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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

#111
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for your feedback. I feel sorry for you. 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 broke…

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.

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#112
post #93
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

> "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".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Siffre

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stefania_Follini

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#113
post #19

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 runner…

This was such a great listen, I came here to comment this and was glad that it was already here.

It is amazing to realise that many of the physical limitations we have are coming from the brain.

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#114

On very high doses of DXM it felt like I was in hell for eternity. It sucked, would not recommend.

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.

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#115
The following is not really related to time perception per se, but a fascinating look into memory:

"A REVIEW OF 80 YEARS OF MEMORIES INDUCTED BY ELECTRICAL BRAIN STIMULATION"

https://web.archive.org/web/20200126062547/http://gpe.ups-tl...

(Source data for this paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S014976341...)

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. [0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63697.The_Man_Who_Mistoo...

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…

Somewhat related, a survey of how Norwegian people visualize time:

https://nrkbeta.no/2018/01/01/this-is-what-the-year-actually...

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#117
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?"

> Losing brain functionality is a scary thought for people who enjoy using their brains all day.

I'm fairly sure people outside of HN enjoy using their brains too, I'd say the vast majority of people do

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#118

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?

> time dyslexia

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.)

Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#119

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 t…

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Re: A brain injury removed my ability to perceive time

#120
post #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 compresse…

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.

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