While reading the book Time, Love, Memory I ran across the phrase, time-blind. It was used in the context of saying that without clock genes, genes that define our circadian rythm, we would be time-blind. Is this possible, are there people who have no concept of the passage of time?
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Yes: Tralfamadorians.
Oliver Sacks has an article in a recent New Yorker about Clive Wearing, a musician who suffered brain damage and has essentially no functioning memory. He cannot remember events more than a few seconds into the past. Evidently, he does not notice the passge of time. But I’m not sure if this is the kind of example you are looking for.
Is this possible, are there people who have no concept of the passage of time?
It’s a well-known fact that the emanations from computers interfere with the human time-sense.
What, you mean you’ve never looked up from your monitor to be shocked that it’s now five hours later than the last time you checked (and at least four hours longer than the time you’d originally planned on spending on the machine?)
Wow! This immediately struck a chord with me. I have been using the term ‘time-blindness’ to try to describe to my nearest and dearest why I rely so heavily on clocks, calendars and any other aid i can get my hands on (iPaqs, watch alarms, etc). I don’t think I have a concept of time passing.
I also suffer from Aspergers and have wondered if this is a manifestation of the condition. A small but illustrative example: if I get a haircut, I come out of the barbers thinking “I’ve just had a haircut”. The trouble is, I continue to think that, even months after the event, until my hair is getting quite long – I still think “I’ve just had a haircut”. It’s as if the passage of time hasn’t registered AT ALL.
I would like to know more about this condition. I have always been completely and utterly hopeless at anything related to time. ‘twould be nice to know that there may be a psychological or physiological basis for it, and I’m not just a “hopeless” case.
Well, depends what you mean.
There’s akinetopsia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akinetopsia),
and as far as clock genes are concerned, there has been lots of investigation into the possible role of clock genes in certain affective disorders (mono/bi-polar depressions, SAD, etc.) Check out http://www.scienceblogs.com/clocks for some great information.
Isn’t that the premise of one of the characters in Adam Sandler’s ’50 First Dates”?
I’m certainly time-blind when it comes to perusing the blogosphere….
No.
Get addicted to an online MMORPG and you’ll get a good taste of time-blindness. You’ll also get to experience: pale skin, weight gain, zero social activities(real ones that is), and very possibly unemployment.
Might I suggest World of Warcraft as a starting point? :-)
“Time-blind” is a cutesy term designed for press releases. The connection between circadian timing and the cognitive abilities of time perception have been studied a little bit, but the results are not very impressive. Apparently, time perception is independent of the circadian clock except for mild daily modulations, e.g., the subjective perception of the rate of time-passage changes with time of day (and also with body temperature, e.g., fever – it is hard to untangle those two, but I proposed a possible experiment at the very bottom of this post).
It seems to me that an immediate consequence of having problems with the “clock genes” would be an inability to time an appropriate sleep schedule. Perhaps narcolepsy is related. Perhaps also, given that nobody can go without sleep forever without becoming seriously damaged, you don’t see complete dysfunction of the clock-genes in higher organisms given the relationship of sleep to continued life and survival. In other words: an individual without proper function dies and is therefore not observed such that they can be clinically diagnosed.
I, too, can attest that WoW can destroy your perception of time passage.
“I’ll just farm for half an hour, until I get 5 motes of fire…”
….
…
“Ok, five motes of HOLY CRAP it’s 2am in the morning??”
I can’t speak for all narcoleptics, but I have a pretty clear sense of time. I can usually guess pretty accurately what time it is. I don’t, however, seem to have any kind of circadian rhythm. I’m as sleepy at breakfast as I am at 3 am when I can’t sleep. I’ve worked second shift, and I work 9-5 now, with no difference in sleep quality.
I can’t relate to the concept of “sleep schedule”. :)
No, they know what causes Narcoleptic. The brains of narcoleptics simply doesn’t have enough of a specific cell type that produces a neurochemical responsible for telling the brain that its supposed to be “on”. Without that chemical, you get the equivalent of a computer in standby mode. Lots of power to the motherboard, but no on switch. With an insufficient amount, you get something a bit like “dirty” power, where a computer will switch off intermittently, because the level of power to the MB drops below a stable threshold. Mind you, this is probably a bad analogy, but its closer than anything else I can think of at the moment. So, the problem basically comes down to that they get the “wake up!” signal from the chemical, but then the brain *uses up* that chemical too quickly, going into standby mode again, until enough of the chemical has been produced to once more signal “wake up!”, then it gets used up again, etc. The only thing clock genes regulate in the system is the primary sleep pattern, which determines when those specialized cells are **supposed** to be ramping up or slowing down production. As far as I know, they haven’t detected any cases where the clock wasn’t working right, just the on/off mechanism.
Mind you, since the effect is the same in both cases, it might be possible, though I would suspect that a “clock” that was far enough out of synch to cause extreme fluxiations in production of the neurochemical would either a) appear to have no effect, since the brain would never *run out* of the chemical, b) be so extreme that they never wake up at all, ever, or c) in a more mild case, simply cause significant deviations in what the normal sleep pattern for someone was (like a 24 hour awake, then 10 hours down time effect, or 8 hours up and 4 down, etc.). It probably couldn’t cause a narcoleptic style effect without having severe consequences beyond mere sleep pattern disruptions.
I tend to suspect that minor wobbles can be survivable, but radical shifts would either be disastrous or shorten life spans by *huge* amounts.
@Tom (post #3):
Time perception as you describe it does not have to be a result of Asperger. I know someone with Asperger and that person can tell me the time( within 5 minutes or so) without having seen a clock for days.
After a period of severe stress in my life, I realized I had lost what I call my ‘time line’. I cannot judge how long ago something occurred in my life. An example: someone asks when was the last time I saw my doctor. “I don’t know, about three months ago” is my response, when it may actually have been a year or more. I have no concept of when what happened, happened. This has been on-going for about 20 years. I have to keep a written record to look up this type of information.
In a biography of Richard Feynmann it was stated that he trained himself to accurately say how much time had passed between two events without referring to a clock. He could also time how long he would sleep, and wake at the time he specified, without using an alarm.
He was also a bongo-player. Perhaps his sense of rhythm expressed itself across diverse talents and skils.
It’s abundantly clear there are humans with no awareness of history, but that’s not the same thing.
Kagehi – I’ve never heard an explanation quite like that before. Have you studied narcolepsy? Narcolepsy is pretty poorly understood, and the most I’ve really had explained is that my production of hypocretin doesn’t work right. Your explanation seems to make a lot of sense for what I experience. Thanks!
“Is this possible, are there people who have no concept of the passage of time?”
Absolutly. I have two examples. 1) anyone who plays Civilization. all sense of the passage of time is gone. 2) my father. He still thinks its the 50s.
Tom (post #4): I don’t know thing one about Aspergers, but I can relate about the time passage thing. I have utterly no sense of time. I can’t guess what what time, or even day it is with any degree of accuracy. My hair is now to the small of my back, since I’ve discovered it’s easier to just have long hair than to keep track of knowing when to cut it. I was amazed to learn yesterday that it was November already, as it seems to me that school has just started. I guess what I’m saying here is that sometimes it feels good to know you’re not alone in the world, so thank you.
Now, would you kindly call my mother and explain to her that this is entirely possible, and I’m not actively trying to drive her crazy?
Conscious time sense must be a much higher level of organization than circadian rhythms and even lower clocks. If you don’t find that people who lack a conscious recognition of time also have fairly severe physiological disturbances (extremely fat, extremely thin or worse, like rats in circ experiments), it follows that these basic physiological clocks at most act as cues to peoples time-awareness.
A physiological time-sense isn’t just essential for thought – it makes or breaks basic survival.
Being that there are people and entire cultures who have very poor recognition of time passing (things happened not now or now – occurs in some non-agricultural cultures and folks up-thread) but are healthy, the last must be the case. What brain structures are hijacked for time sense? I don’t think there’s any good evidence about that – even circadian rhythm research is still fairly rudimentary.
Good post harderkid.. clearly lots of fun in this one.
Inky:
“…HOLY CRAP it’s 2am in the morning??”
That’s no reason to be surprised. If it were 2am in the afternoon, then you’d have something.
This message brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
It still bears repeating.
On another note, there once was an experiment where people lived in a basement for weeks or months with no external cues of time. The idea was to find out their internal wake-sleep patterns. Lo and behold, diversity. Some took a nap every 4 hours. Others turned out to have a 50-hour day that included sleeping 16 hours at once (and were surprised at the end of the experiment that it had taken much longer than they had thought).
For the record, I bet I belong in the latter group, except that I sleep 10 hours out of 24…
It still bears repeating.
On another note, there once was an experiment where people lived in a basement for weeks or months with no external cues of time. The idea was to find out their internal wake-sleep patterns. Lo and behold, diversity. Some took a nap every 4 hours. Others turned out to have a 50-hour day that included sleeping 16 hours at once (and were surprised at the end of the experiment that it had taken much longer than they had thought).
For the record, I bet I belong in the latter group, except that I sleep 10 hours out of 24…
I’m a bit curious about all this. I tend to have a very good sense of time passing. I can read a book… work.. drive.. do just about anything (includign WoW) and maintain a fairly accurate sense of what time it is. I’m rarely more than 10 minutes off.
I sleep without an alarm clock, because (unless I’m ill) I wake up when I tell myself to.
On the other hand – when I’m missioning in Eve-Online, and even with the clock *right there in front of me* I find I can completely lose track of time. For this, I’ve put an alarm clock on the other side of the room so I can be sure to get my 5 hours of sleep. (If I put it on my desk, I just turn it off and continue blasting Caldari pirates)
However – this is the micro scale. On the macro scale, all bets are off. There’s “an hour ago”. There’s “Yesterday”, There’s “A week ago” and then there’s “Uh… maybe in March?” I know the age of my children – but I have to use that to calculate back to what year they were born. I know how long I’ve been married, but, again, I have to calculate back to determine the year (1983 for those of you who care) I last tricked the woman who is now my wife.
All this is beside the point, I think, though. Is there a relatively normal human being who doesn’t sense time passing? I don’t think it’s possible. WIthout a sense of time of some sort, rational thought should be impossible. You can’t get –> here from –> there without following a chain, and you can’t follow ANYTHING without time getting involved.
I would think most mammals have some sense of time.. without it, training to perform a specific task becomes impossible. Sure, it’s not sophisticated or precise as our own, but training involves the use of the future, and if you have no sense of time, you have no sense of ‘future’
Oopsie. I completely missed the joke. Too tired. I interpreted it to mean that if you had confused not 4 but 16 hours with 1 hour, that would be something to write home about, and agreed with that.
Oopsie. I completely missed the joke. Too tired. I interpreted it to mean that if you had confused not 4 but 16 hours with 1 hour, that would be something to write home about, and agreed with that.
On the micro scale, I have absolutely no idea how long any task might take. No matter if I’ve already done it 10 times. When I see that I run out of time, I think I just need to speed up, even though this has never worked before. That way I can miss a train while gazing at a clock all the time.
On the micro scale, I have absolutely no idea how long any task might take. No matter if I’ve already done it 10 times. When I see that I run out of time, I think I just need to speed up, even though this has never worked before. That way I can miss a train while gazing at a clock all the time.
Regarding the connection between circadian rhythms and the knowledge of the passage of time, I offer up my husband as a case study.
He doesn’t sleep regularly, and has not for more than 10 years. He doesn’t have any one time he gets ‘sleepy’, just stays awake until he’s too exhausted to stay awake any more. He’s hell to wake up at almost any time if he’s not left to sleep until he wakes up. Sometimes he sleeps for 12-20 hours at a time, sometimes for less than an hour. I’m not sure how bad this was when he was younger, but his mother says he never slept ‘normally’.
So. His circadian rhythms must sound like a punk/emo fusion band.
He has almost no time sense. Even when well rested, he’ll sit down to do something ‘for ten minutes’ and do it for 4 hours. He is often startled when he realizes his workday is done, and will unintentionally work overtime because he ‘didn’t realize it was quitting time’. I’ll watch him do something (like fold laundry or the like) and when he’s done ask him how long it took him. He’ll say ‘ten minutes?’ when it’s more than an hour.
I don’t know if his chronic exhaustion has caused the ‘time-blindness’, or both things are a symptom of something else.
I randomly delurked to post this. I adore this blog.
Lurchgs,
Is it possible to just differentiate not-now from now? There are languages that are constructed that way. Does that mean that those folks don’t, usually, rigorously distinguish the past from the future? Descriptions of time as cyclical were fairly common (sometimes with rigorous time-keeping, sometimes without the bare rudiments).
So then, what does ‘keeping time’ mean? Obviously mammals (and I’d guess anyone with a CNS) have to have a concept of sequence and position in that sequence, at least in the short term. But that seems more related to an innate sense of counting than what we usually mean by a time-sense. “On 3, we go”.
Measuring time is probably more variable. A lot of things that we do by measuring time can be done just as easily by sequencing. “When do we pick the fruit? When they’re ripe.” “When is ‘master’ home? When the sky starts to get dark.”
Very micro time sense is important for predator-prey interactions. But more than that? Telling 10 minutes from 2 hours? Probably not that important for most people and mammals until industrial society. So maybe we don’t have innate time sense, but some (most) people are capable of developing it. Small children don’t seem to have it, in my experience.
David M, the people in the circ. rhythm experiment were living in a mine – a house would let in too many clues. I was fascinated to read about it.
There’s a nice summary of the science of circadian rhythms, brain chemistry, etc. on Learn Genetics Utah: clock genes.
He could also time how long he would sleep, and wake at the time he specified, without using an alarm.
I am always amazed that I can do this too. If I spend 2 or 3 minutes concentrating on what time I want to wake up, I will almost always wake up at exactly that time, often to within just 3 or 4 minutes on the clock. This works even for odd wake-up times (e.g., wake up at 4:30 for an early flight).
And my god how many weirdos this post seems to have drawn out! I love it…
I’ve certainly wound up driving behind many, many people whose ability to understand that people behind them might be on a demanding schedule seems to have been eliminated by severe brain trauma. I can’t say I’ve met someone who really has no sense of the passage of time. I’ve noticed, though, that the ability to estimate how much time has passed seems to be a learned skill (at least, people, including me, get better at it as they age, and, it seems, in response to repeated situations where they need to register it).
Thoughtfully, fraughtfully,
Einstein says seconds feel
Longer than weeks if
Your hand’s getting fried;
Hours, however, are
Infinitesimal
Spent on the porch with your
Love by your side
I’ve been trying to (re)read Antonio Damasio’s book The Feeling of What Happens, full of very interesting observations and theories about the nature of consciousness (I find it very hard going because his language is just a bit too abstract – perhaps partly a consequence of his native language being Portuguese, so that he naturally uses a more Latinate vocabulary than a native English- or German-speaker would, but also because it’s an intrinsically difficult area). The process he describes of the ‘autobiographical self’ being constructed through iterative ‘self’-reference by parallel ‘multiple drafts’ (cf. Dennett) of ‘core consciousness’ does seem to fit a lot of observations. The iteration implies a definite order of events (hence a local sense of time, while the parallelism (and unreliability and state-dependence of memory) makes the sense of time locally or more generally fuzzy. The book gradually moves into more and more neuroanatomical detail that I probably don’t need. It would be interesting to hear from someone who can handle his neurological detail and has thought about how it fits in with the clock-genes and other stuff in Time, Love, Memory.
I have problems with sensing how many days had passed since certain events have occurred, unless I happen to remember via sequencing with other remembered events that lead up to the present day (or the associated month/day/year itself is memorable). I would get asked about something that occurred a mere week ago, and think that the event happened several weeks ago instead. Or events over the years would tend to blend in with each other, so that it gets confusing what happened in which year of my life.
Strangely, although I would sense that a long time has passed, I would not recall doing much during that time. This, I suspect, is due to my focus on the immediate stuff in my life, and not really the long term effects of what I do today (thus my forgetting the details of what I did).
So, last year I started keeping a sort of journal at my workplace. It’s simply just me typing out my duties for the day into an ever-open Word document. As I finish each task, I bold them instead of erasing them. I also add in personal commentary about the day that interests me (weather, food I want to eat at the moment, etc.), as well as miscellaneous business info like names, phone #s, reference #s, tracking #s, times things were scheduled/done, pricing, etc. (all color-coded for easy skimming).
All the daily entries for each month in my “journal” get saved into individual Word documents filed by month and year. This way I can just scroll through a certain month to see the sequence of events from day to day (oldest day and tasks on top, most recent at bottom), as well as use the “Find” function more efficiently. These files tend to go up to around 40+ pages per month (imagine my horror when I accidentally clicked “Print”!).
Despite my having continued keeping this “journal” for over a year now, I am not really a journal-keeping person to begin with. Earlier attempts involved me starting to view daily journal-writing as a chore, taking a single break from it for a day, and then never looking back. My present self wishes that my past self had left some kind of written clue as to what happened during that time I wrote nothing. Having a good grasp of what happened at what point of my life gives me a stronger sense of who I am and what my experiences are. That is why I like how my current “journal” is coming along.
The beauty of my “journal” at my workplace is that:
1) I can make and change entries as things happen (so no having to think back at the end of the day when I’m tired)
2) I always have something work-related to type in (so no pressure to come up with something to enter)
3) I can make my entries as long or short as I want (which a schedule book or calendar program simply does not allow me to do)
4) It’s not a daily work report that I have to show to my boss (so I can honestly prioritize and schedule my work day without having to fear that I appear to not be working enough) (nor do I have to make the entries make sense to anyone but me)
5) I can copy&paste reminders from previous days
6) It allows me to store detailed information that may or may not come in handy later on (like the phone number of that place where we ordered that thing for the floor back in January)
7) I can make copies and email the files to myself (so no missing post-it notes or misplaced journal book)
Sorry about the above rambling, but my point is that for those who (like me) forget the passage of time, it really helps to have a reminder of what makes them who they are. I am planning to keep these journal files even if I switch jobs ( (#8) it makes it easier to write my future resumes!), and to continue them for as long as I can.
I think is a really interesting discussion.
I always found it cool when I first started really getting into science, about things that the general populus just doesn’t realise science is churning out.
One of my favourites is the concept of “Almost Human” where animals can take on traits that are thought to be peculiarly human-esque, such as elephants doing artwork, chimps and dolphins having sex for fun, or even the antiquity of ants using agriculture and medicine.
The reverse are humans that are missing traits generally just considered standard package – especially by design/creation types. One I know a bit about is facial recognition. Brain damage, and birth defects can leave people with just the inability to recognise a (oughta-be) familiar face. They see a person, even the colour of the hair and eyes, but can’t exactly assemble the face and align it to a memory of that person.
“Time blind” would be something similar. Not amnesia, which is an inability to recall events and memories, but just an inability to evaluate “time” unaided (or perhaps in dire conditions, even with a simple aid, such as metronome, I don’t see how someone could lose the ability to read a clock).
Oh, and yes, World of Warcraft and other computer-aided things do induce it (such as Halo 3, Wikipedia, and Neopets). Maybe there is some radiation affect on our circadian rhythm??
I’m sure someone nailed it already but, just in case the message was lost in the WOWing above, time-blind in the context of circadian clock mutants is not the same as unable to perceive the passage of time.
Time-blind in the context of the circadian molecular clock means unable to entrain physiology and behaviour to light/dark cycles.
Being unable to perceive passage of time is something completely different.
P.
(getting flashbacks to the hamster labs)
I know someone who has the same issue as reported by David Marjanovic @ 27 above. It leads to surreal conversations in which you agree that you going to leave for the airport in 15 minutes time, and 3 minutes later catch him on the way out of the door saying “I’ll just nip down to the supermarket”, an outing which takes 45 minutes absolute minimum. It can be quite a handicap for him in professional life. In the family, we refer to it as “dysclocksia” and refuse ever to make arrangments to meet him somewhere that’s it’s not possible to sit down and buy a drink.
IN about 1987, when I was just a lad playing games on the IBM XT clone we had, I invented a fictional disorder called CUTDS – Computer User’s Time Distortion Syndrome – to explain why several games of Starflight took me to the sunrise.
Nope. Don’t study any of this stuff, but I read damn near anything that crosses a table and smells of scientific studies. lol In this case, the determination of what is really happening occured **very** recently, like 1-2 years ago at most, which is why its not been well understood until now. Basic rundown is:
1. Lab trying a new diet drug found mice where eating less, but oddly, gaining weight.
2. Lab put in cameras, to see what the night time activity was.
3. Lab discovers that mice taking the new drug are suffering classic Narcoleptic episodes.
4. Tests get done to see if some neurotransmitter is being effected. Only one shows up as being suppressed, and its one previously unidentified.
5. Knockouts to the cells that “specifically” produce it show that reduced numbers of those cells produce Narcolepcy.
6. Tests are done on human patients to determine if the same cell types exist and in what number. Its verified that *every* patient they check with Narcolepcy has an abnormally low number of these cells.
7. Introduction of the same transmitter artificially has the effect of a) keeping them awake, and b) gets lots of scary press, because some people are afraid that if it became over the counter, or well known, companies might feed it to their employees, to make them work longer (being as there doesn’t seem to be any negative cognitive side effect of being awake longer from this drug, its trying to stay awake past when the transmitter production starts to ebb that seems to scramble a persons brains.)
There may be some other mechanisms, but this seems to be the primary, “Ok, its time to be an awake person, not a low brain activity lump.”, mechanism, which any other clocks/systems that regulate wakefulness would muck directly up. However, as far as I know, no case of a clock-based glitch has been seen, just the, “insufficient number of cells to make the transmitter”, condition. And it was shear accident, via too fat mice who ate less than what should have caused them to get fat, which led to the discovery.
Yes. I’m married to someone who is “time-blind.”
Yes. I’m married to someone who is “time-blind.”
I wonder if one begins to suffer from timeblindness if one has change-blindness…
i possess no sense of time at all…which is made worse by the fact that i have no clocks in my room…nor does light permiate through my window…so i dont even notice the movement of the sun..i never know what time it is…recently a week went by in what seemed like 2 days…