Please describe your perception of time.

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Okay, I really HAVE to say that by the end of this post...

Wow. That's normal? I've wondered whether or not I'm synesthetic. I honestly don't know. Some stuff about my experiences just screams it, but descriptions of it leave me confused as to whether they're talking about what I experience or something else.

anbuend, if you say this is how you perceive time, I won't argue, but I want to point out that to me, time definitely is linear and is very clear. It's not confused at all, and I know past from present from future. (I know now from not-now, I'm no worse than average at telling memories from fantasies, and specific dates go on a mental timeline and don't get confused. When I bother to picture time, anyway. I don't care much for dates and stuff; I missed that point on the Aspie quiz. )

Actually, there's yet another calendar, for spans of time on the order of one or two weeks or less. Each day is a vertical column, with time passing downward for each, but they're arranged left-to-right. So, it's like...
Morning Monday|Morning Tuesday
Noon Monday---|Noon Tuesday
Night Monday---|Night Tuesday

This being an awful representation. But it shows you the direction. It's more fluid, though.

And I don't always picture them, but most if not all of the days of the week are colored.
Sunday-- yellow
Monday-- cream
Tuesday-- pink/peach/flesh/whatever this color is called
Wednesday-- bright red
Thursday-- dark red (maroon?)
Friday-- gray
Saturday-- lighter gray

I'm pretty sure the year thing is something I do because otherwise how could anyone understand time? I mean really, how can you understand time, if not visually? That's the only way I know of. Other people just... aren't making sense.

But this isn't really spatial. It's more visual. Like, I just picture it, and I move the picture so I'm looking at what I want. But it has colors. Like, January is light whitish-pastel blue. February is light pink. March doesn't get pictured as a month, rather recalled as the absolute worst time of the year. March sucks. I don't know what color April is, but I know it's a bouncy, bright color. May is... I don't know if that's called red or pink. June is blue or yellow (it depends), July a slightly darker blue. August is... this is strange. I'm starting to lose my words right now. And my clarity of thought. I'm quite certain of why, and I'm quite certain it's temporary, but um. August. Brownish yellowish-glowy-golden-brown it looks like the sound of a violin. Which color I don't know as I can describe. I could describe it as sounding like a violin, but I'd have to describe violin music as looking like this color.

September... actually, know what? I have this picture clearly in my head of its color. Not sure what to call it. But it's an intermediate step between August and November.

November is brown.

December is beautiful.

The very bottom is just between December and January. The very top is in the summer.

I have no concept of time. I have tried to fix this and it makes me more anxious. I have to watch the clock or the sun or look at a calendar constantly. If I don't I won't go to work or make it to any appointments. I hate making plans because as soon as I make plans I have to start thinking about them or I won't go. The event will come up and I won't be able to go, too anxious to rush to show up. I get involved in something and I don't realize it is taking hours and days to complete. I hate any type of schedule or do anything in a time frame. It drives the people around me crazy.

Oh, and months.

January blue.
February green.
March red (brick).
April pale blue/lavender.
May red (brick).
June blue.
July blue.
August red (fire engine).
September brown (light, orangish-ish).
October brown (very dark).
November brown (like a darker September almost).
December green.

Some of those seem based on letter colors and others I have no explanation for. I had trouble describing and/or didn't describe the exact color differences between several of the same color. Some of them have shapes too but it's too hard describing blobs in text.

No, I think my June/July are different than that.

Alas. It would be cool if you had the same colors.

BTW in response to the "are you textbook.." etc. thread, I decided to get literal to find that out, and am reading a book on autism that I happened to own but never have read through. It's from 2001 I think. It has a lot more to say about time than I expected, the author seems to think that perception of time is very important to autism somehow. There's a whole chapter on "Making Sense of Time and Space". Here's some notes from that chapter:

"...the basic autistic inability to make sense of past and present experiences leads to special difficulties in comprehending time and space... ...this aspect of the autistic disorders is so important for understanding how the children and adults see the world it needs an entire chapter."

Problems with time are not related to telling time by the clock (many autistic people are very good at this)

Difficulties lie in comprehending the passage of time and linking it with ongoing activities.

Shows itself as inability to wait. (Impatience can continue into adult life.)

Some begin to scream if made to wait more than a second for food/walk/ride/etc.

Other problem happens when people try to tell autistic people to wash/dress/prepare for school within a specific chunk of time. "Even the most able individuals may find it impossible to cope with time limits, which can be a major barrier to becoming independent."

"One of the most obvious examples of confusion with time is the way in which those with enough speech continually ask for reassurance about future events and when they will happen. They want to have the timetable spelled out in precise detail, not once but an infinite number of times." Author attributes this to "a real difficulty understanding that the future will eventually become the present."

"lack of awareness that an event, once started, will come to an end" Some kids freak out when taken somewhere because they don't know if they'll ever go home again. "The fear generated by being lost in time also explains why there is often such a strong adverse reaction to any unpredictable change in the expected timetable." Some autistic people get obsessed with time and with everything happening at the exact right moment.

"The trouble with time is that it cannot be seen or felt but has to be inferred from the sequence of events. There is some similarity with speech, which has no visible, tangible form and has gone as soon as the words have been uttered. It seems that people with autistic disorders have severe problems with coping with sequential events that have no independent, concrete existence. Concepts of time have always puzzled and fascinated philosophers but most people are born with the ability to understand it in everyday terms. People with autistic disorders seem to lack this understanding to a degree that is markedly discrepant with their level of intelligence."

(Lots of stuff on how visual timetables are wonderful. Also for shorter periods things like kitchen timers.)

Stuff about space as well (which I know you were interested in in the other thread that spawned this one, unless I'm mixing it up with something else):

Autistic people "...also have problems understanding boundaries and relationships between objects in space." This can include parts of their own bodies. Like a girl who saw her hand emerging from a sleeve and acted like she'd never seen it before. People can have trouble understanding different views of the same object as really being the same, which may be why some sit around rotating objects back and forth. Also may be unaware of boundaries between objects that seem obvious to other people. Like not knowing where one house ends and another begins. And extremely unaware of subtle unmarked boundaries like personal space or areas on beaches occupied by other families. (She thinks this may be part of why we have trouble understanding relationships between people.)

"People with autistic disorders lack an internal structure for their lives. They need to have an external framework constructed for them by those who care for them and teach them. Even those who are most able need this type of support. The most successful find it for themselves in the work and living arrangements they choose, but even they are vulnerable if the structure is completely removed by the hazards of life."

*****

So there ends my notes/paraphrases/quotes from that chapter.

Some of that stuff she seems to be very spot-on about. Other stuff, I think she may be stretching, or at least not looking at other possibilities. Like the fact that autistic people react badly to schedule changes can be as much about sensory/perceptual issues, and trouble with planning and executive function, and movement problems, and basically having to perceive/plan/move in totally different ways than expected... it can be as much about all that as about time. If not more. But some of the stuff she said was very accurate.

Like a lot of the book, I wish she would use more information from autistic people, but I have to remember in 2001 (and especially the many years before that she must have been writing, and also the fact that it's an update of a book from the 1970s) there were far fewer widely-known writings by autistic people than there are now. Enough that I had a single shelf full of most of the books by autistic people I could find at that point, and binders filled with every article I could find written online. A lot has changed. (Back then I was trying to figure out exactly how I was similar to other people and how I differed from other people, and I was not yet aware of my outward appearances, so I went entirely by actual accounts by autistic people instead of trying to make sense of books dealing with actions and appearances I largely didn't even know I had.) At this point I have several shelves full of books by autistic people and have to get them mostly as gifts from others because I can no longer afford to keep up with the rate they're published at. I mostly can't even read them anymore, but the impulse to collect and organize them still exists (go figure, it's been a special interest for a long time). And I would never even attempt to print out everything written online by us, not even in my most perseverative moments. I would probably only print out the ones I found relevant now, whereas back then I really did have printouts of basically everything.

Anyway I hope that chapter was helpful, just be aware that with books written by nonautistic people about autistic people, there's a lot of speculation going on as to why we do things, and the speculation can be incorrect, or highlight things as really really important that are less important than the author thinks, meanwhile skipping things that really are incredibly important for us. So take it with more of a grain of salt than you'd take actual descriptions by autistic people. The one good thing about these accounts is they generally also include descriptions of the behavior of people who can't describe it themselves. At the same time, those descriptions may have inaccurate assumptions. So enjoy but be careful.

Oh yeah and the book is The Autistic Spectrum by Lorna Wing, 2001 edition. And so far (as for the topic of the thread that made me go and read it) I am finding that I am far more "textbook" according to this book than I ever would have remotely imagined possible. There's even stuff I just never ever imagined would be normal for autistic people, like how my "walk" and posture looks far more unusual in adolescence or adulthood than it did as a child (even though the basic look never changed much). I mean there are major variations, but so far I find myself going "yes, yes, yes" a lot more than "er, no" as far as my actual behavior or abilities go. I think it may be because these days when I'm stuck at home all the time, my exposure to autistic people is primarily online, whereas the author's exposure to autistic people is to all autistic people, whether they can make it online or not. So she describes potentially a lot more diversity than online does. (Online can also have a heck of a lot of diversity, but it does tend to attract disproportionately certain kinds of people, even if all sorts of other sorts of people are there in smaller numbers. I've found more than my share of people like me online, but we don't seem to be a majority here.)

But that's because it's impossible to understand time without looking at it! You just CAN'T understand it without a way to look at it all simultaneously. How could that be a unique deficit? What's next-- autistic people can't breathe underwater? Just how do NTs perceive time?!

Please describe your perception of time - Normally, I cannot keep an even musical beat to a short tune of 1 minute or less. For some reason, for me (ADHD Inattentive), coffee - caffeine compounds allow me to sense the music a little better and to sustain concentration a little so I can keep a better musical beat with my feet. Once the caffeine slowly leaves my system, I return to a state where I cannot keep an even musical beat.

Does anyone know if research has been done to determine if there is a genetic component to synaesthesia? I recently found out that my mom (an NT) has time-space synaesthesia like me.

My perception of time is very non-linear. I have no "sense of time". It is frustrating for me because without a clock I don't seem to know the difference between 5 or 10 min. I have to have clocks everywhere or I am never on time. I cope with this by looking at clocks periodically. It is yet another thing I have to manage. It does not come naturally to me. When I look at a clock I am often surprised by the time on it. I have to work hard at not being late.

I have a good sense of time when i want to, but its usually in standby mode.