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A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

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Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#91

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 wil…

I truly understand you. I've researched into this for a long time but found that it's not currently curable.

Have you tried healing your trauma? Please share anything you've tried or done to cope with DID.

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#93
post #89

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…

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 i…

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?

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#94
post #89

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…

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 i…

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.

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#95
post #64

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 tim…

To put this comment into more context:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weev

(rabite has been open about his real name and identity on this platform)

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#96
"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.

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#97
post #3

Do animals have a sense of time in the same sense we do?

Anecdotal and very "noisey". 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

Ha, yeah our male cat will come and shout at us if he thinks we're up too late!

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#99
post #43

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?"

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 n…

I don't think any of these are exclusive to programming. You can fit in any addictive activity into this template.

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#100
post #82

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?

Having my watch nudge me on the hour has improved my perception of time immensely

Thanks! Will try something along the lines.

When I am in flow state however something more drastic might be needed : )

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