many times. During night it's tougher to happen to glance at the clock at the same time as the night before and the one before that since that's when most people sleep but I can do it. Even if I wake up and stare at the ceiling for a period of time, it will be the same time as it was the night before when I happen to look at the clock to see what time it is. It's just eerie.
I can also do this in the morning. Wake up at the same time everyday without an alarm clock.

My perception of time is elastic. Sometimes it takes forever, then all of a sudden a whole lot of time has passed.

I can judge time very well. Without looking at a clock all day, I can usually get the time of day right within 15 minutes. I can also get elapsed time right within a few seconds. For example, if a TV show goes to commercials, I do some channel surfing. After three minutes or so, I get a "feeling" that it's time to switch back to the show. I almost always switch back just in time for the show to resume.

I dont have ADHD but I agree completely, it becomes a pain when it comes o exams, because of hyperconcentration, I cannot think to look at the clock, so I always rush without meaning to. I tend to finish in about half to three quaters the time everyone else takes.

For guessing the time I tend to be right to the quater hour, and if I am anxious, I often wake up 5 minuites before I wanted to.
Eh, I didn't realise that was too odd, what is it like for an NT?

Time is visual for me. The precise picture depends on scale. A few months goes on my picture of a year, which curves and stuff. I understand what season and date it is by picturing where I am on this curvy thingy, which also has different colors. Years go on a straight, left-to-right timeline or a bottom-to-top timeline with now on top and the past stretching out below.

For centuries, the scale just gets bigger. Each century is a block of time that sits on top of the previous century and beneath the one after.

For hours, it's quite like a clock, similar to years.

Also, I think of examples from my experience of how long a particular period of time takes. Like, for a decade, I think of myself now and ten years ago.

I don't understand a perception of time means. Time is something that is used to coordinate events. I like to look at clocks. I don't have much sense of time, if that is what you mean. I can't make a good guess of what time it is, or how much time has been elapsed. I also can't tell you things I've done and tell you what age I was.

It comes and goes.

I think I don't have a good sense of time. I do think I rely on clocks and schedules more then most people.

Holy sh**! ! I do this too but had never heard of anyone else doing it. I don't have a scale for anything larger than a year, but my year is an inclined ring with winter at the high side and summer at the low side. My week looks like a single week from a calendar, and my day is a chevron with the AM ascending to noon at the apex and pm descending on the other side.

I too have a poor sense of time sometimes as 2 hrs can feel like 10 min and vice versa. I scared my mom once with this. My parents had left the house for something one night. When they got back I asked them why they were back so soon as it felt like they'd been gone 10-20 min. Her response was they'd been gone for over 2 hrs. If I'm engrossed i n something, whether I'm really enjoying it or not, I will almost always lose track of time. It happens a lot when I'm writing a paper for school and it's just flowing out. If I struggle to write it then I'm acutely aware of how much time has passed.

I have read that perceiving time and/or dates in space is a synaesthesia thing? Do you think that's what's going on?

I've spent too many brain cycles pondering the nature of time so mine is sort of twisted up. First, most of what people call time is more a psychological than a physical one. Past and future are treated as real, when in reality they don't exist at all. That said, if I were to describe how I perceive time psychologically, I would have to say it depends on how I am communicating. If someone asks me how long until I arrive, I can perform a calculation and be fairly accurate. If I am doing something like drawing, or working out really hard, time seems to fade into the background. If I retreat into what I have come to call my ASD Mind (disconnected from verbal processing), time goes away completely.

I prefer the ASD state. You can't be anxious without time since anxiety is worrying about future events. If I am in a state without any sense of time, there is no future, hence no anxiety. It is quite annoying to me how frequently this hyper-stimulated techno culture pushes be out of that state.

I guess it's possible but I've done very limited reading up on synaesthesia and what I have read dealt with seeing music as colors and numbers as shapes. None of what little I've read dealt with time but I would be interested in seeing some literature on it.