Diane Van Deren is an ultra runner who had part of her brain removed to treat her seizures. It also affected her ability to perceive time and to read maps.
She originally started running to self-treat her seizures, but eventually running no longer staved them off.
Oddly, not being able to perceive time may have benefitted her running:
> Dr. Gerber credits her endurance in part to her brain limitations. He says runners who can better track time and map where they are can be distracted by the details. But Van Deren has a special facility for what he calls “flow” that lets her transcend the anguish of running long. “It’s a mental state,” Gerber says. “You become enmeshed in what you’re doing. It’s almost Zen. She can run for hours and not know how long she’s been going.”
There's a book by Oliver Sacks that covers people affected by strange neurological disorders and it is fascinating [0]. I can't recall any of them being viewed in a positive light, but it's still worth a read.
That book helped someone I know he was mostly face blind.
Recently I was listening to a discussion where someone was trying to explain her synesthesia about time to a bunch of people who didn't experience that. I found it really hard to wrap my head around, but there is a picture in this article of how one person visualizes time over the course of a year. The idea is just so far from what I think of as normal that it is difficult to really grasp.
"I thought everyone thought like I did, says Holly Branigan, also a scientist at Edinburgh University, and someone with time-space synaesthesia.
"I found out when I attended a talk in the department that Julia was giving. She said that some synaesthetes can see time. And I thought, 'Oh my god, that means I've got synaesthesia'."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8248589.stm
I read a long time ago that it's quite common, like 1 in 7 people got it. Some people don't even know they have it. I always had it as far as I can recall, but it wasn't until my mid 20s, when I stumbled upon a picture, that I reflected on it and the fact that not everyone sees number forms.
Oh wow. Count me in on the I didn't know I had that! camp.
When younger I struggled horribly with ALL things math, and to this day still do. OTOH I've always had a knack for DIY involving measurements: lenghts, rythms, quantities, sizes, you name it. I just invoke my own "dynamic mind ruler" for the task at hand and usually get it right 1st try. Cooking something new? I intuitively know the proper amount of ingredients and spices. Doing work in a friend's car? That nut looks like a 3/4 and that one a 11/16, and who the heck put a 11mm in place of a 7/16??
Incidentally, the whole concept of Time always flows from right-to-left to me. 1000BC is waaay to the right, and 2030AC is just a stone throw away to the left. Now I wonder if it's something only I perceive that way, or everyone does.
Oh wow! Thanks for that, I lost a bunch of time with my coffee this morning thinking about time. I feel like I've lost my sense of time and it is all smeared together. It always has been to some extent but the last couple years have been stressful with business health and family health issues.
This line made me laugh "A straight fucking line. Because life moves ahead
Right handed man, 20-29, Eastern Norway" and think about the reporting on the Aymara who describe the past as infront of them and the future behind. That was hard to grasp but then it made sense because one is potentially visible and the other is unknowable until one passes through it.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/24/4
This almost caused me an existential time crisis until I drew out my own year and realized it’s still as I remember. It just gets a bit smeared out in my head.
As long as we're discussing Dr. Sacks, I just read his short story (part of same-titled book) "An Anthropologist on Mars." The titles derive from Dr. Grandin Temple's perception of being high-functioning autist in academia/husbandry; she is best-known for re-designing slaughterhouse shutes, able to "see" as animals do.
Her entire story left me, a spectrum-kiddo, grasping for what "real" even is.
The thing that struck me as her "most unhuman" aspect [but with which I can relate, self-inflictedly]: Dr. Grandin doesn't understand most human social customs, so from a young age vowed to never enter into a romantic relationship.
She considers this entirely a waste of time, and lives to work.
Highly recommend Dr. Sacks many books/collections, may he RIP:
[I'm just a fleshbag]: Man Who Mistook Wife for Hat
Another book that is very illuminating is "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor. Reading the brain stroke description can give non-experiential understanding of various Zen koans, including the non-verbal one where Buddha simply holds up a flower and it becomes entirely understandable to Mahakasyapa.
It also points to the natural tendency of human beings to attribute profoundness or spirituality to various forms of brain malfunction. The author does it in the later chapters of the book.
One of the more terrifying books ever written, if nothing else for the fact it opens one to the possibility we may all have such disorders on a species-wide level. What if there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive?
You don't find the idea the world might work in ways we specifically will never, can never, comprehend doesn't frighten you at all? The fact it isn't strictly impossible there could be something right in front of your face and you would never know it?
Not sure what you're asking. What is "that" which would require "'learning it' to have zero persistence in any form'"?
What I meant is, even if we all learn that everybody in the world has "such disorders" and that "there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive", what would the objective change be to make this "teriffying"?
"There's a killer out to get you" or "you have X disease which will have those symptoms" is terrifying.
"There are things that you don't know, and that you as a species can't even perceive" is at best amusing.
This sudden knowledge doesn't change anything that's happening or makes anything that happened before more frightening, does it?
>>>> One of the more terrifying books ever written, if nothing else for the fact it opens one to the possibility we may all have such disorders on a species-wide level. What if there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive?
>>> After learning it, it would still be the same exact world as was before we learned about it.
>> That would require "learning it" to have zero persistence in any form would it not? How might one know such a thing?
> Not sure what you're asking. What is "that" which would require "'learning it' to have zero persistence in any form'"?
"That" = "it would still be the same exact world (as was before we learned about it)".
World-State: 1
World-Event: at least one human becomes open to the possibility that we may all have such disorders on a species-wide level, that there may be things none of us allow ourselves to perceive. (And once an idea exists in one person's mind, they may act upon it at some point in the future.)
World-State: 2
Are the two states identical? I would think not.
> What I meant is, even if we all learn that everybody in the world has "such disorders" and that "there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive", what would the objective change be to make this "teriffying"?
To me, it can be "terrifying" to see risk that others cannot or, or refuse to try to see.
Scientists and "scientific thinkers" often express fear of the quantity of "deniers" that don't agree with their risk assessments, and get even more terrified when the "deniers" refuse to listen to reason.
Similarly, people like me feel similarly when it is the scientists who behave the same.
> "There are things that you don't know, and that you as a species can't even perceive" is at best amusing.
This is a consequence of the epistemic norms (lazy, colloquial, bad, etc) of the culture you grew up in: under strict epistemology (philosophical epistemology vs scientific epistemology), risk exists regardless of your personal opinion on it.
Of course, this "is" "pedantic", so no expectation for you to take it seriously...though if my memory serves you are usually the one going against the grain here on HN, so perhaps there's a chance. :)
> What if there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive?
What if? There are plenty of topics that people cannot discuss in detail (they're typically referred to as "culture war" topics) and HN enforces such things (to the degree that it does, to be accurate) like most social media platforms...doing otherwise would be ~"inappropriate", etc...culture + the nature of evolved and culturalized consciousness sees to that.
Towards the end of her life my grandmother had a few small strokes. After one, I clearly remember her loosing her pathfinding ability. She became lost in her 4 room basement, unable to find the stairs.
At her worst, she seemingly got lost in her 5'x8' bathroom. I remember her just continuing to turn in place and then dismiss each direction as being the wrong way to proceed.
After seeing how hard it was to walk after my dad’s stroke I’ll never buy a 2 story home when I’m entering old age. It’s just so dangerous and easy to fall and never recover.
Flow happens to at least a lot of runners to be fair though. At certain distance when I'm running, it becomes very pleasurable, like you are above everything.
I've run over two dozen marathons, twice run 100 miles, and also run timed races of 24 hours and 12 hours (multiple times). I'm a decent runner, having run the Boston Marathon 5 times.
I've never really experienced anything like what they're describing with Diane Van Deren. I'm not sure I've ever really experienced what folks refer to as the runner's high either. At best, I can say that there are times that my running is as effortless as walking, even when running at a fairly decent clip. During those effortless times, I've gotten lost in thought or in conversation with another runner, but no differently than I'd get lost in thought or conversation during other activities. I've never experienced any sense of euphoria when running. Joy and tears and emotional overload at the end of Boston sure, but not what I'd call euphoria.
That runner's high sounds great though, for those who do experience it. :-)
It usually happens to me at around 8km. I get inspiring thoughts, feel like I can achieve anything and at this point I would definitely not want to stop running. Maybe it could be similar to ADHD medicine then.
You have ran some very impressive distances though.
I distinctly remember a HN post, were the father of the poster had the same problem. Meaning he would sometimes "crash" and just stand there, forgetting about the world everything - often for hours if nobody "interrupted".
After my mom's stroke she basically lost the concept of time. Apparently it's relatively common. Kids don't get the concept of time until an age, and you can lose it. Amazing how much you need it how things fall apart in this modern life without it. Didn't help that she decided to use a 2017 calendar in 2018, I questioned my sanity as I unraveled the mess.
It very much impacted her life. About the only good thing was that she'd just eat at any time we wanted. "I could eat" became the answer always, not that it wasn't before. Woman loved a good scallop and was quick with a fork if you tried to take hers.
Ha! What a lovely way with words you have. That made me laugh.
I’ve recently ‘gone solo’ and I decided to experiment with caring a little less about time. The only starkly visible clock in the house is on the oven, so I reset it. But it still tells a time, and I knew I’d eventually figure out the delta, so I covered it with tape.
It’s funny how lunch is supposed to be at ~midday, but when you don’t know when midday is, does it really matter when you eat lunch? It’s a really, really hard habit to kick. Gradually I get more to the stage where I eat “when I could eat”, but still. Lunch is at lunchtime.
This experiment did make me realise just how much I looked at that clock. Check the time, check the time. To what end? I can’t tell you. That habit does appear to be on the wane.
I've always had a peculiar, extremely elastic relationship with time, which I do perceive, only it's wildly all over the place, day in day out; a "moment" could fold hours into an eyeblink, or it could make split seconds last an eternity and a half. A tidy calendar, reminders for basically everything, and setting up "mental tripwires"† is the only way I found to be any sort of reliable.
Finding balance between the constant dread of missing something I have to do that turns me into a slave to the clock and being able to live a relaxed life is an eternal battle of mine.
† Some kind of autosuggestion trickery, where I lay a callback upon some unrelated physical thing I know will happen in order to trigger another thought. e.g "when I cross the kitchen door I'll think about texting foo about bar"
> Check the time, check the time. To what end? I can’t tell you.
It was Grandfather’s watch and when Father gave it to me he said I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire; it’s rather excruciatingly apt that you will use it to gain the reducto absurdum of all human experience which can fit your individual needs no better than it fitted his or his father’s. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won he said. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
I don’t suppose anybody ever deliberately listens to a watch or a clock. You don’t have to. You can be oblivious to the sound for a long while, then in a second of ticking it can create in the mind unbroken the long diminishing parade of time you didn’t hear.
It's always the idle habits you acquire which you will regret.
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
> Lunch is at lunchtime.
“Drink up,” said Ford, “you’ve got three pints to get through.”
“Three pints?” said Arthur. “At lunchtime?”
The man next to ford grinned and nodded happily. Ford ignored him. He said, “Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.”
- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
>I've always had a peculiar, extremely elastic relationship with time, which I do perceive, only it's wildly all over the place, day in day out; a "moment" could fold hours into an eyeblink, or it could make split seconds last an eternity and a half. A tidy calendar, reminders for basically everything, and setting up "mental tripwires"† is the only way I found to be any sort of reliable.
Self diagnoses (and diagnoses over the internet) are pretty harmful in a society where many people think they have every mental/physical disorder just because they have a few (of the many) symptoms associated with one (or many) disorders
One might even argue that the labeling aspect of a certain disorder (particularly a mental one) by a "professional" to not be particularly helpful too in addressing ones problems
>Self diagnoses (and diagnoses over the internet) are pretty harmful
Self-diagnoses can be legitimate or not - depends on the person doing them. They are often a necessity, in an environment where a professional diagnosis takes thousands of dollars or years in waiting (and is often done badly, by ill-informed professionals, like the many-decades prevailing myth that women/girls "can't be autistic", or that "ADD and autism can't coincide").
As (in this case) they are also based not on bloodwork or some physical indicators, but on a subjective assessment of a person's way of thinking, the person having the actual experience is often more qualified than the professional. Same to how you don't really need a doctor to tell you you're gay.
>One might even argue that the labeling aspect of a certain disorder (particularly a mental one) by a "professional" to not be particularly helpful too in addressing ones problems
One might argue that the false dichotomy between professionals and laymen, where the former is supposed to hold all the keys to knowledge and the latter to passively consult and follow the advice of the former, is a problem in itself.
And a little outdated in modern societies where the "laymen" are not some mud dwelling peasants who never went to school and only know farm work, but univercity-educated (even over-educated) in their own right, and libraries are not confined to the rich or the scholars, but every book ever written is a click away.
In any case, a self-diagnosis doesn't give you the required paperwork to get drugs, or to get benefits, or specific accomondations, or anything like that. So it's not like it hurts society by taking resources from "legitimate" diagnoses.
Last, but not least, pointing that X symptoms is "quite common to ADD/ADHD" is not self-diagnosis, it's not even diagnosing. It's a suggestion hinting to a possible condition. It could very well be used for seeking a professional diagnosis.
Or do you think people with ADD/ADHD just go to the doctor to get diagnosed out of the blue, and not because of some similar suspicion, spotting some unexplained symptoms or themselves, or identification with some symptoms they've read about?
If you compare notes and find mitigations/strategies used by people with diagnoses helps, then it hardly matters for all but one practical purpose. If you need a diagnosis for disability support, that's another matter. It's sometimes more trouble than benefit from what I've heard.
When I do this my body adapts to only being hungry after I'm done with work, making me go about 9 hours without food (plus the sleep time before). I found that without clocks I will just be hungry for a lot of food after work and then I'm sorted, making it kind of a natural intermittent fasting.
It will be fascinating if there were a way for you to record the actual time when you do eat lunch (without the time being revealed to you; say a Rasberry Pi where you press a switch to record current time but it has no display). I am curious how much our body clock synchronizes with real time. I see that in my kids, who don't yet know how to read time. But they are hungry right at noon and 7pm, and will get cranky if they don't get something to eat within 15 min of that. Do adults retain such strong internal body clocks?
> "I am curious how much our body clock synchronizes with real time"
Various experiments have been performed with people in caves, where they don't have "time cues" such as natural daylight. From the Michel Siffre wikipedia entry[0]: "He found that without time cues, several people including himself adjusted to a 48-hour rather than a 24-hour cycle ... Several astronauts reported experiences similar to those experienced in underground experiments such as loss of short-term memory to being isolated from external time references." And for Stefania Follini[1]: "her biological clock drifted away from its regular rhythm to following first a 28-hour day, and later on a 48-hour one ... When she finally emerged from the cave at the experiment's end ... she estimated that it was ... only two months from the start of the experiment instead of the four that had actually transpired".
That sounds very familiar. As someone with ADHD when I get hyperfocused I can completely loose track of time. It’s a large part of why many ADHDers struggle with being on time to things.
However it can be great for getting into the flow programming.
> It’s a large part of why many ADHDers struggle with being on time to things.
The group of ADHDers that can be on time on the other hand will often accomplish this by spending the time up to an appointment doing nothing but worrying about being on time.
I think there is a lot of promising tech to help people out with this stuff. Just having your phone prompt you when you need to do stuff. I saw Google maps (perhaps recently) added a feature where you tell it the time you need to be somewhere and it will notify you when it's time to leave.
He uses his iPhone extensively to do things like this. I recently learned that the native Calendar app can do the same thing for scheduled appointments that have a location specified. Reminders can be set for things like: (can set multiple) "30 minutes before travel time" or "Time to leave", etc.
One thing he's struggled with is establishing the habits to set up these kinds of tools. There are often other issues associated with TBI and memory/new habit formation have been a challenge. Needs reminders for the reminders.
He's determined to find the right combination of tools/processes so he can create a guide to help other people use their current tools to manage this aspect of their lives. The potential is definitely there.
> I saw Google maps (perhaps recently) added a feature where you tell it the time you need to be somewhere and it will notify you when it's time to leave.
Has been doing this for me since 2009, a lifesaver in unexpected traffic or construction.
Now I feel bad. I had an ex who would always lose track of time and I wasn’t understanding enough (being late by several hours and forgetting important things like her first chance at a covid shot, or getting lost while driving and having spent an hour driving around the neighborhood without realizing how long she’d been lost for).
Timers make a lot of sense, if you can remember to set them.
I’ve gained a lot of empathy for folks dealing with this as I’ve seen my brother’s struggles up close. I definitely didn’t understand the dynamics before.
One of the things we’ve talked about is how otherwise “normal” he seems to most people, and the problems this causes. The symptoms aren’t as obvious as wearing a cast on your broken leg, or having severe speech issues, etc. and as a result, people are more likely to get frustrated or not understand when the symptoms spill over and affect other people (being late, forgetting things, etc).
I wonder whether my work colleague has that issue. Every 20mins there are timers going off on his phone. On the other hand, he is a smoker, and I imagine that the nicotine dependency ought to act as sort of a replacement for that sense. Not a terribly precise one though.
Given how he often disrespects other people's efforts to stay focused, I doubt it. It might be a crude approximation of it though. And I don't 100% remember what they interval exactly is.
Be as that may, I find the Pomodoro method to be a wonderful tool to structure one's time!
You judge the passage of time by remembering the things that have happened since the last time that you checked the time. If you can't remember what you've been doing, then it could have been minutes or it could have been hours since you've last checked.
The fact that I wear one on my wrist and glance at it by chance without having to remember. The fact that there’s a clock on every appliance in my house and I look at those without intention to do so. Maybe all of that is subconscious action based on my perception of time. I’m not sure.
Imagine that your watch was jinxed. Every time you looked at it, you would be either either too early to prepare for the next thing you need to do, or already too late. That’s an approximation of what the problem is.
She could read clocks... but it didn't make sense to her. 24 hour clocks helped some. Is 10am before or after 2pm? She didn't know. Further, she didn't understand morning and evening, it's either bright out or dark out.
It goes even so far as, she didn't really understand the causality of the sun coming up or going down and the east or west. So "the sun is just coming up it's breakfast time" was several levels of causality past her. A bridge game at 11am requires me to wake up at 9,
To make people happy she'd just say "ok" when someone said a time.
And so many people just didn't understand these limitations, including the scheduling folks at the neurology department who would setup 3-5 meetings well in advanced and then move them constantly.
I feel I have a slightly "time-warped" memory. I often can't tell whether something was two months or over a year ago, for instance.
I believe this to be caused by depression, as I've seen many similar reports online. Life assumes a sort of "flow" state, as you don't care enough to pay attention to things. It affects my memory in general as well.
With ADHD this is pretty much a thing. If you also get the “funzies” where you sometimes “relieve” a moment in a way that is so real that you end up speaking out loud in response to the relived memory, you should probably consider getting it looked into.
Especially if your depression isn’t a “real” depression. What I mean by that isn’t to minimise it’s impact or how it feels, but I was once in a depression group where I just didn’t fit in. I was in it because I had been suicidal, so, well I obviously wasn’t doing ok, but unlike the other members of the group I could get up in the morning just fine. Long story short, I was diagnosed with ADHD to which depression and anxiety are often “friends” when it isn’t treated. And by treated I don’t only mean medicated.
Anyway, if this isn’t you, then I’m sorry for derailing you a bit.
> I was once in a depression group where I just didn’t fit in
One of my weirdest thoughts to date has to be "I think this group is for normal suicidal people" haha
Doing much better now! Similar to you my depression was more of an ADHD symptom than "real" depression. Real in terms of end result but treatment for ADHD worked much better than antidepressants.
It's kinda hard to not be depressed when you're not getting any dopamine from doing things I guess
> With ADHD this is pretty much a thing. If you also get the “funzies” where you sometimes “relieve” a moment in a way that is so real that you end up speaking out loud in response to the relived memory, you should probably consider getting it looked into.
Is this really a sign of ADHD? I always thought I was just a bit out there. Honestly, I'd be relieved to attribute it to something relatively common like ADHD rather than some mysterious brain quirk. Just the other day, I caught myself having a full-on conversation with my grandpa, who's been gone for over two years now. And it was crystal clear, all the details and everything!
Rehearsing and replaying conversations is common with ADHD, as is the "relieving a moment in a way that is so real that you end up speaking out loud in response to the relived memory" part.
I have something very similar. When I get very focused on something, you can ask me what I had for breakfast, and I'll vividly remember and recount making an omelette; but that was three weeks ago. This goes for pretty much anything, even very unique events. I can remember it well, but I can only place it within about an 8 month period, even if it was just a week or two ago. I'm quite nervous about ever having to be in a court proceeding, giving a deposition or anything like that where specific dates are required; it just escapes me how people remember this stuff.
Is it possible that you've fallen into a habitual life? I have almost a black hole in my memory from 3-year period that I spent mostly at home. After that period, I can look at a photo in my gallery and know almost the exact date when it happened. Or vice-versa, knowing where I was on a specific period 7 years ago.
ADHD is sometimes wittily described as time dyslexia, and while I haven't met anyone who has described symptoms as bad as this and also know friends with ADHD who play music seemingly effortlessly, this article was still very interesting to me.
I have understood and it also observed that meditation can help somewhat, and I wonder what else can help for people otherwise function well who struggle with time?
> ADHD is sometimes wittily described as time dyslexia
As someone with ADHD, this wildly misrepresents the actual disorder. ADHD itself has nothing to do with time, it has to do with executive function. Someone with ADHD can try to will themselves into doing something and simply not be able to. They'll try to make a command, and their body or brain will not listen to them. It will completely refuse to do what they tell it to.
This isn't supposed to happen; you're supposed to have control over what you do. You are supposed to be able to decide to do something, get up and simply do it. But with ADHD, it's not that simple. Even things that require no physical action are difficult, because it's not the actual movement that's hard, it's the decision-making itself. Hence "executive dysfunction".
Any "time dyslexia" effect, wrt scheduling and deadlines and etcetara, is just a symptom of it. The reason why people with ADHD procrastinate is not:
- because they don't know what time it is.
- because they don't know when their deadline is.
- because they don't know how much time they have.
- because they don't know how much time they need.
- because they don't know how easy or hard the task is.
It is because their brain wants to do something else more, and it's not urgent yet.
They absolutely cannot work on the task no matter how hard they try. They have not forgotten. They are not slacking off. They literally just can't do it. Their brain refuses to think about it, their body refuses to move for it. They don't have the willpower or the motivation for it. They are trapped. They are completely unable to make any progress because their brain will not let them.
That's what ADHD is.
Not everyone has it this bad, but ADHD is typically characterized by this happening for at least some things. It could be "showering more than once a week", it could be "doing the dishes before 20 of them have piled up in a big stack", it could be "preparing for a road trip days in advance". It doesn't have to be everything, and it doesn't have to be completely insurmountable, but if you have to have a complicated coping mechanism in order to manage to do something that you otherwise can't just decide to do, that's the disorder.
I realize my comment above can be read as "time dyslexia is the whole problem with ADHD" and that was not my intention. Thanks for your perspective!
I also totally agree that ADHD-ers know what time is.
That said, ADHD is a thing I have to deal with and for me and a number of those I know who have ADHD, "time dyslexia" is a very good explanation for a subset of the problems we observe.
> They absolutely cannot work on the task no matter how hard they try. They have not forgotten. They are not slacking off. They literally just can't do it. Their brain refuses to think about it, their body refuses to move for it. They don't have the willpower or the motivation for it. They are trapped. They are completely unable to make any progress because their brain will not let them.
Here it is you who are taking agency away from ADHD-ers.
Many can, it just takes a lot more effort than for other students/workers.
Things I have seen working:
- restricting oneself heavily so that the work at hand becomes the only possible thing to do
- conjuring up reasons why something is intersting
- pair programming
- various ways of sneaking up to the subject (start by fixing a few small issues, them improve a unit test, then make a small prototype, then take a look at the actual problem in question)
> Here it is you who are taking agency away from ADHD-ers.
What do you mean? All the mechanisms you've listed can be ways to help, yes, but you still can't just decide to do those things. You can try to reformat it or place it in some other context where it becomes doable, but these are specific coping mechanisms that shouldn't always be necessary, like they are for someone with severe enough ADHD.
I apologize for implying that all ADHD is that severe, I'll see if I can edit it to be more clear there, but I'm not trying to take agency away; I'm trying to point out how it results in that "time dyslexia", and why it's a disorder (rather than just, say, laziness).
> You can try to reformat it or place it in some other context where it becomes doable, but these are specific coping mechanisms that shouldn't always be necessary, like they are for someone with severe enough ADHD
>As someone with ADHD, this wildly misrepresents the actual disorder. ADHD itself has nothing to do with time, it has to do with executive function. Someone with ADHD can try to will themselves into doing something and simply not be able to.
That's misleading. ADHD does involve executive function issues, as it does other issues, including sensory issues like noise and light sensitivity (that have nothing to do with executive function), issues with body balance/proprioception (also nothing to do with executive function), issues like rejection sensitivity, as well as time issues ("time blindness").
ADHD presents a variety of symptoms, not the same ones for everyone. The “H” (“hyperactive”) part in particular often doesn’t manifest (and that’s how many children become undiagnosed adults- hyperactivity is easier to spot). If you don’t have time dislexia, that doesn’t mean that others don’t.
> If you don’t have time dislexia, that doesn’t mean that others don’t.
In this case it's important to define what "time dyslexia" even is. I was talking about how the phrase didn't accurately describe ADHD symptoms, but you seem to be talking about a third thing that does have a concrete definition. What definition is that?
Do you mean all of my dissociative identities? The answer is yes. DID can result in individual identities having different access to certain parts of the brain (for example, certain identities could have aphantasia while others have vivid imaginations), but as far as I'm aware, ADHD is a problem with the brain's reward system itself (the one that has to do with dopamine), so it affects the entire brain function, no matter which part.
However, I've been in situations where different identities can do things that I can't (i.e. switch in order to get out of bed in the morning), so I don't think anything is necessarily set in stone...
Ahem. That's what yours is. Mine is straight-up time defiance. I stopped caring about clocks and deadlines. You speak for yourself: attentional difference is a cluster, not a fixed set of symptoms and behaviours.
Another example, I'm not short of motivation. It's just there are so many interesting things to work on.
No, it's not just what mine is. It agrees with the clinical definition of ADHD, with the experiences of all who I have spoken to about it, including many friends, with multiple[0] articles[1] describing[2] the disorder[3], and so on.
Your time defiance is a symptom of a deeper problem. While I can't guarantee it's the exact same problem that I have, your disorder is certainly not just "time defiance", and if it truly is ADHD, the root of it will be executive dysfunction, as that is what defines the disorder.
> For example, I'm not short of motivation. It's just there are so many interesting things to work on.
I could say the same thing. But I can't choose which thing I work on. I want to draw. I want to code. I have hundreds of unfinished projects I could have finished. I have hundreds of abandoned hobbies I could have stayed with. Sure I have "motivation", but it's motivation to do whatever catches my interest at the moment, not motivation to do any of the things that I actually want to do.
Edit: based on interaction elsewhere in this thread, it seems I and LoganDark agree very much. I don't have time to rewrite this now, the compile finished a few minutes ago already, so just keep in mind that I and LoganDark seems to agree to a large degree when you read this.
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There are the medical definitions, and there are the things you understand when you have friends and family with ADHD and you hear them describe it.
Yes, executive function is the problem.
Also yes, thanks partially to that and frequent comorbidities ADHD-ers also experience:
- time blindness (maybe because flow is so much more important to ADHD-ers that they have learned to hold to it at all cost?)
- on average fewer slots in short time memory (I don't know it this is in DSM, but it is well known)
- anxiety and depression
- etc
Every doctor I have spoken to is well aware that ADHD has many problems in addition to the ones stated in the diagnostic criterias.
You say that, but as another anecdote, I'm fit and lift weights, and I don't eat junk food. I wish my sleep were better but that's not for lack of trying.
LoganDark's comment about some people with ADHD being absolutely unable to will themselves to do certain things describes me so well it's scary. It's something I've struggled with for years, and has affected me at work lately.
I've always known I'm not lazy or stupid, and in the last few years I discovered programming and taught myself software development. I fixate on things strongly yet I struggle to do mental work if it just so happens that I find it uninteresting or pointless. It's fucking me up. My therapist even pointed out a few weeks ago that it's a strong sign of ADHD, but I hate the thought of having that... I guess now I really should seriously explore this. I only know that I started feeling like my dev job is pointless even though it's a great job, and my coworkers are fantastic. It's more deep than just pointless but now I can barely will myself do anything related to work...
"Have you just tried not having ADHD?" is what I've been told thousands of times. Yeah man, I've tried. I am extremely fit, exercise all the time, have a great Vo2 max, lift weights, sleep 9 hours a night, and don't snore. I'm vegetarian and eat very little sugar (I've even done keto for five years with no change in symptoms).
If I was neurotypical, sleep and exercise would help a lot more. But I'm not. I instead have to use dozens of alarms on my phone, pair programming, hyperfocus training, and deadline panic to get through the work week. Home stuff remains in shambles, still haven't figured out how to do the dishes or put clothes away.
> poor general mental health which would be solved if the person in question didn’t mouthbreathe and eat sugar, and slept well and exercised regularly.
I cannot do those things.
I've been to physical therapy multiple times for things that are caused by a lack of physical activity. Their advice is the same every time: it would take less than 15 seconds every day to do a single stretch. Here are diagrams showing you how to do them. Look how easy it is.
But even that is too much. I don't want it to be too much, I know it's dead simple and any normal person would be able to do it without a second thought, but that is the problem. I'm not a normal person, and my brain doesn't work like a normal person's does. It does not let me do that.
It does not let me know when I should do that. If I set a timer/alarm, then when it goes off, I can't even listen to it. Either I just can't get up, or I want to finish what I'm doing first and then I completely forget.
This isn't something that I control. It's not something that I chose. And it's not something that I can fix by simply being less pathetic. Because as much as I'm aware of these behaviors and now ridiculous they are, I cannot help them. There is no way for me to just make myself do something.
AKA "time blindness", though I think "dyschronia" would be a better term, to match with dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, and dysgraphia.
(I think I also have it, though undiagnosed. Three of my last four web projects have been a clock, another clock, and a timeline. I still have a terrible problem with procrastination.)
Hah, I also make heavy usage of Todoist and notifications.
Got an old tablet on a cheapy plastic arm held above my monitor dedicated to my task list when working. It's set up to get my attention as and when tasks need starting.
Bit of a balancing act between having it make enough noise/vibrate to get my attention and not vibrating itself off its perch and making me jump out of my skin :)
I think it's interesting that HN in particular seems to be fascinated by brain injuries, myself included. Losing brain functionality is a scary thought for people who enjoy using their brains all day.
edit: also I find my HN comment history to be a really good check on my perception of time. It's weird to see the random thoughts I wrote out in my down time. I ALWAYS think, "wow that was 3 months ago?"
The person you replied to specifically said (emphasis mine) “people who enjoy using their brains all day”. The bit you removed is crucial. Most people want to have a functional brain, but that’s not the same as saying they like having their minds constantly engaged in demanding tasks. Otherwise we wouldn’t have “Sunday afternoon movies”.
I really think we’ll discover that programming is toxic for the brain. Mechanisms:
- Intense loss of memory, inability to remember names and faces, since everything can be written down all the time,
- Periods of flow interrupted by compilation time, change of topic (looking at the web), within a lot of stress (want to deliver the feature, excited to set up the architecture),
- Long hours working, sometimes into the night, thus grave loss of sleep,
- Sedentary intellectual-only work, no use of the body, and more importantly no use of facial features, no smile, no talking for hours and even years long.
- Eventually, social networks top up all those with intense context-switching and dopamine addiction,
Leading to early onset of Alzheimer, or, as we’ll call it, Eastbound Disease.
Of course that doesn’t have to be your fate! But programming takes you into that slippery slope very easily.
To anyone downloading: Please argument too, because I don’t understand, thank you.
Since nobody answered you: intriguing argument but that's not a byproduct of programming but of alienation. You don't have to live this way even if you love programming.
This is the first time I've heard lupus cause severe brain damage. Is this a rare occurrence? Since it's inflammation, could this same scenario happen with meningitis?
Psychosis is a potential symptom of lupus, albeit uncommon. Some people with lupus have been misdiagnosed with Schizophrenia, and more generally there are signs of immune dysfunction in many cases of Schizophrenia. I'm not sure about this particular scenario, but psychosis is also a potential symptom of meningitis, and brain inflammation can definitely cause weird behaviors (e.g. the account in the book Brain on Fire). It's not "severe damage" in the traditional sense, but depending on illness and treatment timeline there can be irreversible life-altering psychiatric consequences from brain inflammation.
"The shape of each synaesthete's year is different. (Image based on an original illustration by Carol Steen)"
Doesn't everyone have a weird, slightly wiggly loop in their head that represents the year? I don't stand in the middle of mine as described in the article, I view it like it's a diagram on a screen, and we move round it like game pieces on a board. The first six months of the year are comparatively compressed, with July and August largest the presence (they are on the left, roughly between ESE and NE).
Or I did, I haven't thought about it for a while, I think it might be one of the many things that having a pocket do-everything device has down-emphasised. Either that or moving hemispheres and changing the mapping between months and seasons has altered the way I think about it.
I always figured that at some formative point in my childhood I saw some sort of representation of a year like this and just internalised it fully.
In my experience, usually when you read in an article how people marvel at something someone does and you think "doesn't everyone do that?" the answer is no, they don't.
No, I've never thought of a year as having a shape and neither does anyone I know. If prompted to draw something they'd likely go with a clock-like circle but that's because that's how it's usually visualized (I think every kindergarden or elementary school has a picture showing the four seasons as clock-wise segments of a circle somewhere) but it's not how they "think" of it. If you told them to point to "September" they wouldn't point in a direction, they'd wonder what the heck you asked them to do.
I spent most of my life thinking the idea of thoughts being a "voice in your head" was a metaphor. Surely people who don't suffer from hallucinations don't literally have a voice in their head vocalizing their thoughts in full sentences, right? Thoughts are just nebulous "vibes" that need to be manifested into speech intentionally if you want to express them, right? Turns out no, I'm the weird one. Most people do have a voice in their head and it's usually only considered a problem when there's more than one or you don't like what it's saying.
I also spent most of my life thinking people don't really can see an object they imagine as if it were present and seeing things that aren't there means you're hallucinating. But again, no, I just have aphantasia and there are degrees of "visual imagination" but most people can indeed conjure up somewhat lifelike images (or at least relatively "hi-res renderings") in their mind, often with sound and smell (no, not just vibes, the actual perception of hearing and smelling) as well.
I also always thought "habit" was a fanciful way of saying you condition yourself to do one thing after another, like always putting the tooth paste in the same place after putting some on the brush head. Something that becomes easier after a while because you know the steps and can follow them like a mental to-do list. But no, many people can literally make themselves go through entire chains of actions without having to make deliberate decisions to do so at every point, just by repeating the same cycle of trigger & action enough times. And for them it sticks, too. They don't just do it for a few months and then phase out when they stop putting in the effort because it happens unconsciously. They don't get distracted by an intrusive thought halfway and then forget what they were doing. They don't have to "block the main thread" to do a habit, they have "userland background processes" in addition to the "system processes" like breathing and walking.
I used to think everyone had to do a conscious check on themselves to determine whether they need to go to the toilet, have a snack, drink something or get warm/cold before the emergency alarm kicks in and tells you have to do so right now or else. Again, no, most people somehow are just aware of that, like the desperation meters in the Sims games. If you ask them if they'd like something to eat and they aren't urgently hungry they can just tell you and don't actively need to think about it.
Oh and related to this article: I used to think nobody actually "felt" time really. It's just something that happens and as you grow older you learn that certain events or tasks take up certain amounts of time and when you know what time it was earlier and what has been done or happened since you'll have a good guess what time it is now and you can recalibrate by checking the time in between so your estimates get better. Nope! Tons of people can literally tell you the approximate time without wasting mental capacity on keeping track of all of that. They're able to do a thing, figure that they've already spent half an hour on something they expected to take fifteen minutes and call it quits rather than come out the other end six hours later wondering where the time went -- and when you tell them this is what it's like for you and they say they know what you mean that's only because they're talking about things they do while "in the flow", not literally doing anything.
There's a reason the neurodiversity movement uses the term "neurodiversity": it's not about individual clusters of neurodivergence. A person is neurodivergent or neurotypical. But people are neurodiverse. Always. Some people are time blind, some people have aphantasia, some people have both, most have neither. But across a non-trivial sample size you'll always have a diversity of neurotypes and everyone will be "weird" at least in some way, even if they share the same diagnostic label (or lack thereof). Heck, if you factor in enough variables, divergence is the norm rather than the exception.
Yes, people are very different. A friend recently told me that they, similarly, have no internal monologue, and seem to have aphantasia. Other friends are there on facebook wishing their internal monologue would just shut the hell up sometimes. Mine goes away pretty much only when I'm busy doing something.
Brains are fascinating and it's interesting to discover just how different people are.
I never got all the "don't worry about it, time travel is complicated" in sci-fi. Do people really have that much trouble with it? Or large distances in space, for that matter.
And it turns out, yes, I'm weird for being able to keep and resolve multiple timelines (and not get hung up on paradoxes), and it actually is weird that I can easily comprehend vast cosmic distances.
I had to resist saying "it's just two adjacent timelines offset by an hour" a few times with the recent time change.
I tried a 5mg THC edible last week (new user) and I lost my short term memory for about 50 hours. It was hell because I could still remember some things but my visual memory was 0, so it was like I was always coming out of a dark cloud that's 15 seconds behind me, but perceiving now in full clarity. It really messed with my perception of time. I wonder how many times I thought: "what's going on... ok you lost your short term memory... but now is so clear... but it won't be soon... how long has this been happening... " I cried 40 hours in because I didn't know if it would ever come back. Luckily it did and I'm here a week later with hopefully little scars.
Very similar happened to me smoking the first time. Mostly due to not knowing limit. Looking back I'd say it was like ~5x what would have done the job. To this day I need to carefully dose. Awesome time vs anxious time is not far apart dose-wise. Glhf!
That's... an interesting reaction. I'm sorry you had to go through it. What's notable for me is that this happened at such a low dose. Maybe there's something more to it in terms of interaction or reaction in your body?
This is my experience with THC and it's definitely anxiety inducing! A good reason to avoid the drug. I imagine that with the proper mindset, and in the proper setting, short term memory usage might be less important or even a hindrance. I could see this as a boon when playing silly games, goofing off in the ocean, or maybe doing something akin to talk therapy, but for anything I currently enjoy doing, holding onto a thought and following it to logical conclusions is a primary necessity.
Time, as we perceive it doesn't really exist. It's much more complicated than what we perceive, as it should be otherwise we would not be able to live in society. Our brains create the apparent linearity of time to give us a sense of progression. But it doesn't really work that way. In my opinion, no evidence here, we could even communicate with someone that lived in the past. Because that's not the absolute past. That person lives still in another layer of reality. As such there's no such thing as past and future. It's just a construct from our brains. That's my view. Not affirming anything.
I have an early childhood brain injury, and I don't perceive time passing. I never knew time.
I took a medication (abilify) that made me aware of the passage of time. It was excruciating, I had to stop. My brain had no framework for handling the input.
Wow, this comment made me confused as I thought you were talking about DMT so I searched and ended up in a redit talking about "what drug should I do Dph,dxm or DMT" The ignorance about drugs these days is mind blowing considering the available info. I would post a link to redit message but its not worth it. Seriously the first 3 replies are the most ignorant destructive replies I have seen in a while.
My hot take is that you shouldn't take any of them. Especially DXM and DPH. But even DMT, the things you can learn on drugs, you can learn on other, safer ways.
I remember reading stories about people who took a substance (can't remember which) and lived entire imaginary lives in a fantasy world in real-time: that is for years, they go to school, have kids, go to work, etc., until they wake up and it would have been only 15 minutes in actual life.
That's Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the chemical produced by our Pineal Gland which is related to dreaming and is released in massive quantities upon birth and death (IIRC).
It's produced in several plants including Mimosa Hostilis and Acacia Confusa, and can be extracted into a tea called Ayahuasca, or into pure DMT crystals which can be smoked in a process similar to smoking meth.
People claim to have human experiences like you describe, but I've only ever gotten the type of DMT trip that completely unravels the human meaning of things.
Rick and Morty's Roy: A Life Well Lived is the only one reference I ever heard of. But its unsurprising - near-death experience produces some wild reactions and our minds love tripping around for some reason
I forgot about the time distortion from that! When I was in high school I like to get to first or 2nd plateau and ride around town on my bike listening to music on my MP3 player.
The last paragraph where she describes her life six years later is pretty much exactly what adhd is like.
“I use to-do lists to keep myself on track. I triple-check the rehearsal dates on emails I send my students to make sure I haven’t listed the wrong day or month, although sometimes mistakes still slip through. I also sometimes struggle to remember how far back events in my past happened. I’ll catch myself wondering if I had the oil in my car changed three months ago or a year ago.”
I’ve always regarded the ability to remember when the last oil change or when you registered your car was to be some kind of exotic magic trick that everyone but me can do, like I’m living in a world full of savants with abilities I’ll never have.
My biggest problem on the job is that I don’t really have any sense of how things take; I work on something for as long as it stays interesting or until it’s done. My project time estimates are hilariously bad. I have no idea how long it took me to do something after the fact, until I get congratulated or reprimanded by my boss.
For me, it’s kind of like being colorblind and being told I’m stupid my whole life because I can’t separate the red m&ms from the brown ones.
> Six years after my recovery, my memory overall is not as sharp as it was before my illness. I use to-do lists to keep myself on track. I triple-check the rehearsal dates on emails I send my students to make sure I haven’t listed the wrong day or month, although sometimes mistakes still slip through. I also sometimes struggle to remember how far back events in my past happened. I’ll catch myself wondering if I had the oil in my car changed three months ago or a year ago. But every time I take my viola out of its case, I feel grateful to be able to think like a musician again.
Probably a testament more to the savant like intelligence of a classically trained musician than an objective description of someone’s stunted recovery.
For me, I exercise the same extra work to keep up with my day to day, though to my knowledge, have never had a traumatic brain injury.
I remember serious time slowdown - eg distortion of sound pitch, just like with slowed down grammaphone with overuse of cannabis back in the university times. It was interesting, but not pleasant. But I guess thats quite common thing for many drugs.
Later on I have thought-trained myself to think of time of something arbitrary - I can more-less think of future and past to anytime I wish to. So distant pleasant memories are just as 5 min ago, and something unpleasant is consciously very far in past. It is like being able to time-travel, and it can be quite inspiring and revealing thing. Can be confusing also, I can see and feel myself as 25 years younger (as 20yr old) anytime, but the others probably dont.
I don't have much difficulty perceiving time in general, but I have a dissociative disorder that can really, really fuck with it: Dissociative Identity Disorder, formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder. (It's not an "identity disorder", but a "dissociative identity" disorder, the clinical name for the so-called "personalities".)
When one of the other "personalities" is out in my place, that length of time will be lost to me. As if I just teleported forward. Things that happened before the event will feel more recent than they really were, and things that happened during the event, I won't remember at all. Because those memories weren't mine to begin with - they are memories of someone else that lives in my head.
This results in a lot of very fun situations, but it mostly results in me losing big chunks of my life and not knowing things that just so happen to have been told to someone other than me. (I didn't forget, those memories just belong to someone else!)
I've also had some small number of dissociative episodes, which are even worse because I can get really extreme time dilation during the episode, but also phantom sensations like endless pain and suffering-- you get the idea. It can get really really fucked.
I'm lucky not to have completely lost my sense of time, but having to figure out a bunch of identity stuff every single day is very Fun. Sometimes it's actually fun and other times it's the big existential crisis that never ends.
My trauma really isn't healable, on top of just getting a healthy dose of Fresh trauma a few weeks ago.
Honestly, DID isn't meant to be cured and coping sort of just consists of accepting that this is your life now. Now, I did a lot more than that because I encouraged plurality and allowed each identity to express themselves and have fun lives, and that's honestly probably the best coping that could have been done. Living life as multiple is just different.
Some people are able to integrate and become just one person, but I would rather die than do that. Being multiple is my identity. Without that, I'd be lost.
I'm surprised we can even do anything. The delay seeing something until the signal gets to my brain then to process it and then to act takes ages. We all live in the past by about 30ms to 120ms.
Brain issues are always so fascinating. The subjective experience is to diagnose a faulty sensor using the sensor. The brain that both I and the author agree seems to be acting up also wrote this article.
Did it mess with your ability to perceive time, or alter your recollection of how you once perceived time, or alter your ability to assess your perception of time, or activate a hidden "too aware of second-order time phenomena" organ
It seems like the altered time perception caused behaviors in the moment like interrupting others that can be verified by others, so probably this is not an issue with recall/ability to assess perception of time.
These experiences really make me wonder how much of time is fundamental in the universe and how much of it is just a subjective experience created by the brain.
I am experiencing hallucination and memory issues for the first time after having a cardiac event very recently at a relatively young 45.
On top of one eye being nearsighted and the other being far sighted, the closest I would describe this is ocular and mental auto correc/complete powered by low horse power gpt.
This could be liberating or terrifying. If you don’t notice time passing, does it feel like you’re just in some eternal existence beyond time, where you have all the time in the world? Or do you just instantly come to a realization some day that time is up and you’re dead?
What about solitude, solitary confinement, social isolation, with respect to the perception of time ? How much of it is link to a physiological injury like inflammation vs loss of markers ?
I was imprisoned on false charges and tortured by the United States government. A precedent-setting appeal freed me, but not before I spent a long time in solitary confinement, much of that on a hunger strike.
Solitary confinement causes brain damage so severe it is visible on a CT scan. The area that it damages is the hippocampus, which is key of in the perception of time and spatial memory. I can still perceive time on an immediate basis, in terms of music and speech, but a year goes by in a haze. Short seconds, like walking into another room, seem to pass slowly against the rapid progress of my thoughts which are now unanchored to the immediate physical realm and I forget what I went to the other room for if there's not a persistent reminder such as hunger or the need to use the toilet to remind me. I write what I plan to do into a notes app before I move anywhere, even one room over in my own house. Living a normal life has become impossible.
Malnutrition probably didn't help with respect to the CT injuries.
Does in-person conversation help to stabilize your flow of time ?
Can piggybacking on someone else (like a helper, or group activities) help you recover your own sense of longer term coherency by synchronizing your flow with others ?
> Does in-person conversation help to stabilize your flow of time?
No, it makes it a lot harder. It's easiest on a short-term basis if I constantly echo a phrase over and over in my head, like an internal metronome. I can't do that and talk at the same time. Nothing really helps, it is actual physical damage to your brain and nobody knows how to fix it. The best thing is to just accept that your brain is really broken and start finding mnemonics and workarounds to get by.
I think that the forced repetition of thoughts to compensate for memory also primes the brain for anxiety, long-term.
I use my music memory to do things when continuity breaks down. I think of a short, familiar melody, and attach words to it based on what I need to do. Like getting a song stuck in my head on purpose. As I move through rooms, I gain and lose awareness and I probably won't know what I was up to by the time I arrive - but then I notice a melody with instructions is playing in my head.
Anything that leaves my visual field can leave my awareness. I have found that attaching clothespins to my shirt with a post-it is helpful for more complex tasks.
Following conversation is hard for me. At some point I want to look into using an AAC device to both track where a conversation has been and remember what I'm trying to say.
My brain injury happened when I was a child, but wasn't diagnosed until I was nearly 30. There really aren't many resources available for anyone outside of the education system.
Smaller animals seem to have much faster muscle twitch and reaction time. It's very likely that they perceive the finer motor control much faster than humans. But if a fly can dodge raindrops, what must it be thinking when it's sitting on a windowsill for like an hour? Is that like 3 days for it?
The world stood still every time I did mushrooms. Check the clock at 9:30, trip all night long, check the clock again and it's only 10:15.
If you're having a good trip it's a divine gift, you get to trip for like 20 hours in under 3 or 4 hours. But if you're having a bad trip it's the 17th layer of hell and you have to keep going back to the beginning every time you think about time.
Pets are good at learning your schedule. They know when you normally come home, or when you feed them, and they start to get impatient if you're late in either.
Sure, that example relies on another factor as a frame of reference (hunger, or the sun setting). But don't humans do that as well? Our sense of time shifts dramatically when we're kept indoors without the ability to see natural light.
We actually just had a cat change her food seeking behavior by exactly 1 hour during daylight savings, which allowed us to mostly exclude her internal clock and time sense.
I'm not sure there is even a way to study the fact that other people have the same sense of time that we do - I think this would fall under qualia. We just assume it's roughly the same like I should see the blue you see.
Regardless it's clear from training our dogs that they feel impatience, which I think would be best described as a rising sense of discomfort over time. A younger dog and/or one with less training will get up more quickly by itself seeking a reward, while after more training they can put those thoughts aside and wait through it. After a tough day of training or sports, just like us they have less willpower remaining and are more likely to revert.
And right now it's 3:30 pm and he's letting me know the school kids have left the neighbourhood so it's time for his walk. I'd chalk this reaction up to other factors like the noise outside but it happens during the holidays too.
From what I've read, dogs can smell time through the decay of scent particles. They don't know that an hour has passed, but they know that something doesn't smell as strongly. They understand day/night, but don't understand the concept of time the way we do.
Regardless, the dogs I've known have known the exact time for breakfast and dinner better than any humans I've known, and without any clocks to look at
My dog is an odd ball weirdo... he will have a whole bowl of food and not eat it until you spoon feed it to him or drop a few pieces on the ground first. Or he will eat it all in the middle of the night when I'm asleep. I end up just leaving a full bowl for him all the time cause I never know when he's hungry. I've tried to schedule him for food and he just won't go along with it at all.
My cat badgers me when I'm up too late (midnight) even though it's been hours since the sun set. She badgers me if I sleep in too long on the weekends, etc.
She seems to have an idea of the day-to-day schedule and get's upset if it's not followed.
So at least cats seem to display evidence of knowing a "schedule" based on more cues then just daylight/hunger
I've anecdotally seen plenty of evidence for object / other being permanence. However I don't know offhand of a good study design for gauging the perception of time rather than other factors like hunger, restroom need, sleep, etc.
She originally started running to self-treat her seizures, but eventually running no longer staved them off.
Oddly, not being able to perceive time may have benefitted her running:
> Dr. Gerber credits her endurance in part to her brain limitations. He says runners who can better track time and map where they are can be distracted by the details. But Van Deren has a special facility for what he calls “flow” that lets her transcend the anguish of running long. “It’s a mental state,” Gerber says. “You become enmeshed in what you’re doing. It’s almost Zen. She can run for hours and not know how long she’s been going.”
https://www.runnersworld.com/runners-stories/a21763474/fixin...
I first heard about her on Radiolab:
https://radiolab.org/podcast/122291-in-running