Editing Talk:Blog/2024-11-23/Human Ability (section)

== Perfect Time-Sense ==

[[St. Michael's Academy|My school in India]] did not have clocks visible anywhere. When the school bell rang, you were on to your next class, but that was the only indicator that it was the next moment. My father eventually gave me my grandfather's smooth-sweep wind-up wristwatch<ref name="wristwatch"/> but for most of my life I didn't have one. This is notable only because at some point I derived near-perfect sense of time for when the bell would go off. This is probably because I kept adjusting my wristwatch's time to be x minutes of real time in order to get myself places on time but then would mentally adjust and then have to fight myself.

On one occasion, after I'd lost my wristwatch<ref name="wristwatch"/> I recall that I'd been booted out of class<ref name="booted-out"/> for some shenanigans or the other. Outside of class there are no watches, there are no people walking the halls, and no clocks. All you're doing is staring down an empty hallway. At some point I recall telling a companion next to me that the bell would ring in precisely 10 seconds and I started counting down. When my countdown ended, the bell rang. This was completely unsurprising to me at the time because I'd been doing it a few times already by then.

I can't do this anymore, but the fact that it was possible then means that it is probably possible to train people to have this kind of time-sense if not in an absolute scale, at least in a duration sense. People report animals having near-perfect time-sense regarding feeding and walks and so on, so it is not unbelievable that humans can do this to a higher fidelity since they are aware of more time indicators and the notion of duration. Almost everyone I tell this story expresses some amount of disbelief (except my wife, who seems to accept this without a doubt).