Nope. I slept in a common room with 3 brothers. If my alarm went off (half an hour before they needed to get up) I got a whopping. So I would wake up moments before the alarm, scramble from bed to my desk and slap the snooze button sometimes just as the buzzer started to sound.
This guy is over-thinking it. And underestimating the human brain.
Yup. I grew up in dorms at boarding school. The art was to wake up five minutes before the bell, so you could be first in line for the showers and get hot water, and then to breakfast before they ran out of the good choice. You couldn’t have an audible alarm, as you’d wake others and then you’d have competition.
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.
Yeah, it's not a cognition re-ordering event that's happening. You simply wake up just before the alarm because the human brain be crazy, yo.
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.
Strange to say but I actually don't mind being woken up due to someone else's alarm. It lets me experience the pleasure of knowing I get to go back to sleep :)
The author is not necessarily wrong about his case, and this could be investigated experimentally - have someone else set the alarm to a time he does not know.
Though I don't have the common room experience that you had, I too regularly wake before my alarm goes off with more than enough time to turn it off.
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.
When I was young, I would prepare to wake up before the alarm if I really wanted to make sure I didn't oversleep. I would stare at the current time for about a minute and then go to sleep. The next day I would always wake up a few minutes before the alarm.
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.
I often wake up before an alarm even when I've not set it, or it's set to silent. Actually I rarely set an alarm but usually wake up +/- 5 minutes of the same time.
Personally, I rarely wake up before my regular alarm goes off. However, if I have to wake up earlier than I normally do for something (dr's appt, scheduled flight, etc), my body seems to wake itself up every couple of hours out of fear that I will sleep through the alarm. So I normally wake up at 8 and sleep soundly through the night, but if I've gotta be up at 7 for some reason, even if I have an alarm set, I seem to wake up in a panic at about 4 AM, 6 AM, 6:30 AM, etc.
Very recognizable. What I found interesting is that, even though apparently my brain can time the alarm really well, but I cannot actively rely on it: if I choose not to set an alarm, I will wake up a dozen times before, like you describe. It’s easy to explain why, but still a pity.
Monday plant startups were the worst back when I did manufacturing plant ops.
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.
I think even more interesting is when I wake up before my alarm and actually get up/out of bed I feel like I had proper sleep. However, if I decide to go back to sleep for the short period of time before my alarm, I usually wake up by the alarm and feel like I got terrible sleep.
Yes! Basically, every time I wake up because of alarm I feel disgusting.
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 regularly wake up about 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm goes off. I think it has a lot to do with light levels. I tend to set my alarm to go off about 7:00 in the winter and earlier in the summer, so there is some light outside to wake up to.
I'm also one to wake up 5 to 10 minutes before the alarm, but my alarm often varies. Some days it's 5:30 AM. Others it's 8 AM. So the ambient light level theory is out for me. But probably 6/7 days per week I find myself waking up a few minutes before it goes off.
Besides the overlooked possibility that people are just better at waking up at specific times than is generally expected (which I think is true and probably explains most cases, but maybe not all), there's another explanation the author didn't consider: it's possible that people frequently half-wake-up, and then fall back asleep and forget the experience. However, if you half-wake-up right before the alarm, then the alarm interrupts you before you get the chance to fall back asleep and forget the experience. You just think that you unusually woke up right before the alarm, without remembering the many other times you woke up in the morning not immediately before the alarm.
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.
> 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.
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.
I discovered at an early age that I could "will" myself to wake up at a desired time. It's certainly not perfect, but my accuracy is way better than chance.
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.
Yeah, I'm pretty much sure OP is unnecessarily complicating things. It I am getting up like 5 minutes before the alarm every time I know I really need to get up at that specific time (because I know something more important than just dragging my ass to the fucking office needs to happen this time), well, that means I somehow know subconsciously really well what's the time is. Because either I'm living in my sleep ever since, or I actually got up, turned off the alarm clock so it won't bother me, got dressed and went on with my day. Not just lied there fooling myself I'm awake before I actually got awake.
100 years from now the conversation will be about how back in the day we didn't know all of the ways time, space and quantum mechanics worked and we thought it was just a coincidence or some psychological brain function that has a highly tuned timer.
If there was some kind of backwards-time effect going on, then you would expect the experience of waking up just before unexpected interruptions to be just as common as waking up before scheduled interruptions (alarms). Personally I have a lot of experiences of waking up right before an alarm that was scheduled at a time I knew and not as many experiences of waking up right before something unscheduled.
I've definitely had the experience, mentioned else-thread, of waking minutes before the alarm, and learned through experience not to roll back over if I wanted to feel awake that morning.
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.
I almost never use an alarm to wake up. Whenever I use an alarm I wake up 5-10 minutes earlier and I wonder if the alarm went off or not. I consider this some kind of anxiety because usually I use an alarm to e.g. catch a flight
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).
During high school I had an alarm. I would wake up within about 1 to 3 seconds of it going off, stand up, walk to the alarm that was in my washroom and turn it off just as it was starting. Every school day for years.
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.
Yes, I believe this is the same phenomenon as the "long second", where you glance at a clock and it takes longer than your perception of 1 second for the clock to move, then it ticks along normally. This is because the brain noticed you changed your view and didn't want a discontinuity in processing so it makes itself think that there is a fraction of a second more of the initial image. (or something like that, probably more complicated.)
Our two dogs seem to do this. They sleep in our bedroom. We get up at 0500 to walk them before going to the gym. Usually we're up before the alarm goes off, but not always. If we sleep until the alarm goes off, typically around 0458 the dogs will be up and standing next to our bed; they shake their heads around so that the sound of their ears flapping will get us up.
In order to prevent this I bevel my week. M, T, Th I set my alarm for an hour earlier. W and F I set my alarm for the latest I can reasonably wake up and still make it to work on time if there is a minor hiccup. It prevents me from getting used to a particular schedule and waking up ahead of my alarm. When I wake up ahead of my alarm I tend to turn it off, thinking I'm awake, and subsequently fall back asleep, making myself late.
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.
I thought this was going to be an article about how this guy had a microphone in his room recording constantly, and analyzed the sounds around him that corresponded to times he woke up earlier than he wanted to. That would have been cool.
I see a general chorus of disagreement in the comments, and have to agree - I wake up before my alarm and the clock is reading 6:42 or something when the alarm is for 6:45. It's not some exotic Lamport clock phenomena or some quote out of Nietzsche's "Human, All too Human" ("Everyone knows from experience how fast the dreamer can incorporate into his dream a loud sound he hears, bell ringing, for example, or cannon fire, how he can explain it after the fact from his dream, so that he believes he is experiencing first the occasioning factors, and then that sound"). We just get good at anticipating our alarms.
I also often wake up before the alarm, and the delta is on the order of tens of seconds. I'd say I definitely get to become fully awake and start thinking about the upcoming day before it rings. Apparently, just a matter of quite a precise internal clock.
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.
>> A couple of days ago I lay in bed thinking “the alarm is just about to go off” and then a second later it did go off and I thought “how come I woke up just before the alarm went off?”
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
It's more that the conscious brain incorrectly orders events when building memory. Deja Vu is a common phenomenon of falsely feeling a memory of something that was just learned.
[+] [-] JoeAltmaier|6 years ago|reply
This guy is over-thinking it. And underestimating the human brain.
[+] [-] madaxe_again|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] henrikschroder|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] veeralpatel979|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mannykannot|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xthreen|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] globular-toast|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GuB-42|6 years ago|reply
To do it blindly you can have someone else do it, scramble the clock, use an app,...
[+] [-] brianpan|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] andybak|6 years ago|reply
Interesting hypothesis but so easy to disprove.
[+] [-] AdmiralAsshat|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] stingraycharles|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csours|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] city41|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jonplackett|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway_tech|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] krick|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Cerium|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamatworknow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] XCSme|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AgentME|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Izkata|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] downerending|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] krick|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] UI_at_80x24|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kempbellt|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] coding123|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AgentME|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] syntheticnature|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] paxpelus|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] md_|6 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] 3pt14159|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] projektfu|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Vysero|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] oyebenny|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dctoedt|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] art4ur|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dang|6 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9365150
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9134541
[+] [-] maxk42|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] magicroot75|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glangdale|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gattr|6 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] sharkmerry|6 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] gowld|6 years ago|reply