I'm really busy with work at the moment and I was working late last night. When I finally admitted defeat I looked at my watch and it read 10 to midnight, not too bad I thought. When I got upstairs I looked at my digital bedside clock and it read 1:50?. Now, because my wrist watch is unreliable, it keeps stopping, I automatically thought oh crap my watch has stopped again, it's two o'clock in the morning, I'm really tired and I'm only going to get 5 hours of low quality sleep since it's really hot and muggy at the moment! When I awoke at 7am I felt awful, just as I should have felt after a long day and only 5 hours of restless sleep.
As time passed this morning I discovered that it wasn't my watch that was wrong at all, it was the digital clock whose first digit is on the blink, it read 1:50 and it was actually 11:50! giving me a fairly normal 7 hours of sleep. Why did I feel so bad? I went to sleep thinking about how tired I was going to be when I woke up and my brain faithfully delivered on that, Human brains truly are powerful simulation engines, giving us false physical signals that seem totally real and probably chemically are real. This is especially true when we're given external confirmation bias into the bargain.
2 comments:
Personally I'd be concerned about the fact that every device in your life seems to be on the blink. If you're working that late I'd be saving every three minutes, in case your PC joins the party.
I blame sun spots AE, yesterday my daughters mac-book also decided to play up, another hour wasted, I hate fiddling with macs I find them so opaque but that's another post.
Anyway, I always find that IT people of a certain, ahem, age, always save every three minutes, like a nervous tick! Probably because we remember what it was like before auto-save and RAID drives.
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