If a family member told you that they may be late for your wedding because they suffer from time blindness, I believe that many people would scoff.  If you were chronically late for work for the same reason, you would likely be fired.  If you were consistently tardy for school, you would definitely get detention.  It seems like time blindness may be an easy excuse for a failure to wake when an alarm clock goes off, but people on TikTok and other social media sites are taking it seriously.  This tendency to over or underestimate the time needed for a particular activity has even been studied by the government, well before these posts.  But how legitimate is the condition and, though it is often seen as a symptom of ADHD, does it also affect those a brain injury?

Time blindness, medically termed chronotaraxis, is associated with the brain functions controlled by the thalamus, which is located near the center of the brain.  The thalamus plays an key role in many human functions, including memory, emotions, the sleep-wake cycle, executive functions, mediating general cortical alerting responses, processing of sensory (including taste, somatosensory, visual, and auditory) information and relaying it to the cortex, and sensorimotor control.  While thalamic strokes, a brain injury, are not rare, chronotaraxis following such a stroke is uncommon – affecting only 5 of 120 subjects, or 4 percent, of people in a particular study.  (While this NIH study was published over 15 years ago, in 2007, the results coincide with more recent results.)  

In 2013, the National Institute of Health reported on another study that studied stroke and other types of brain injury and found that this time issue goes beyond the effect of a stroke and is related to the consequences of traumatic and other brain injuries.  “We concluded that while timing variability in TBI patients is not consequent to dysfunctions at the clock stage, but rather related to attentional, working memory and executive functions disorders, medial temporal lobe damage affects the memory component, and possibly the downstream decision-making stage, of the temporal information processing model.”  Unfortunately, issues with mental executive functions are hugely affected by both acquired and traumatic brain injuries.

More recently, just this summer, USA Today reported on time blindless, focusing on its effect on those who also suffer from ADHD.  However, they also highlight other personal issues that can have this effect, specifying noted that time management is controlled by the frontal lobe of the brain, an area that is often affected when one has a brain injury.  (This, of course, seems to go against the above-mentioned study that points to the medial temporal lobe of the brain as the source of time blindness, as well as a 2020 report that refers to it as an underestimated right hemisphere syndrome.)

Personally, I can relate to the symptoms of time blindness.  Well before my brain injury, I tended to underestimate time requirements for various activities, from homework to travel.  Both before and after my brain injury, would I, and others with brain injuries, be helped by a system that considered/recognized “time blindness” as an impairment, or would it just delay the start/end of whatever task caused the tardiness?  I’m somewhat skeptical, though the results cannot be denied.  Perhaps more academic research must be done to understand the possible difference between poor time management skills and a medical deficit, related to time.  Or, maybe rehabilitation programs and those with brain injuries need to spend more time on strategies to overcome any time deficits that result from damage to the brain.