as small as a world and as large as alone, I just thought you might find that interesting, I...

3:36pm July 20, 2014

dusty-soul asked: I just thought you might find that interesting, I think. (You're the only other autistic person with time perception problems I know.)

I know other autistic people with time perception problems, I just don’t think a lot of people talk about them. In fact, one hypothesis behind my movement disorder is that it involves a faulty time processing thing somewhere in the brain, so that the body gets stuck in one place because the brain isn’t processing time correctly. It’s only one of many hypotheses, but I’ve heard it before, way back in the Autism99 online conference.

Here you go:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040417224302/http://trainland.tripod.com/dougaljulian.htm

Both the autobiographical accounts produced by verbally able
and/or non-learning disabled people with autistic disorders and
also clinical observation often emphasise the non-triadic features
of autism (Frith and Happé 1994). Two of these non-triadic
features which have not received much clinical or experimental
attention are the problems people with autistic conditions show in
their understanding of time and chronology and, more rarely
(estimated by the author to be under 5% of cases), their intense
dislike of seeing their own reflection in a mirror or window pane.

And further down:

Temporal understanding and autism

The other, more often reported phenomena is the severe
problem with understanding the nature of time and the
experience of time flowing which many people with autistic disorders exhibit and report upon. Many people with autistic disorders appear to live in a permanent present, even though their memory is not evidently impaired (pace the phenomena of savant abilities). Taking a longer perspective, for many people with autistic disorders, there appears to be a sense in which time can be only be perceived in going from the present to the past. Again, several theories can be advanced to make sense of this phenomena:

Biological clock dysfunction – This has been
advanced as part of the metabolic theory of autistic
disorders (Shattock and Savery 1998) and states that due
to specific biochemical dysfunction, the innate timing
mechanisms of the human body in people may be
severely impaired.

Inability to imagine future events – This
explanation, which has the advantage of parsimony, can
be derived from the impairment in imagination section of
the defining triad of impairments (Wing and Gould 1979).
Essentially, the difficulties with conceiving of future time
and events can be ascribed to a pervasive deficit in
imagination.

Time dilation effects – People with autistic
conditions occasionally report abnormalities in their
subjective experience of time, experiencing a period of an hour as a minute having passed. For example, a young man who presented with extreme pathological slowness and who was given a diagnosis of autism reported being always rushed by his carers. His own experience of time was evidently much slower than ‘normal’. Such experiences seem to be linked to the catatonic states, which are observed in 5-8% of people with autistic disorders). This again has links to ideas regarding consciousness and autism (Cotterill 1994; Hare and Jones 1998, 1999) with its parallels with the experiences of people during altered states of consciousness (cf Ornstein 1969)

In addition, the author has seen examples of extreme
concretisation / formalisation of the life-span (i.e. the notion that there are finite limits to the lifespan and one’s own existence) in people with a diagnosis of Asperger’s syndrome. An extreme example of this would be the person who was obsessively aggressive to those younger than himself because they would have more life than him, this aggression increasing proportional to how much younger than this person they were.

Time and movement in autistic disorders

One clinically important aspect of autism which is related to the above discussion of the experience of time is catatonia. There is increasing clinical evidence of an association, between catatonic states and autistic disorders (Realmuto and August 1991; Dhossche 1998). The catatonic symptoms observed in people with people with autistic disorders include stuporous episodes with mutism, waxy flexibility, posturing, and episodes of agitation, which fulfil the DSM-IV criteria for the catatonic features specifier.
This may be evidence of co-morbidity or of a catatonic variant of autistic disorder. A version of Frith and Happé’s (1994) notion of central coherence could perhaps be put forward in that some people with autistic diagnoses are unable to integrate individual items into a flow of action (an appropriate analogy might be the time signals which synchronise digitised information to reduce 'jitter’). Therefore, could the catatonic states being arise from the lack of a timing signal? We can note that many instances of catatonia in people with autism are related to the initiation and the maintenance of intentional actions – also, speed of movement when not catatonic! This is often very fast and comprises a single bit of action. We can note the chains of cues, which occur in some cases of autism – the autistic person's freezing acts as a cue to their supporter to prompt (often verbally) the next bit of action, which lasts for 2-3secs. before freezing again and the next prompt occurring – is there a rhythmic nature to this process i.e. an external time signal (click track)? This suggests a possible form of support by supplying this external time signal (metronome, etc).

Catatonia in autism may also be associated with signs of dense amnesia for immediate and short-term recall of event and actions (cf. Hare, Flood and Jones 1999). This again could usefully be analysed using Rosenfield’s theory of self-awareness and its relationship to memory and body awareness

So… it’s been talked about, just not a lot. And if I had to dig back to 1999 to find stuff, that says something. But it also might just say that I haven’t been keeping up with any research into time perception and autism, because I’m sure there’s been plenty of such research out there. I don’t agree with all of this guy’s conclusions, especially because he’s going off of research that’s heavily outdated at best. But I do like that he is looking into what he calls “non-triadic” features of autism because autistic people ourselves have talked about them – in other words, he’s looking at what we found of interest about ourselves, rather than what researchers pigeonhole into the “triad of impairments”. He does some pigeonholing himself, but for 1999 this was decent stuff.

If you want to read the rest of the papers from that online conference (a real mixed bag), go to:

https://web.archive.org/web/20040214182000/http://trainland.tripod.com/autism99.htm

Notes: