Last night I went to bed sorta late and forgot to set an alarm, but I remember thinking it’d be nice to wake up around nine.
I woke up at EXACTLY 9 AM – literally to a minute. Could be a coincidence, except I do tend to wake up around nine on most days, with or without an alarm. Only exceptions are when I go to bed extremely late and force my body to take longer to recover, I suppose.
Made me think of my late Grandma who kept telling me how she can set an alarm in her head and wake up at any time she wants. I always thought it’s bullshit.
I mean, if that was true, how would that even work? Time is a concept, and a relatively new one at that; IIRC we only started really counting minutes and seconds around the Industrial Revolution? Of course there’s sunrises and sunsets and the whole natural circadian rhytm thing, but most people are detached from it anyway.
Does our brain learn to count hours and minutes somehow because our lives revolve around that so much? Is it all just a big ol’ bias of some sort?
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I cannot specify the mechanism. I can only say that practice makes perfect. I’ve not needed an alarm clock since I was a child. Every once in awhile I’ll set an alarm if there’s a massively important event at an unusual time on a given night or day, but I invariably wake a few minutes before it.
I think it goes like this. You’ve been living with the clock all your life. It has become part of your subconscious. All you need do is train yourself to access it.
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