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?
In: 17
Old grandfather clocks kept track of time using the constant period of oscillation of a swinging pendulum.
Many biological processes also exhibit a very regular, periodic pattern. Rise and fall in the level of metabolic activities, hormones, bran waves, etc.
Plus, while the clock has no way to adjust any drift caused by random chance, the brain can use external stimuli as reference markers and fine-tune its internal state accordingly.
That’s why people with a regular, predictable schedule (your grandma is likely one of them) generally have no trouble waking up at almost the exact same time everyday, but people who have cut off all connections with reality and go to sleep at weird ass hours have great difficulty waking up on time.
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