Whether I set a 5-minute timer, a 15-minute timer, or a 30-minute timer, I always seem to instinctually know when it’s about to go off within 1-3 minutes of the correct time. I’m not counting, I just get this strong urging and knowledge in my head that it’s almost up.
This is in opposition to when I was in Kindergarten (I think), when I was baffled at the concept of having a sense of time. I couldn’t tell how long anything had taken numerically without counting it directly.
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Of course, when it comes to 5-minute timers, my accuracy is closer to me knowing 10 seconds beforehand.
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What you’re talking about here is called “time perception” and it’s a suuuper complicated subject. I don’t fully understand it myself, but basically, your brain and body use a lot of systems in unison to determine time perception, either through things like your sleep-wake cycle, which repeats roughly every 24 hours, or smaller scale perception, like what you’re asking about here.
In the end, it depends a lot on how much you train your brain to pay attention to those timeframes. If you’re used to doing things in a 5-minute span for example, your brain will get used to knowing when 5 minutes have passed. If you always wake up at the exact same time, your brain will start to predict that, which is why some people find themselves waking up a few minutes before their alarm goes off, their brain is trained to expect it. Bull riders are known to be really good at determining when 8 seconds have passed, since that’s how long a bull ride lasts.
As it stands tho, we don’t really know a lot about time perception for sure, and most lf what we do know is super complicated, so I hope this satisfies your curiosity a bit!
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