A psychic hit?

In a recent post I wrote “Now if I DO see that exact clock showing 16.25 over the next few weeks I will tend towards the psychic explanation”. Sadly that hasn’t happened but something else has.

As I’ve said in that post, I never wear a watch. However, at any given time I can usually guess what the time is to with 20  minutes, even if I haven’t seen a clock for many hours. So I guessed the time recently, having seen no clock for at least 3 hours, at 10.38. When I looked straight away at a clock it said 10.38! Pretty impressive I thought. Am I psychic perhaps?

Well, the experience becomes less impressive when I tell you that 10.38 was actually my second guess and 11.07 was my first. Still the second guess, the one I actually went with, was spot on. But is it that impressive?

As I said I can usually guess the time to within 20 minutes.  I think my ‘ability’ to track time comes from NOT wearing a watch. It made me appreciate how long regular tasks took. I could then add their duration together, correcting for any delays encountered, and come up with a pretty good guess of the overall time elapsed since last seeing a clock. If I was wearing a watch, I wouldn’t have bothered to do this.

Now, if I can do this to within 20 minutes either side of the real time then there’s a 1 in 40 chance I’ll get the exact time. So I’m bound to get the time exactly right fairly frequently. Suddenly my correct guess isn’t looking so impressive and certainly doesn’t imply any psychic ability. It shows that when you analyse great apparently psychic hits they are often not as exciting as they first appear.