4 ms·
It's not just cats; I think humans are capable of much of the same but we actively suppress it for $reasons. Any time I have an alarm in the middle of the nigh
by ComputerGuru 3y ago
It's not just cats; I think humans are capable of much of the same but we actively suppress it for $reasons.
Any time I have an alarm in the middle of the night for any random hh:mm, after just a few days of the same pattern I will naturally wake up exactly 1 or 2 minutes before the alarm as my internal clock knows what to expect. If I ignore it out of laziness and go back to sleep until the alarm rings (literally a minute later) I can break the habit but if I embrace it, it is really accurate and reliable (though thrown off if I went to bed absolutely exhausted, so there are limits as one would naturally expect).
- m463 3y agoReminds me of the feynman book "What do you care what other people think?" There's a chapter: “It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…” where he talks about and experiments with mental counting and mental time judgement I decided to investigate. I started by counting seconds—without looking at a clock, of course—up to 60 in a slow, steady rhythm: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5…. When I got to 60, only 48 seconds had gone by, but that didn’t bother me: the problem was not to count for exactly one minute, but to count at a standard rate. The next time I counted to 60, 49 seconds had passed. The next time, 48. Then 47, 48, 49, 48, 48…. So I found I could count at a pretty standard rate. Now, if I just sat there, without counting, and waited until I thought a minute had gone by, it was very irregular—complete variations. So I found it’s very poor to estimate a minute by sheer guessing. But by counting, I could get very accurate. he goes on to do all kinds of other experiments like counting while running up and down stairs and more... :)