This guy is over-thinking it. And underestimating the human brain.
So, you just trained yourself to wake on time, at 0657 or whatever time shortly before 0700 you thought wise - after all, you didn’t want to be early, as then you’d just stand in a freezing corridor, and you’d have wasted precious minutes of sleep. Eighth was the perfect place in line, as that was how many shower heads there were. I digress...
To this day, I have zero need for an alarm clock - I just pick the time I want to wake at, and I do, within a minute. I can decide to have a 15 minute nap and it’s exactly that. If I don’t set a constraint, I sleep on until I “naturally” wake up.
I have absolutely no idea how this unconscious dead reckoning of time works, but it does. I’m not as good at it awake as I am asleep - I only manage ten minute accuracy.
Another plus is that you don’t get sleep inertia like you do when woken by something suddenly, and instead wake up, well, awake.
Are you getting restful sleep?
I can manage to do something like this within a 10-30 minute range where I’m lying in bed kind of half awake until I decide to just get up, or my alarm goes off and I hit it instantly and I’m ready to go. But I’ve come to realize that it’s not some super human time keeping ability—I’m basically staying up all night, not actually sleeping, anticipating the time I need to get up, and my mind just forgets all but the past few minutes.
I realized how I did it after I started taking naps at work. If I can get at least 20 uninterrupted minutes, I basically blink and wake up rested. If someone walks by or there’s a noise at some point during that period, it’s basically me just groggily sitting around for half an hour and then my memory of it all fades a bit after the break finishes and I forget I was basically awake the whole time.
Adapting to a schedule and waking up at the right time is one thing. Being able to arbitrarily set a time sounds either superhuman or like there’s no truly deep sleep occurring.
Oddly, i wake up almost always 2 minutes before my alarm. self preservation is a hell of an instinct.
I have, many times, with many different alarm clocks or phones, woken up a minute or so before the alarm is set to go off, and usually I unset the alarm and get out of bed. There's no prep noise, no early warning, no re-imagining how things happened. I just do it, sometimes.
The answer isn't that I have a clock in my brain, but rather that waking phases occur regularly during sleep. I start to wake up, think "what time is it?" and check my phone. If it's within 30 minutes of my alarm, I just turn my alarm off and get up.
No magic required.
To do it blindly you can have someone else do it, scramble the clock, use an app,...
I don't think it's magic. There are plenty of cues (sound and light) that can tell you approximately what time it is without being conscious.
Interesting hypothesis but so easy to disprove.
Line start time was 6 am, so I had to check everything before 5:30, so I had to be in the plant at 4:30. Naturally I woke up at 2:30 and 3:30 for good measure. Fortunately the regular day shift ops also showed up at 6:30 or 7, so there was someone around with actual brainpower.
For my day to day I don't use an alarm because I wake up at the correct time naturally. This probably compounds the problem for me on alarm days.
But the most bizarre thing for me is that I pretty much always get up before the alarm (and hence feeling perfectly fine) if I drastically changed my regimen recently (which normally is pretty much non-existent), even if it leaves me with 5 hours of sleep. But once I get comfortable with it, I start sleeping longer, waking up after the alarm (even if I set it purposefully late, making place for, like, 9-10 hours of sleep), waking up tired and hating my life.
I used to have an alarm clock very close to my bed, and I would be able to turn it off or hit the snooze button very quickly after it went off without getting up. I believe I could hit the button in my sleep, or wake up just enough to hit it and then fall back asleep fast enough to forget the experience. I remember many times waking up at my alarm starting to go off at 9:30am (or some other round ten minute interval time after 9am) even though I scheduled it at 9am; I must have snoozed it several times and fell back to sleep quickly enough to forget the experience.
I even switched to a phone alarm clock app where I had to solve simple arithmetic problems in order to snooze or disable the alarm, and I had the same experience. I'm not sure it if it makes sense to say that I was solving the math problems in my sleep; I think it's more correct to say I woke up, solved it, and then fell back asleep and forgot the experience because I fell asleep quickly enough.
That happened to me quite a lot during college, and due to a quirk of my alarm I know for certain I wasn't just sleeping through it: The snooze button was between the two arrow buttons for setting stuff, and if I hit an arrow by accident while the alarm was going off, the set alarm time would change. It pretty regularly ended up several minutes off of where it was supposed to be.
Living things have all sorts of biological clocks, so this isn't really magic. Rather, it might be a bit surprising that we have some conscious control over it.
For fun I try variations: I will wake up in 6hrs. vs I will wake up at 7 o'clock. vs I will wake up 10 minutes before my alarm.
...or whatever my target is.
Your subconscious mind perceives it as a predictable negative event and wakes you up in an attempt to prevent the disturbance.
Goes to show how cool our brains are.
My personal experience says this is likely the cause as well. A vibration on your arm is a lot less disruptive as "EENENENNNG..... ENENENENNG....ENENNENN" right in the middle of a dream.
I'm also old enough to have had an alarm clock with an internal relay for the alarm, whose click was sufficient to wake me before the alarm proper sounded.
In particular, see Daniel Dennett's response (the relevant aspects of which are quoted on the Wikipedia article linked above).
I will say, I don't think this is a terribly interesting _example_; as others have noted, it's not uncommon to actually wake up minutes before the alarm goes off. (I commonly wake up 20 or 30 minutes before my alarm goes off; I can be reasonably sure my subjective experience is accurate because I look at the clock!)
But what the author hits upon (apparently naively, but it's nonetheless a useful insight) is that cognition (if one is a materialist) is not a monolith and that, as a result, various timing issues can confuse observers (as with Libet).
I became convinced that the precision of the brain at a task is partially a function of its reliability long before learning anything about machine learning.
Why is it that if you don't set your alarm you won't wake up before it would normally go off, had you set it.
Sleeping in on Wednesdays gives me a burst of energy just as everyone else is experiencing the mid-week "hump." And doing the same on Friday keeps me from checking-out an hour before the week is done. It's a good system.
Another situation when it can trigger is when I brew tea. I like a "reproducible" brew, so I'm used to setting the timer to 3:30 minutes after filling the cup with water. When I then go do something else and become engrossed in it, I'll often suddenly realize "Oh no, what about the tea?" I then look at the timer and see there are 5-10 s left.
What is the alarm like? A beep every 10 seconds? I dont follow how a consistent sounds would not be recognized.
This seems to posit. Alarm is recognized by the brain, he then has enough time to have a conscious thought but then the ears arent passing the signal they've already received, (which triggered the wake up), to the brain to "hear" it?
Does this happen to anyone else? I've never heard of it before
This seems to happen to me pretty often, given that I'll wake up in "the middle of the night" (usually because I need to use the bathroom, or because I want a glass of water), then check the clock, realize that the alarm goes off in 3 minutes, and grumble about the lost sleep time.
For instance: alarm set for 8 AM.
You wake up, look at the clock: if it says 7:59AM or earlier, you woke up before it had a chance to ring. If it says 8:00AM or anything past that, it already went off.
Unless, of course, you have an alarm that does not show you the current time. Otherwise, it's pretty easy to figure out what's happening.
Of course it also happens, that I sleep like a log until the alarm warkes me. The waking up in time usually happens when there is an urgency to be on time.
My guess is sometimes it's an hour before the alarm, but it just feels like a minute before, since you actually doze off again...
And I would bet that they are actually waking up before the alarm clock, most of the time because of the regular schedule, the other times due to confirmation bias.
These days I seem to be waking up before my alarm, but several hours, not moments before.
