[time-nuts] Am I the only Time Nut who doesn't wear a watch?

[David I. Emery]

On Sun, Jul 10, 2011 at 08:48:07AM +0530, Raj wrote:

>         Analog generation *know* the time from the position of the
> clock hands. By the position of the hands you know how many minutes left
> to an appointment etc. IF you ask them the time then it will take a
> moment to convert it to words!

	I had occasion to observe two generations of extremely
intelligent women in my family as they approached death and began to
seriously lose mental acuity weeks or months before the end - both of
them completely lost the ability to make any sense out of the time on a
digital clock well before they died but were perfectly comfortably able
to read and understand an analog clock with hands and numbers almost to
the end.

	Apparently for those who grew up in the analog clock era and
only had analog clocks around when they were little the mental
processing involved in reading and understanding the time from an analog
clock face is deeper and different from the mental processes involved in
dealing with the time in digits... which was a later learned skill and
seems to take more or at least different parts of the brain.

	So yes, one's fundamental mental model of the time may well be
deeply enmeshed in the angles of the hands on a clock, rather than the
abstractions of hours and minutes.

	I think little children do (or did) learn 3 O'clock as a pattern
of hands on a clock face associated with a particular time of importance
(time to take a nap or whatever)  well before the abstractions of
numbers, or hours and the significance of 3 hours after the meridian
mean anything.    How children in the digital age learn time is an
interesting question...


-- 
  Dave Emery N1PRE/AE, die at dieconsulting.com  DIE Consulting, Weston, Mass 02493
"An empty zombie mind with a forlorn barely readable weatherbeaten
'For Rent' sign still vainly flapping outside on the weed encrusted pole - in 
celebration of what could have been, but wasn't and is not to be now either."