An ADDer's Theory of Time

Among the features that set ADD/ADHDers apart from the pack is the fact that we have a sort of warped concept of time – or, at least, that’s what I’ve been told.

No, seriously, someone did mention to me that she had seen and heard on a Public Broadcasting System show that some scientists had studied the way ADDers perceive time.  They may have used brain scans or something.  It was all done in an actual scientific study, even though it was presented on a show for public consumption (therefore probably dumbed down) and even though the info was passed along to me secondhand or worse. The woman who told me may have been more specific at the time, but I don’t remember.  I mean by that, she may have told me whether the scientists said we think time moves more slowly than it actually does or faster than it does – or maybe we are inconsistent.  That would be my guess, if I had to guess from my own experience.  That detail I don’t remember at all, if she even told me.  I just remember that she told me about the show and the study and the result.

There’s a little incident that I remember from when I was eleven or twelve years old. Ancient history at least. It was in a Sunday School class at church, and the Little Church Lady (definitely ancient history there) had told us all to close our eyes and try to guess when one minute had passed. It was supposed to prepare us for the lesson that life is important, that the way we spend our time matters, that once a minute is gone it can’t be brought back. Anyway, that little exercise was one of the hardest tasks I’ve been assigned, other than cleaning my room. I’m pretty sure I raised my hand at about the 30-second mark. Then again at 40 seconds or so.

I still have trouble just sitting and trying to guesstimate when two minutes or five or ten have passed. Maybe it’s the ADD, and maybe it’s just hard for anyone to do. Hard to find something to use as a basis for measuring.

This time-awareness (or unawareness) thingy may be one of the reasons why ADDers tend to have trouble being on time to appointments – this struggle with grasping how much time has passed and/or at what rate. In the years since I first recognized honestly how much trouble it always is for me to be on time to anything, I have started paying more attention to the way I respond to clocks. At first, in my quest to try to become punctual, I thought it would help me to set clocks ahead by a little bit; that might help me get places a few minutes early or on time anyway. It was a tip I had heard from other people (not ADDers, I might mention). But it didn’t work for me. For a very brief while after resetting the clocks, I got better about punctuality. But then I would start remembering that the clocks were ahead, and I would adjust my use of time. I didn’t always think about it consciously, I just adjusted.

I have learned that sometimes it can be helpful to me to time some tasks (making the bed, washing dishes, driving to a specific location) in order to focus my attention on how much time I am using in a given way. But for me, it is best to time myself under an array of circumstances – driving time in best weather conditions with light traffic vs. driving time at rush hour in a pouring rainstorm; making the bed when the covers are relatively neat and the rest of the room is tidy enough vs. making the bed when the covers have been wadded up and strewn every which way and when the floor is covered with clutter that I have to step over – all while the phone is ringing off the hook. You get the picture. It helps me to know a realistic range of times that I am likely to spend on a certain task. It helps to motivate me – or at least it becomes easier to overcome a lack of motivation.

During all the decades of struggling with time management and time perception, of trying various tips and creating a few of my own, I would occasionally hear about studies that helped to shed light on the question. One time I heard the most fascinating study that gave me a great idea about the way time works for ADDers.

The study had to do with drivers, car drivers, and their perception of how fast they are driving. The study was conducted with good drivers using an auto-driving simulator. In the first phase of the study, the drivers were trained to guess accurately at the speed they were “driving” on the simulator. When they could reliably gauge their driving speed, they were put in various driving situations – different kinds of weather, etc. , and required to guess their driving speed in these different conditions.

The interesting thing about the study was that these very well trained driving-speed-guessing drivers were not good at guessing their driving speed when “outside conditions” were very foggy. The drivers, who otherwise were remarkably reliable in their guesses, generally were driving at least 10mph (roughly 16km/h) faster on the simulator than they had guessed. That puzzled me. They were driving on the simulator in all cases. Same driver, same simulator. Wouldn’t the pressure of foot to gas pedal be the same, no matter what the weather conditions were like?

That study triggered my thinking about how our mind perceives tempo/speed. In the case of the drivers, the problem with guessing speed was related to the fog. But how did that affect perception? What was different? I think maybe that when there is no fog outside, a driver’s peripheral vision is filled with images of landmarks and features that are passing by – trees, buildings, telephone and light poles, and other cars. With the experience of driving at different speeds even though barely aware of items passing by, the driver builds up an awareness of how fast the passing images move through the peripheral field of vision, while the car is moving through space at a given pace. Then, when those objects are veiled from sight, when the fog covers everything, the driver loses the points of reference that have made it possible to predict the car’s speed.

And that relates to time in what way? Well, time is actually a measure of the movement of objects past one another: the earth around the sun, the moon around the earth. Since the time when our earliest ancestors developed their time awareness based on the movement of celestial bodies in space, other methods of measuring time have been discovered, such as the half-life of carbon-14 and the electron spin energy levels in cesium atoms. But these newer methods developed after galaxy-based time awareness had been developed over many millennia, and these methods relate their units of time to the older models (years… seconds…). Our ancient forebears can hardly be faulted for not knowing how to measure the decay of atoms or the cycles of radiation, transitions between spin energy levels, and ground states of atoms.

Many people have an excellent awareness of time, and I’ve always wondered how they do it. Perhaps their genes programmed them to have some kind of subconscious awareness of the movement of shadows across the earth, or perhaps the rhythm of their heartbeat is predictable. Something gives them an edge when it comes to “feeling” time.

What about the ADDer? One trait of the ADD/ADHD personality is the ability to “hyperfocus,” that is, to home in on some task or object of interest and shut out all else for extended periods of time. In the state of hyperfocus, the ADDer’s brain is no longer perceiving whatever it is that goes on around them, those little changes that help to signal the passage of time. It is something like being in a mental state of fog – fog all around, blocking out the usual points of reference – but with a strong focus on the task immediately at hand (like the driver who can drive in the fog).

So, that is my theory of why it is difficult for ADDers to have an accurate perception of the passage of time. The ADDer has such a strong focus on some immediate interest that everyday time signals are lost. A clock striking in the background is just part of the ambient noises that blend to create the concept of Home; the tummy rumbling in a request to be fed is shushed while the best picture for a Hub is being researched; the movement of family members all around don’t interfere with reading and absorbing a description of the development of the Fujita Scale.

The ADDer is not very aware of time, because the clues that signal the passage of time are blocked out in deference to the many other things in life that feel like they are so much more worthy of focus and attention. But that’s another subject. The ADDer – or anyone else – who actually wants to do better in matters of punctuality and time management can make use of timepieces, cell phone and computer reminders, scheduling journals, real-life reminder services, and many other helps. But that also is a subject for another time.

Another TIME? hahahahaha.