ADHD: The Perception of Time

One thing that seems true for the vast majority of ADHD adults is that they experience the passage of it in a fashion different from that of “normal” individuals.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in.
—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Philosophers and scientists have examined for millennia both the way we perceive and the way we move through time. Some have characterized it as standing in a river while time flows by us, or floating down the river of time as the world (past) moves by us. Others talk about the past and future as non-existent, that we only live in the present. Time is an illusion of our minds: there is only the perpetual now.

Einstein referred to time as a function of, and relative to, motion and space, leading to his theory of time dilation. Some of his followers have characterized it as a deformation in the curvature of space, or vice-versa.

Regardless of what time is, one thing that seems true for the vast majority of ADHD adults is that they experience the passage of it in a fashion different from that of “normal” individuals.

I first wrote about this phenomenon back in 1992 in Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception. Russell Barkley, in a chapter of an anthology on ADHD that Janie Bowman and I edited titled Think Fast: The ADD Experience, put forth his belief that our frontal lobes, where the passage of time is perceived, may be involved in what we call ADHD.

At the time that I wrote of people with ADHD perceiving time differently it wasn’t part of the diagnostic criteria for ADHD and still isn’t. Literally hundreds of ADHD adults, however, have written or spoken to me since that first book came out to say that they experience exactly what I described.

They agree that this variable perception of the passage of time may in some fundamental way be involved in bringing about what we call ADHD.

For most individuals with ADHD, there are only two times: “now,” and “some other time.” This leads to procrastination. “Is it ‘now’ yet? It’s not? I guess I can wait...” It also leads to tardiness. At least a dozen Hunters I know have the nickname “the late so-and-so” and last-minute binges of work and school assignments are common, with a perpetual rush-rush to catch up.

These people also report that when they’re on the hunt, or really interested in something, time seems to move very quickly. When they’re bored, however, or waiting for gratification, time grinds to such a crawl that it’s emotionally and sometimes even physically painful.

ADHD lay expert Dave deBronkart commented on this phenomenon in a discussion on the ADD Forum on CompuServe. He said:

“Maybe NOW is, in human life, not a point in time but a small ‘bubble’ that does have a start and an end, so there’s some depth to ‘now.’ I suspect our presence in time isn’t a ‘flat’ slice but more like a streamlined teardrop shape.

“A key factor could be the width of different people’s ‘ovals’ or their path through the perception of time. For instance, depth perception’ of time (the ability to sense how far away something is) might come from the differences perceived between the front of the oval and the back of it. A person whose oval is flat might not have much of that sense.”

He continues:

“For a real kick, what if you take the oval and rotate it 90 degrees? Maybe in the other direction it’s flat. What you’d then get would be someone who doesn’t perceive much from moment to moment, but who perceives an extraordinary amount ‘all at once.’

“And that, of course, is what’s often said about successful ADDers and Hunter/entrepreneurs: an incomprehensible ability to do many things at once, or to integrate ideas from wildly unrelated disciplines. (Edison often referred to his ‘kaleidoscopic’ brain.)”

The reasons for this difference in the perception of time between “normal” and ADHD people are unknown.

Some say these differences in the perception and awareness of time came about as a result of the agricultural revolution and therefore represent a refinement in the brain that allowed humans to become farmers. This would imply that those persons who don’t have the “Farmer time sense” are evolutionary throwbacks, prehistoric relics who somehow stumbled through the course of evolution and natural selection into today’s world.

On the other hand, some futurists and ADHD skeptics like Dr. Thomas Armstrong assert that what we’re calling ADHD might actually represent an evolutionary improvement or necessary variation in humanity, with which our institutions have simply not yet caught up. Certainly a nation of obedient, compliant, “perfect student” children would be radically different from that in which we live. We’d probably still be a colony of Great Britain, lacking electric lights, the phonograph, motion pictures, and thousands of other things brought into life by “eccentric” inventors who easily fit the psychiatric criteria for ADHD.

Futurist John Naisbitt in his ground breaking book Mega-Trends proposes that in the near future people won’t just change jobs through their adult lifetimes, but will frequently change careers, often as many as seven times, something relatively “normal” for ADHD adults.

If time is not “real” but instead just a perception, a creation of our minds or something which can only be subjectively known, then it makes perfect sense that the Hunter’s time-variable mind would be an advantage in the information age. The same mind which could slow time when the prey was spotted during the hunt and speed it up while on the chase could similarly adapt to the Internet, video games, driving in urban America, and the rapid pace of modern business.

As Wilson Harrell, former publisher of Inc. Magazine and president of the Formula 409 company, put it:

“ADHD is a survival skill in the rough-and-tumble world of entrepreneurial business, just as it is on the battlefield. You have to learn to think fast when necessary, and think slow when that’s called for as well. Time must be a pressure like the wind at your back.”

So the best solution here is to make the transition from the Agricultural Age/Industrial Age to the Information Age...and leave all those Farmers and factory workers behind.