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I wrote the below essay in the hopes of helping NT teachers better understand autism. Please tell me what you agree with and do not agree with in this essay. Also tell me if you feel that I left something out. I would greatly appreciate your comments.
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Albert Einstein, revolutionized physics with his arguably deep autistic perception of time and space that the 99.9% of the population lacks the capacity to fully comprehend. Any parent of an autistic child understands time and space in a totally new way when her five year autistic child engages in embarrassing behaviors at the wrong time in a public place. A comparison of how a kindergartener with autism understands time and space to how a kindergartener with more social thought processes illustrates the difference in perception of a person with autism.

To understand the difference with how a kindergarten child with autism understands time, consider a kindergartener with normative thought processes. She most likely perceives time by making qualitative observations of the social circumstances. Her mother tells her to expect to leave for the mall “soon”, a qualitative statement. She observes Mommy putting on make-up and rushing back and forth in the house. She knows from experience that these two events immediately precede a shopping trip. She might even imitate her mother's behaviors during imaginary play when she pretends that she will visit the mall.

Now consider how a kindergarten child with autism understands time. To illustrate, the child’s mother informs him that they will leave for the mall in 15 minutes. From experience, the mother knows that her son loves numbers and prefers quantitative statement of minutes remaining instead of the qualitative statement of "soon". The mother might provide the child with numerous reminders that they will leave shortly. She might say, “9 more minutes”, “8 more minutes”, etc.

The mother gave both children the nearly identical hypothesis that they would leave for the mall in the immediate future. The kindergarten girl with normative behaviors tested this hypothesis by using inductive logic to analyze qualitative data, make-up and rushing. The kindergarten boy with autistic behaviors tested this hypothesis by using deductive logic to analyze quantitative data, the time remaining before leaving.

The physical limitations of both children's brains allows for a finite capacity to analyze data. Thus, the child's brain capacity might result from adaptive evolutionary trade offs of directing energy to the brain versus other parts of the body. Suppose that the human brain also makes trade offs in data analysis style.

Ceteris paribus, the boy prefers quantitative data to qualitative data and visa versa for the girl. For example, women have a need awareness of social information to successfully rear children. This type of data tends to be in a more qualitative form. While men tend to prefer relatively quantitative information. This type of information is essential if the man plans to solve problems regarding observing weather and making tools. In fact, social distractions could prevent him from processing quantitative information.

This would explain the prodigious abilities of many children with autism. Social distraction could prevent the child from excelling in music because of the concentration necessary to perceive quantitative data about the pitch and length of a sound. Likewise, he might demonstrate technical excellence as painter with ability to quickly process thousands of quantitative observations to render color and form. Similarly, he might excel in fields such as engineering and computer science that require rapid encoding and decoding tiny pieces of quantitative data into mathematical expressions.

The autistic kindergartener perceived time much differently than the girl with normative thought processes. He perceives time in small discrete quantitative frames of reference. In contrast, the girl perceived time in larger chunks of qualitative social references. Neither perception is more correct than the other. Instead, they both represent the potential for diversity of the human experience.

You had to ask ...


A teacher would want to understand autism in a way that would help in the class room. It would be more effective if your example used a classroom setting rather than going to the mall.

I personally dislike the Einstein reference. It is irrelevant to the argument. I also find diagnoses of historical figures for any condition speculative at best.

I also dislike the paragraph that starts with "Ceteris paribus". How many school teachers would know that particular Latin phrase? I had to look it up. It comes across as pretentious. Further more the distinction between male/female quantitative/qualitative preferences is of dubious accuracy and also irrelevant to your explanation of time perception among autistics.

It also leaves the impression that all autistics perceive time in the same way. This is not true and you should make it clear that this is one way that they differ. When in hyper focus mode, I don't perceive time at all. 15 minutes is the same as 150. When so intensely focused, if you try to interrupt me to remind me how much time is left (such as the mother saying "We are leaving in 8 minutes") I might not even acknowledge you or even realize you said something.

Excellent points. Thank you very much.

I'm autistic and I don't experience much of a sense of time at all to the point where I get confused between past present and future. I also don't experience life in the sort of rigid, "scientific" (I don't know a good word for it) way described in the article. Remember there are all kinds of autistic people.

Everything I was about to say. This is why wavefreak58 is one of my favorites

Let's see, I'm an ex-grammar freak, so let me help you with your grammar a little.
No comma between Einstein and "revolutionized," if you don't decide to cut out that sentence based on WaveFreak's and Midlife's comments.
"For example, women have a need awareness of social information..." becomes "For example, women need to have awareness of social information...." It makes more sense.
Also, these sentences must be joined. "This type of data tends to be in a more qualitative form. While men tend to prefer relatively quantitative information." becomes "This type of data tends to be in a more qualitative form, while men...." "While men..." is a sentence fragment.

As a literary device or analogy, ok, but to say that Einstein did what he did literally due to autism is a bit much, IMO. Einstein used concepts developed by others, such as Lorentz and Poincare (and corresponded with them, IIRC) -- and I've not heard of them being suspected of being on the spectrum. More likely they were all just people who were just good and math & physics.

(I.e. the transformation of space & time coordinates from one inertial frame to another is called the Lorentz transform, not the Einstein transform. Einstein is the one who finally put it all together into Special Relativity, but I've heard it argued that if he didn't do it someone else probably would have in not too long.)

Maybe something more like, "A.E. revolutionized physics with his deep perception of time and space, and similarly, autistic children may..."

As far as giving the countdown, I think that would've helped me at that age. I 'm not sure it was a matter of preferring quantitative to qualitative information, though.

I do not agree fully based on your examples. I think I understand what you're trying to say (the autistic is more focused on the actuality of the time whereas the NT is more interested in what happens during the time rather than the actual minutes) but your examples do not match with my experience.

Before I learned how to tell time and even after, a time given to me by anyone other than my mother I considered to be sort of "fluid". It changed, my father could say to me that we would be leaving in fifteen minutes, but we would leave in anywhere from fifteen to an hour. So while I was ready and on time, I judged how soon we would leave based upon my observations of my father i.e. did he have his keys? Was he wearing his jacket if the weather required it? Was he standing by the door telling my mother goodbye? Or was he rushing around looking for something? I don't count these as social observations, merely my attempts to identify my father's routine (because hey, when I was little, everyone had a routine. The idea that someone didn't have a routine took a long time for me to realize. ) And understanding his routine helped me to cope when mine was disrupted for his.

I think both autistics and NTs observe behavior and eventually catalogue it (some slower than others and some faster than others.) If your point was that autistics rely heavily on concrete time, then you might want to tweak those examples a little for a more concrete incident, such as the time school/class starts or similar.

If I may ask, are you pointing out these time relations for a specific reason for the teachers? Or was this an aspect of autism you think is most important for NT teachers to understand? And which level of teachers are you trying to reach? Elementary? Middle to junior high? High School? Each level is going to have different areas that they will think are the most important.

I hope I helped!

I work with students who have a vision loss at the high school level. About half of the time, I have a child who is on the spectrum on my caseload. I know several students who are so autistic that they are non-verbal. Many of these students also have varying levels of mental retardation. Yet, some non-verbal students with autism know how to read and search on Google. From my experience, the majority of these kids enjoy the company of other people.

The school district that I work at is far more sensitive to the needs of children with autism than many school districts. Some school districts in the United States have procedures for managing the behavior of autistic children that is psychologically abusive. I believe that the abuse stems from the egotistical behaviors of some NTs.

About seven years ago, my wife gave birth to my son who is autistic. My son is highly intelligent. He learned to read before he turned three. He simply cracked the code. In kindergarten, he locked staff members out of their computers by changing the BIOS or pulling similar stunts. He loves hugs, kisses and the company of other people. Yet, he struggles with loud sounds, changes to his routine, and respecting other's personal space. He would sit on a stranger's lap without hesitation or invitation. Fortunately, he has a great school with great teachers. Too many children are not as lucky as my child to attend such a great school.

I want to describe autism to NT people in a way that is non-threatening. I do not want to preach to them about specific teaching techniques or suggest that anyone is abusive. I believe that addressing time and space is the least threatening way to address this issue. It might also be the most interesting way to inform NT teachers about autism.

At this point, I feel reasonably confident that NT people generally perceive time and space in a social context while persons with autistic perception perceive time and space from a functional/mechanical context. If I can provide some sort of theoretical explanation for this difference in perception, then teachers would be more likely to listen.

Yet another book-length post from me. I swear I can't figure out how not to be repetitive and big on details without losing something, when I write posts like this. As I sometimes do, I'm bolding the most important parts so people can skim if they want. 

The problem is, we don't. At least not all of us.

I tried to explain I barely perceive time at all. But there's more than that. 

There's a really common idea floating around that says that NTs perceive (insert anything here) in a social way and autistic people perceive it in a mechanical/functional way. The problem is that not only is it not anything close to that simple (no matter how many people think it is), it's also not even a good simplification of the more complex reality. 

There is a large group of autistic people where things like that are true of them. They tend to be the autistic people with the best way to communicate what their world is like. So people (including those autistic people themselves) tend to believe that it's something close to universal, and that those who either can't describe things or can't describe them well, are in the same boat. And some are. But then some are not. 

Some of this is because ideas about autism are often formed by observing autistic people without asking us. Then this weird thing happens. The idea goes out there and becomes a stereotype. Then people are diagnosed based on people assumed to fit the stereotype.  Some of those people will have been diagnosed at least partly because they could articulate that they fit the stereotype. Others will be diagnosed who can't communicate in words as well and are simply assumed to fit the stereotype (perhaps assumed to do so more strongly than those who can articulate it). 

There was a time I would have told you I fit the stereotype. I grew up with a severe receptive language deficit. I coped by repeating what (from what I could tell) another person might say in my situation. I only rarely said anything that truly matched my inner life, which caused immense problems for me as can be imagined. By young adulthood I was both learning to communicate my real thoughts, and losing the last of my semicommunicative speech (due to a somewhat rare condition linked to my being autistic). So I'm now one of those nonspeaking people who can operate a computer. (I used to be a speaking-but-not-very-communicative person who could operate a computer). 

Anyway, I've found a lot of autistic people who experience the world like I do, but a lot of us either have communication issues or get drowned out by the standard stereotype of an autistic person's experience of the world. I'm going to try to explain mine here. Be aware that most of the time I'm not aware of words as even possible, and my experience of the world is entirely outside of words.  My experiences are also highly sensory rather than idea-based or intellectual. I can do ideas and words but it takes serious effort.  This makes translation extremely difficult. 

So, time. I barely have a sense of time, and what I have is very fluid.  What English calls past and future are more to me like the now I can see but can't access entirely, and the now I can't see. Yet I always find patterns between them and can sometimes feel as if I'm in several nows that are touching. Sometimes I even see myself as a different person in each now instead of one continuous person. Other times I'm unaware of any other time but what most people call now, and nothing else exists/existed/will exist except my immediate sensory awareness. Sometimes I don't even have sensory input or thoughts/ideas, just awareness.  Sometimes time repeats and gets stuck like a broken record, sometimes it ties itself in complicated knots and goes out of order.  I have fairly wonky temporal lobes, which may account for some of this, most people who share this with me have TLE like I do or are suspected of it. 

Anyway, if there's anything time isn't for me, it's linear, easily measured, or mechanical.  It's often not there as far as I can tell, or else it's alive and twisting and bending in strange ways.  Space for me isn't "functional/mechanical" either. It's movement through space. It's a dance. It's living, like all the things that fill it.

You see, people make a fundamental mistake with the sort of autistic people who work like me. They imagine that because we don't appear to single out humans for interaction (even if some of us do, for that matter) then the world we perceive around us is mechanical and devoid of the kind of life nonautistic people perceive in each other. In some people that can be true. Especially those whose brains make what looks to me like a permanent sacrifice:  They pick up words and intellect and ideas, and in order to make room for all that they shut off the kind of perception that people like me (who spent much of my life, even after learning echolalic speech, oblivious to words/ideas, and who still spends much of my life shutting down language and idea in order to retain my sensory awareness) retain our whole lives. At least that's how it seems to me. 

So how do I perceive the world if not that everything is mechanical and functional?  I perceive aliveness everywhere. It's not that I don't see humans as alive, it's that everything is alive and I don't single out humans for interaction. I'm not anthropomorphizing. Everything isn't humanlike. It's more that each part of the world has its own unique kind of life. At least life is the only word I know for this kind of thing.  So space and time and everything are populated by their own kind of life. The only way it can ever look mechanical is if I have been using words or ideas too long and start losing touch with what I'm otherwise aware of.   That's one reason I'm careful how long I get caught up in the words it takes to communicate with humans who have trouble with my more natural ways of communicating (I've gotten into that in some posts but have no room here). 

Not all autistic people are like me but I've found a fair number. Not all autistic people are how you portray us either. And many are different from either of us. I can be fairly certain of this because I collect books by autistic people describing their inner lives, I have read things by easily hundreds of autistic people online, and I've known a lot of autistic people offline too. (Including many who have never mastered words as I have, but who speak the same "language" as me without words. Not all non-word-using autistic people are like me, though, and neither are all autistic people like me either nonspeaking or non-word-using. It's complex. Very complex.)  I just know that describing all autistic people as any one thing, cuts out the experiences of many of us who are different from the established stereotype. And I'm certainly one of those who gets cut out easily. 

A quote from the book Women From Another Planet by several autistic women. I've bolder an important passage that was already italicized. 

***BEGIN QUOTE***

MM: [Speaking of some autistic people...] we do not draw a line between inanimate and animate beings, that they all have a soul to us.

Daina: As a child, everything was somewhat alive to me. Perhaps the face-processing tendency that most NTs have enables them early on to distinguish what is alive and what isn’t, and what is human and what isn’t.

Ava: Or maybe what is and isn’t alive, is just another assumption that NTs make. So for the NT child, either because of the strength of those attachments to faces and the accompanying social world, or through some coincidental developmental process, the aliveness of the sensory world fades. Whereas we ACs retain more of the direct experience of the world and less of the face-addiction-belief thing.

Sola: This reminds me of a poem that I studied in high school, "The Pond" by Bjalik. The poem describes a secret place in the forest, where there is a little pond and a tree growing from it. When the poet was a little boy, he used to go there, alone, and listen to the "language of visions," an unmediated way for the child to communicate with the tree and the pond. The articles that I read about this poem discussed the role of spoken language, as adding the social aspect, separating the initially naive child from the true essence of the world. I was enchanted by the poem. For many months I perseverated on the meaning of communication and language, searching the library for more articles about this. However, unlike the conclusion of the poem, I did not feel that growing up and maturing inevitably meant losing this innocence and being expelled from nature. I felt that I was still that child in the forest. Now that I know that I am AS, I am not surprised that the poem had such influence on me.

[...]

A perhaps startling suggestion, is that we may even have learnt empathy and other moral attributes, through our early relationships with the nonhuman world, despite a common NT assumption that fascination with the nonhuman risks making us more robotic. For example:

MM: We are always sewing souls into the things we create.

Jane: Yes I think soul (essence of being) is created through the creation of a relationship. I call it a moral relationship (which I know sounds prissy or sanctimonious to some), by which I mean a relationship where there is acceptance/acknowledgement of agency and responsibility. When I relate to an object (whether it is another human or a bear I have created out of cloth), with my moral/aware consciousness, when I acknowledge my power to affect (recognize, hurt, heal, shine like the sun or nourish like rain — even to destroy like lightning), I also give power to the other (the object) to affect me. So that other is as alive as I am (in this sense). We are in a moral relationship that gives life meaning. That is why I know the bears who are my most intimate and daily family do help me be/have whatever is good in who I am and what I do. It is the relationship that makes us who we are (that makes me who I am). And I say that even though I have a strong tendency to want to say/feel I am I, alone. That fraction of truth lives inside the larger truth of relationships.

MM: Most of humanity is ignorant for not seeing what is around them. I hear the rocks and trees. Wish me well and tell me I am one of them, one of the silent ones who has now been given a voice, and that I must come out of hiding to protect others without voices: in my case I tend to help give voice to persons with Alzheimer’s disease. My washer and dryer speak to me, and I painted a face on them and gave them names and make sure I don’t overwork them. When I worked in a copy shop I could produce more copies than any other employee. Yes, I could understand the physics of the machines and their limitations from overheating etc. But for me the machines were talking to me and I talked back regularly.
I was raised by my Siamese cat I could understand her language better than the human language, and so I spoke Siamese before I spoke English, and I thought the cat was my real mother because I could understand her more than I could understand humans. [/b]I speak to children, babies, machines, rocks and trees as if they can hear me and they know what I am talking about.[/b] That is why my success with Alzheimer’s patients is so high: I treat them with such great respect and assume they know what I am saying. And I wonder why the rest of the world is so ignorant as to treat others as stupid and dumb and things and animals so terribly because they are somehow less than us? Well I think that this is a very arrogant stance to think we are better or more alive than these others who very much have a soul.

***END QUOTE***

And a quote from Momo, which isn't about autism but reminds me of this topic and how some of us relate to the world. 

***BEGIN QUOTE***

Momo listened to everyone and everything, to dogs and cats, crickets and tortoises — even to the rain and the wind in the pine trees — and all of them spoke to her after their own fashion.

Many were the evenings when, after her friends had gone home, she would sit by herself in the middle of the old stone amphitheater, with the sky’s starry vault overhead, and simply listen to the great silence around her.

Whenever she did this, she felt she was sitting at the center of a giant ear, listening to the world of the stars, and she seemed to hear soft but majestic music that touched her heart in the strangest way. On nights like these, she always had the most beautiful dreams.

Those who still think listening isn’t an art should see if they can do half as well.

***END QUOTE***

MM has a really neat webpage that can now only be found on the Internet Archive. Here is the link to her page. I especially like the one about the wild kittens. And the one where her shoes were part of her, which is so much like how I still perceive the world (I once answered the question "What part of you hurts?" with "My keyboard"). 

What Ava said about this living sensory world often fading even happens to many autistic people. When I talk about this, some autistic people tell me it reminds them of before the age of fiveish. I don't know what shifts in development cause some autistic people to lose it and others to retain it forever. But I'm one of the ones who retained it. And I never want to lose it, it's very important to me and to most others I know who retained it. Even some who lost it have told me they miss it, some have tried all kinds of things to make it come back but with no luck. 

Anyway, as I said this is only one of many ways autistic people can experience the world.  But it's an important contrast with the idea that we see the world in a mechanical way. There's nothing remotely mechanical about all this. 

(One of the many reasons I'm on this site is to make sure nobody forgets people like this. )

So I don't know how you could handle this in your writing. You might not immediately understand enough of this to write something convincing to others about this. But you could at least write in there somewhere that many autistic people are extremely different from what you're portraying. You could also ask around on here how we experience certain specific things -- questions like that get lots of answers here.

Ah, bugger it. We don't have a social context to learn about them from. Aspies live in universes that only have one person in them.

I think I can relate to what you are saying even as an NT person. I love to go on nature hikes here in Arizona. When I see beautiful scenery, I feel changed by the experience. I am not thinking, I am being. I am aware, alive, and happy. To think about the experience would ruin it for me.

When I took several courses in Math at the University level a long time ago, time would simply cease to exist. The experience of the math problem was more of a flowing stream of conscience. I would solve one math problem after another math problem for up to 16 hours in a row.

As a father, I am constantly aware of time. It is time to cook, clean, talk to wife, play with kids, pay bills.

I think I can relate to what you are saying even as an NT person. I love to go on nature hikes here in Arizona. When I see beautiful scenery, I feel changed by the experience. I am not thinking, I am being. I am aware, alive, and happy. To think about the experience would ruin it for me.

When I took several courses in Math at the University level a long time ago, time would simply cease to exist. The experience of the math problem was more of a flowing stream of conscience. I would solve one math problem after another math problem for up to 16 hours in a row.

As a father, I am constantly aware of time. It is time to cook, clean, talk to wife, play with kids, pay bills.