Biologically, you don't see a discrete, continuous image. The brain interprets so much from what is actually a blink-ridden, up-side-down picture that I don't think this theory holds much water.

That said, school we did a time-measuring activity once where we count off a minute and have a friend see how accurate we were. I was always within 2 seconds of the 60, toward the upper end of my class. But I was the only blind one there, making proper statistical analysis difficult.

It is true that we have to react to auditory rather than visual signs. When watching comedy, I often find some amusement in things like slapstic but only if it's explained, never in realtime. By far I prefer wordplay or spoken comedy.

I do find focus and attention interesting. A sighted person can receive an email - say an invoice - and announce the balance due within half a second. as a braille reader, it's very hard to process in a way other than linear.

Not true. There are blind people who are very good with the here and now. Auditory and sensorytype of clues are right there too. It’s just a different way to see. Blind people are not extra slow. Some people are because of thought process and not blindness. It depends how much I am strategizing and analyzing in a sense. But at my impulsive moments oh goodness I can probably out perform a sited person easily. I can be very keen to my surroundings. Blind people are not predictors either. I mean some of us are better at seeing future circumstances than others like any other humans, but not as a whole, no.

Is this a real saying? I've never heard it.

Blind people do have spatial perception, and a blind person doesn't have to wait to hear. They can move around to note ambient sound changes, sense the immediate environment haptically with canes and feet and hands, and make sounds (the most striking example being Daniel Kish-style tongue click echolocation) to sample more distant features.

In an auditorily rich environment, the difference between light and sound speeds is not that biologically significant. Something visible 100 meters away will not have gone far in the 300 ms it takes the sound to reach you. There are some exceptions, e.g. traffic crossings, where it's harder to parse out traffic noise without the benefit of vision.

One could try real hard to make this saying apply by saying that auditory information is inherently temporal (a stream of pressure waves impacting the eardrum) and visual information is inherently spatial (photons refracted to distribute an image across the retina). But both vision and audition carry spatial and temporal information. Some spatial auditory acuity is higher in blind folks than sighted; some is deficient. Blind people can get very good at perceiving ultrafast speech (≥16 syllables/second) so that would be a faster perception of information, sort of the opposite of "waiting to hear."

Side note, I also find the saying fails on its face. If a blind person doesn't have as much time-resolved information, then how could they possibly be the ones to "see in time"? And how would it follow that a sighted person is excluded from seeing in time and restricted to seeing in space? To me the saying wants to feel profound but, once you think about it for another few seconds, falls apart into superficial shreds at every level.