Who else has a "Spidey sense" for timing things

0235@lemmy.world to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 100 points –

Whether it is cooking, or setting timers, is anyone else able to very accurately predict timers.

E.g.cset the oven for 35 minutes, then walk into the kitchen with 1 min left on the timer?

My job requires a lot of running tests that take half an hour, 1 hour etc. I have been doing some other things, and wondered "the test has to be done now". As I am taking my phone out of my pocket, my alarm goes.

And this is my work phone, not my fun phone! Work phone normally sits on my desk all day getting ignored!!

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I’m notorious for this stuff. I also have a tendency of knowing what time of day it is without looking at the clock for hours, usually within 5 minutes. Freaks my wife out.

I have the opposite of Spidey sense and will frequently forget I'm cooking something if I don't set a timer.

My partner has this but in the most annoying way possible. He'll set a timer on our oven, then go sit down in the other room. At some point, inevitably, he will become convinced that he forgot to set the timer. After me failing to convince him this happens every time, he'll get up to check. There will be 1 minute remaining on the timer.

Every. Damn. Time!

Don't know if it counts but I hate my alarm so much that I sometimes wake up 1 minute before it triggers.

I definitely do.

I did standup for years so increments of 5-10 minutes from open mics are sort of baked into my brain.

Those initial increments have led to me getting up, walking into the kitchen and starting to open the oven only for the timer to go off as I reach for it.

Super handy skill! And also a bit weird.

2 more...

Isn't there some weird cognative effect happening in situations like this?

  • Alarm goes off
  • Wake up
  • Brain rearranges your memories so that you remember waking up just before the alarm went off
  • "What a coincidence that I woke up before the alarm"

Those cases for me are usually waking up in a panic thinking I've overslept my alarm, but when I check the time it's 10min before it goes off...

Interesting, because in times of low stress, I’m able to wake up a few minutes before the alarm and then turn it off just to stand up rested.

My mom's dog always barks at precisely 5:00PM to ask for his meds that he needs to take an hour before he can eat.

He even does it when we drive to another time zone.

Same here. I think it only works for durations I often use like cooking eggs. Might be result of unintended training.

Somehow my husband always knows, doesn’t matter how long the oven timer is set, he is forever standing up from the couch just before the timer goes off

What kind of crazy voodoo is this?!

My grandpa used to brag that he could always tell you the time to within 3 minutes if you asked. Meanwhile my ADHD makes me utterly time blind

See I can do what OP is talking about for anything that doesn't matter. If it matters, ADHD takes over

i have the exact opposite of this. i have to count the seconds in my head to make sure i've been brushing for two minutes.

I've developed it after two decades waiting tables, and learned to listen to it, but it's useless for anything other than "food's almost ready" or "I'm about to get sat again" and so on.

I can usually guess the time of day to within about fifteen minutes’ accuracy, even when it’s been hours since I last saw a clock.

I also have a peculiar ability to catch falling things. It’s VERY fast, and doesn’t seem to involve conscious thought. It just happens like a reflex.

Oh, yeah

I seem to know when timers will go off, and what time a clock will show, know how much time is left in a movie

Stupid brain keeps track of time pretty well, I guess

We needed to be able to observe the passage of time before clocks... Even before we had names for units of time or time itself

Humans are just over evolved pattern recognition machines, it shouldn't be surprising we still recognize some while on autopilot.

I’ve got this. Check phone, 45 sec left of a 20 min timer, etc.. What’s really weird is the wake-up alarm where I get up at the right time even if I forgot to set an alarm. This also works for one-off events so it’s not just my body getting up at the same time every day. E.g. I once had to wake up at 4:15 AM instead of my usual 8:00 to drive two hours to work (long story) and set my alarm to 4:15 PM accidentally. I ended up checking my phone just to see that it was 4:20 AM and I was only off by 5 min.

I’m like bipolar about it. Sometimes I do, just like you mentioned; other times I forget and overshoot it a mile.