Sense of Time

Which activities make you lose track of time?

-Wordpress writing prompt

Hello Dazzle! Thanks for coming and hanging out with me today, I’m glad that you are here. Today I want to talk about my sense of time. People frequently talk about loosing track of time and personally find this to be a very strange idea. In all of my life time, I can think of only a few times that I lost track of the time and in every case I found the experience to be rather upsetting.

Most of the time I don’t wear a watch. Yet, I can always tell you what time it is within about 15 minutes of the actual time. It is something that I remember always being able to do. This has been such a natural thing for me that I always found it odd that people didn’t know what time it was.

I didn’t actually understand the meaning of “loosing track of time” until I was in my twenties. I always used this phrase to mean that I got really involved in a task and wasn’t able to force myself into the transition from that task to the next task. Like reading a really good book before going to bed and getting into a good part. I’d tell myself I’d read one more chapter. I knew that it was already time to go to bed, but I just couldn’t initiate the transition from reading to getting ready for bed. I now understand this to be under the umbrella of cognitive dysfunction; specifically called Task Switching.

Then someone explained to me that they actually stop tracking what time it is while they are doing a task that they enjoy. This was such a strange concept to me that at first I simply didn’t believe them. How could a person stop tracking the time? Our brains just do that. It’s like breathing. Right? Well, many hours and lots of research later… No. Most brains don’t just do that.

For me, I normally only loose track of time when I am sleeping. When I first wake up I have to check the clock to know how long I have been sleeping. But once I have looked at the time I am then grounded and connected to the time again. For the remainder of my waking time, I am able to keep track of the time. My brain just does it with out me thinking about it or putting any effort into it.

So, what are the few occasions that I did loose track of the time when I wasn’t sleeping?

I’ve had 2 seizures in my life and with both of those seizures I lost track of time. When I came back to awareness, I felt very confused and disconnected from everything. And I also quickly realized that I had no idea what time it was. That was super scary for me. It felt like I had become disconnected. A chunk of my time was just gone. Thinking about those holes in my timeline still provokes a mild unease.

The only other time that I can recall loosing track of the time was one of the many times that I passed out from my POTS. Normally, these episodes do not effect my sense of time. But there was one occasion that after passing out my brain reported to me that it was several hours later when I returned to consciousness. It was very unsettling and frightening to have my internal clock be wrong. I think this experience was more upsetting for me then just loosing track and my brain telling me it didn’t know the time.

I think that the strangest part about my ability to mentally keep track of the time is that it does not keep me from also struggling with Time Blindness which is defined as having difficulty with a perception of time, how much time as passed, how much time it’s going to take to do something or being able to track a sequence of events in time. Like most things this is something that has a great deal of variation in presentation from person to person. I have no difficulty with the perception of time or keeping track of how much time has passed. I am also pretty good at recalling events in the sequence of time. I cannot place them into a date or tell you how long ago something happened. But I know the order that they occurred in.

But I can never tell you how much time it’s going to take to do something. I will never be able to accurately report how long it took me to do something after I have done it unless I have made an effort in the moment to record how long it took me when I completed the task. My brain cannot predict how long it will take me to eat a meal, take a shower, crochet a hat or any other task. Doesn’t matter how many times I have completed that task. I will still have no idea how long it is going to take.

Nor can I recall how long it has taken me to complete something in the past. Say I crochet a cat hat today. Then tomorrow you asked me how long it took me to crochet that hat. I would have no idea. Having tried to make guesses on this kind of thing has also been demonstrated to me to be very inaccurate. I will think I took 2 hours to do something when it really took me 6. Or I could think I took 10 minutes to do a task that actually only took 2.

This is just another example of how complex our brains are. Often times we assume that people are capable of doing something or should be really good at something based on how well they have performed in another area. But our brains aren’t as linear or logical as we would like them to be. There are just times when someone can have an above average ability in something while having a below average ability in a related area. I am like this with time.

Well, that’s about it for my rambling today. Thanks for coming and spending some time with me. If you like my rambling then click on that like button. It really does help! Until we talk again, you take care of yourselves!