This reminds me of something Douglas Adams wrote to his editor in 1992: "(...) there is something inherently ridiculous about digital watches (...) Digital watches came along at a time that, in other areas, we were trying to find ways of translating purely numeric data into graphic form so that the information leapt easily to the eye. For instance, we noticed that pie charts and bar graphs often told us more about the relationships between things than tables of numbers did. So we worked hard to make our computers capable of translating numbers into graphic displays. At the same time, we each had the world’s most perfect pie chart machines strapped to our wrists, which we could read at a glance, and we suddenly got terribly excited at the idea of translating them _back_ into numeric data, simply because we suddenly had the technology to do it..."
LOL that explains the "an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea"
YES, this is exactly how I feel and look at the clock. Especially the "imaginary minute hand" that represents the end of a class for example. I can quickly glance at my watch, and know/feel/understand what time it is, but if somebody asks me what time it is, that means oh no I need to actually parse it and engage my brain. Also, it's so infrequent that you really need per-minute precision. Glad to have found someone actually talk about this.
100% agree with you on this. And I think if you ever do need to parse the time you usually round it. For example if the clock says it's 3:52 and someone asks for the time, usually you just say 3:50.
Well I just learned something about myself, I do the same thing when asked the time. I can look at my watch and just know where in the day we are, but it takes a second look to verbalize it, and I never give minute-precision. I think this concept ties into a lot of other ways people look at the world, in a digital vs analog sense. I drove long before GPS, so going to the store is forty minutes down the county road, not thirty miles. I wonder where else the difference crops up.
This is very interesting. In Sweden ( and probably the whole Europe too ) our digital clocks are almost always in what you call military time. As a swede, when i thought about your flip clock i had to think for a while that it was not set to morning but actually afternoon. 3 to me has always been 15. 3 is in the morning.
Nothing makes sense in occupied Turtle Island. 12 hour clocks, imperial measurements that are defined by metric, privatized everything, etc. I was lucky enough to spend a few months overseas and now exclusively use metric in my workshop and 24hr time in personal clocks.
I just automatically thought he was filming half past 3 in the morning. Until I read your comment I hadn't even realized I thought that and that filming at 15 would make way more sense.
@@geobot9khow does having a 12 hour clock be the same as it has been for centuries not make sense though. Like everyone used 12 until digital came out. The reason everyone uses seconds instead of the metric equivalent the French tried to come ip with when they standardized everything else is because time was the only thing that everyone in Europe already standardized. Also if the French wanted the US to use their system they should have sent more than one sample or made sure it didn't get taken by pirates.
@@Pfish1000- Lol. Yeah no, until the middle of the 19th century when pocket watches started to spread because of railroads, the only clock most people had access to was the one on the village's church or town hall. Time in the day was not marked by the time on a clock, but by the position of the sun in the sky and the ringing of the Angelus bell. The 24h format is vastly more practical, it entirely avoids confusion, and removes the need for a useless affix while displaying 12h time is already a 4 digit affair.
@@MadNumForce OK cool so these mechanical town clocks that existed for centuries, were they not 12 hour or did they have 24 hours marked on them? Oh it was 12 like every mechanical clock? The move to 24 hours in Europe is significantly more recent is half my point and digital makes that easier. I bet if I went to Milan Italy TODAY and bought a wristwatch to go with my new tailored suit, it would have 12 denotations for the hours and not 24. Sure a 24hr clock avoids ambiguity without the need for a suffux, that's why it's used in aviation and the military, but for your average person it offers relatively little advantage and is what people were already used to so we just didn't bother to make the switch. Also before you argue that time wasn't standardized because everyone had a different noon. I'm specifically referring to the units and how many of them make up the next unit was agreed upon. Nobody had 90 second minutes, nobody had 75 minute hours, and nobody had 16 hour days. At least not in Europe which is all that matters as that standard an not the French attempt at metricify-ing it and not any other standard, is the standard the world now uses.
As a person with ADD this is why I decided, years ago, to keep an analog clock in my room. I have trouble with time management, so to have a visual of the progression of time does 2 things: 1 It allows me, like you said, to see where in the hour I am and how much time I have left at a glace. 2 Each time I glance at the clock I see the progression and relate it to how time FELT since the last time I looked and makes me aware of any distractions I may be allowing at that moment, or if I'm feeling a bit spaced out and loosing all track of time internally. This inevitably helps to instill a sense of urgency when these problems become apparent. And it's much more apparent and easily gauged with an analog clock.
@@deltastripesThat reminds me, I have to buy a pomodoro timer. I'm ADD too, and I never really thought about it, but I think analog clocks actually are better for me for that reason. I think I'm gonna pick up like 2 of them--maybe a glow-in-the-dark one. I'm not sure if it's just the layout of the digital clock so much as being desensitized to it because it's EVERYWHERE--namely on my phone, which I have basically integrated into my body at this point 😂
Somewhat related: pilots and competitive drivers have recognized for years that it is MUCH faster to get the information that you _need_ from analog displays like needle gauges and bar gauges, than digital readouts. It isn't nearly as important to know that engine RPM is 7,449... 7,443... 7,438... than that you're about half-way between 7K and 8K and will need to shift soon. Likewise, for most purposes, it's more useful to know you're about 2/3 through the hour, than whether it's 3.37, 3.39, or 3.41.
Exactly! When information is rapidly changing and not precisely under your control, fast approximations and trends are more brain efficient than precise numbers.
Definitely agree -- and you can kind of "read" an analog tachometer without looking at it directly, and you can certainly see when it's moving. It's almost like parsing a digital readout requires interpretation, whereas the analog display is visceral and doesn't require that interpretation step.
I have seen many race cars where drivers have rotated their tachometers so the optimal shift point is at the 12'o'clock position. It requires zero thinking time to register the shift point; Thus reducing the cognitive load in critical timing or high stress situations. Every small advantage is an edge on your competitor.
Especially with information that changes rapidly. A digital readout cannot show the rate of change of the information in a sensible way. And when you should be primarily looking out of the window in front it makes no sense to have a speedometer that you have to *read* to obtain your speed, instead of a needle that shows your speed instantly.
Thats why there aren't digital gauges in cars much. Chevy tried something in the 90s but it didn't last. People had to sit and actually read the number to know how fast they were going. Analog gauges "read" faster. Once a person gets familiar with the gauge, a simple glance will tell them how fast they're going with enough accuracy to matter. Plus analog gauges show rate of progression much better than digital ones, as far as diagnosis of pressures are concerned. Its easier to tell how fast a pressure is rising. A digital readout may not update fast enough to properly show information.
I realized this difference in perception of time as an EMT and needed to time 30 seconds for people’s pulse. When I was a student I asked a guy why he had a manual instead of digital watch and the guy told me that it’s easier to time 30 seconds with analog. I didn’t see how that made sense so I forgot about it until I started taking pulses and I realized that he was right. By glancing at the second hand’s position, you gain the number and the relative position of the hand. If you forget the number, you can reference your memory of the position of the hand to get an approximate idea of where it was. You also don’t need to add and subtract while extremely stressful situations are going on like you would need to with a digital.
Excellent example! While i do not need to time 30 seconds, i often get a safety relevant system to work on fortimeframaes like half an hour or 1 hour. And it's way easier to glance at an analog watch to see how much of the time i have left than a digital one. One of the reasons i usually wear an analog wrist watch. I can do it with my digital one too (for situations that the analoge ones are to precious to me i use a G-shock), but to make it easier i either use the stop watch or the timer to see how much there is left. (sometimes my brain translates the numbers then to an analog dial in my head)
You can literally just get a glance of the second hand, and when its inverted from that its been 30 seconds. With digital its like, youre straight away doing sums. I dont even care about numbers, you just look at the little arrow and when its pointing the other way you are done.
Yup, whenever I need to estimate time intervals, I look at or mentally picture an analogue clockface, because you can visually see the interval on it. For knowing the exact time *now*, I prefer a digital readout though, because reading the tiny minute dots is annoying, but given the prevalence of digital clocks in devices it's not hard to have both available to you. An analogue wall clock and digital on your computer/phone.
There are even watches made for medics so they could time stuff like that, like Boldr Venture Medic...but that's a mechanical watch and those are basically for enthusiasts.
I also like that on an analog clock, the hour hand does not instantly jump from 3 to 4 when 3:59 becomes 4:00. It moves smoothly between the hours. When its 3:55, it's basically pointing at 4, which is good because 3:55 is basically 4:00. Or at least its much closer to 4:00 than 3:00.
Yep. I think a watch maker awhile back created a watch that only had an hour hand, it was meant to give people are more comfortable idea of time, since you can still get an idea of when it is without having to mull over exact minutes or seconds
Yeah the hour hand is like an "hours gauge" in the same way that you have pressure and fuel gauges with needles. It tells you the time of day coarsely (with 1/2-hour precision) completely independently of the other hands.
i feel the same way !! i've also noticed that as soon as i look at a digital clock and then look away, i immediately forget what time it was because something about a string of numbers just doesn't stick in my memory very well. but if i look at an analog clock, even if i don't "translate" it for myself, i have a much better chance of not only remembering what time it was but also just having a generally better understanding of what that means for my schedule or whatever. the visuals are definitely a huge part of it - i can pay better attention to the pattern of where the hands are on an analog clock and recall what that looked like than i can for a digital clock, so even if i don't remember exactly what the time was, i can recall the image of the clock face in my head and basically re-read it mentally. but this was super interesting, and although i had never thought about it like this, i'm absolutely the same way !
Doctoral candidate in education here: This phenomenon is called "automaticity" and refers to the idea that our brains develop meaning from abstract combinations of stimuli. The term is most often used in reading education when we talk about developing fluency. It's the same reason that when you read the words in this comment, your brain is not literally parsing each letter, but rather, the words themselves hold automatic meaning based on their visual form, while at the same time can be broken down into their granular parts (phonemes and letters).
i kinda of feel like the disconnect comes from changes in our mentality. Being bored in school watching the minute hand till the end of class or end of school day to be able to get home, watching the minute hand at work to clock out and rush home to unwind. As someone who rarely leaves the house and works from home similar to how a youtubers life must work theres no structure to my days now. I sleep when im tired, technically speaking since i work off my computer, and i spend every waking moment on the computer i am technically always clocked into work. The only time an actual clock comes into play is when i have doctors appointments or if i want to order some food to be delivered and i need to order before the places close. Also theres the fact that the older we get the faster time seems to pass
And you can demonstrate this skill. Consider presenting a situation you're practiced with - knowing what the time when class ends looks like - and present a bunch of random analog clocks showing times within that time range. Sure, if you are asked, "What time is it?" you'll be processing things more than your digital counterparts, but if you have an assignment in front of you and are asked, for each clock, "Do you have time to finish this?" you'll give faster responses, because you're estimating distances rather than doing any math. Any question that interprets the time into something to make practical decisions on you'll be able to "compute" without math.
Another specific example to demonstrate the usefulness is to present clocks with a "ghost hand" and ask how much time is left until the real hand lines up, allowing practical responses like "just over 10 mins", and present the same for digital examples. If the times are wonky, like how long for 2:18 to become 2:46, it takes multiple steps to interpret that practically as "just under half an hour", yet the analog clock with a minute hand moved by 28 mins looks like "just under half an hour" of distance no matter where the starting time is.
@@jandew314 Now I wonder if I'm weird. I wouldn't think of either of those as concretely... I'd just round off and think 20 and 50, so about half an hour. I don't think the "progress bar" analogy works for me at all, cause I still need to think about roughly where I am versus where I'm going.
@@jandew314 yes thats a great example "what time is it" vs "do you have time to finish this" when i get home from work and i know i should do a thing. i look at the clock(my phone with a digital clock) im like nah thats going to take the rest of the day(because i cant be bothered to actually calculate how much time i have before i need to sleep). for example change oil on my car or whatever. so i just watch youtube instead just wasting the day away. but if i would have looked at an analogue clock i would see that i have like half the day left and will with no problem be able to change oil even if i hit a snag. very interesting. i need more analogue clocks in my life. :)
The “progress bar” concept is entirely new to me and is blowing my mind. It was always taught to me since the beginning when we made paper plate clocks in elementary school in the ‘80s that the goal is to point to a number which you can then translate to the time. That’s why digital clocks are so much easier: they’re precise and unambiguous with no extra layer of translation required. But suddenly I understand why some analog clocks might not even have any numbers on the face at all, or only at the cardinal points. It’s not actually the point of the clock!
@@MegaLokopo Yeah because subtraction is just figuring out how much you need to add to move clockwise to your target time. It's kind like how schools have introduced subtraction as addition of the difference between the two numbers, moving left to right on a number line, to help students conceptualize and visualize it when they are first learning it. It's not always the fastest technique, but it leads to the best/deepest understanding.
@@jshariff786 That is still widely debated. Lots of students are struggling with the changes made the past few years even pre covid changes unrelated to covid.
I find it super interesting how you conceptualize 03:40 as forty minutes into the hour, and not as twenty minutes until the next hour. I know both notations refer to the same point in time, but it seems to me like two completely different ways to perceive it. I stand firmly in the digital time camp, having grown up with digital clocks and never really having used analog, but I can definitely see how the spacial aspect of literal hands rotating in a disk can help understand time. I don’t see time as fractions of a disk, so for me, converting the remaining trajectory of the minute hand into actual minutes is the harder of the two ways. Time is numbers in my head because that’s what I grew up with.
There might be a connection to that. Ive spent a good half or so of my life mainly with digital time but I still have a hard time keeping track of things. I know conceptually that 3:50 is 10 minutes until 4:00 but I always think of it as 50 minutes past 3:00. I dont have the same issue with analog though, because I see analog as fractional. 2/3 into the hour is 1/3 until the next, but I dont seamlessly make that connection with digital because I dont see it as fractional. Also for me analog gives a sense of almost urgency while digital just doesn't until it's very close to the time I know I have to leave for example
I will think of it both ways. It's both 40 minutes after and 20 minutes til. I usually think of hours in groups of 5 (12 groups in an hour). I think of hours in 2 groups of 12 hours (am and pm). In most cases, being within 15 or 30 minutes is adequate. Then, I just refer to the quarter hour and the half hour. For example, I'll say, "It's about half past 4" or "It's a quarter to 4."
I actually find it interesting how a firmly digital person would still be accustomed to thinking of time as leading to the next hour, rather than time since the last hour. Digital time, in numeric sense, is *always* counting up from the previous hour. Figuring how many minutes are left until the next one requires mathematical calculations. With experience, one is used to such things and simply knows that "40 after" is "20 'til" because it just "is" that way, rather than doing the mental calculations of "60 minus 40 is 20." But looking at an analog clock face, you can SEE the pie chart of time, rather than having memorized mathematical formulas in your head. The movement of the minute hand could be conceptualized as counting up, OR counting down, OR both- depending on your point of view. But a digital clock is ALWAYS counting up. The numbers are always rising, and counting down requires math. So it's interesting to me how a firmly digital person would be a "counting down" type; I just find that interesting. Neither right nor wrong; there is no right or wrong; it's all the same time. Just different ways to express how we're thinking about it.
It's like how when something costs 3.99 it gives the illusion that it's closer to 3 than 4. Same thing when a digital clock reads 3:59. It throws you off, even if it's unconsciously
I found your "progress bar" analogy to be the best description about how you perceive time on an analog clock. Being a school retired school teacher, I really connected with your comparison to your school class schedule being at odd numerical times, but instead of constantly doing head-math to figure out the remaining numerical minutes, you view the analog clock more like a "count-down" timer waiting for the bell to ring at zero.
I don't get most students' obsession with "what time is it?". They already know when the bell rings. If you look at the large clock on the wall, you can instantly see how many minutes are left. "What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?" And then half the time they don't even listen for the answer, they just want to interrupt the lecture. I mean, I got pretty serious ADHD as well, but then I at least try to find it interesting, think of my personal experiences with the subject or if it's really that boring, just draw in the notebook and shut up.
Yes-and, because, in a clock, two number-lines (one running 1-12 (or 0-12); the other, 1-60 (or 0-60)) have been wrapped around a circle, each with both of its ends at the same point, you can make the origin ("zero" in "waiting for the bell to ring at zero") anywhere around the circle. If we're talking about twelve hours (a whole circle) from four o'clock, we know to relate any time between the start and the end to the "4"-point on the clock. If we're talking about an hour from 5:07, we know the "7"-mark is the crucial thing. If we're talking about five minutes, we can make any combination of hour and minute the start (or end) and just move the five little marks (or a twelfth of the circle) in one direction or another, even if it means crossing the "12" at the top of the clock. There's great advantage in treating some numerical concepts as continuous loops, on which any points can be the origins. In the end, it makes much sense that we do this with time (but not, say, dollars or apples), because time as we experience it is repeated loops-the diurnal loop of night and day, the annual loop of the seasons, and even the seven-day loop that is the week. Numbers are just our way of processing and sharing information about the natural world when what we have is hard to visualize or is going to involve a lot of steps or a lot of inputs. When what we're trying to do is simple, we keep the numericization as little as possible: if I want you to hang a picture at a certain spot on the wall, I say to put it "half way up": I chop the wall only into two equal parts (halves), and I tell you to move from the bottom of the wall to the top of the bottom part: I don't bother to go compare the height of the wall to a stick or ribbon on which dozens or hundreds of equal spaces have been marked, and then read digits that tell me how many of those spaces separate a certain point from the end of the stick or ribbon, and then tell you to go to that number and put the picture there. Simplifying numericization is one of the unspoken advantages that older units have over those of the metric system. The metric system has many benefits and even advantages, yes. But think of the ease of writing "1 c" or "1 cup" compared to that of "100 mL" or "240 mL or "250 mL" or "0.25 L". Then, set aside the writing and just consider the speaking-the quickness of pronouncing "one cup" and "a cup" (two syllables), compared to the slowness of pronouncing "two hundred and fifty milliliters" (ten syllables) or even "a quarter liter" (five) or "a deciliter" (five).
Thank you for this. It helps explain why I've always struggled with telling people what time it is when I look at a clock (both digital and analogue.) I don't really think about time in "numbers" but in "how long until" or "do I have enough time" or "what should I be doing now." So, I'll look at my watch and see 12:45 and think, "I better eat some lunch" or, "Man, I've got an appointment in 15 minutes. I better get in my car." or, "There's just a few more minutes left in class." When someone asks me the time, I struggle, because I have to translate my thoughts of "It's time to eat lunch" (or whatever) into some sort of number. I'll usually get the minutes right, but not the hour. The hour isn't terribly important to me, because I already KNOW what hour it is, because I've been glancing at the clock throughout the day.
This is fascinating! As someone who grew up mostly with (24 hour) digital clocks, it's never occurred to me to read analogue clocks graphically. I can read them, but my instinct is to translate the hands to numbers, and it takes me a second. It might get easier if I try to think of it as a portion of a circle instead. To me, it's the numbers that give me that immediate intuitive understanding of the time. :30 immediately means "half-past" to me. :50 means "ten minutes left" etc. I look at a digital clock and I have a conceptual understanding of what time it is. With an analogue clock, I have to translate it back to numbers and only then do I have that conceptual understanding.
I think some people’s problem is that “reading a clock” is taught in public school as a math problem. Translate analog to digital in abstraction, not as a “how do you use this information the clock is giving you”. Also, on the hour hand is hard to read issue, it’s always closest to the hour that is closest. “Almost four” is more descriptive and useful than “54 minutes after 3”
I totally agree, I feel like the reason a lot of people have trouble with analogue clocks is because they are told and are always trying to, convert the time directly and exactly into a numerical, digital value. It creates a whole different perspective and yeah clearly a traditional clock is harder to read for an exact to the minute value, but its way better at visualizing where in the day or the hour you are.
When I was at school, whilst it wasn't taught as converting to digital, it was converting to words. To read an analogue clock, we were taught how to tell if it was o'clock, quarter past, half past, or quarter to, and name the hour with that. Whereas on a digital clock, I can look at it and see if it's :00, :15, :30 or :45 to answer the same question, and questions that were used to gauge our level of understanding were all about being able to tell the teacher what the time was on a drawing of a clock.
Came into the comments to say this. Yeah, we were always taught "this is how you read an analog clock as numbers" and nobody ever pointed out that it could represent progress, not just a number.
I agree with the 1st part about how to teach the clock but disagree on the 2nd part, i find 3 54 (54 minutes past 3, ect) far more usefull, could be its my dyslexia, of just the evolution of my 1st learning of clocks that a struggled with, but knowing the exact time helps me more then a "about 4" Is it 4? Is it 10 to 4? If its 5 to 4 that means im late but if its 12 to 4 then i still have some time. Or is it even past 4?! Its why i look at the time myself then ask someone else.
12:37 reminded me of a fun thing. I went to school in actual Westminster in actual London. The entire school was trivially within earshot of Big Ben, which strikes a distinctive set of chimes every quarter hour. Our lessons were also an odd duration - either 40 or 50 minutes each depending on the day. The first term there, the chimes were honestly pretty annoying. Every quarter hour these bloody great bells would peal these complex chimes (four chimes per quarter, so the full hour is 16 chimes, and then the number of chimes of the hour, so the midday chimes were 28 notes in total!). But after a while you tune them out and nobody notices them. However, in the second year I noticed an odd thing. Although we all wore watches (it was the 80s - digital watches were cool), nobody ever looked at them. Or asked each other the time. Or was surprised when a lesson ended. Or even checked the clock on the wall. We all - the entire school - we just MAGICALLY KNEW WHAT TIME IT WAS. Because every quarter of an hour, this by-now-subliminal sound would reset our sense of time. So if someone (like a tourist) DID ask the time - you just knew to within a minute or so. It was very bizarre. So that's a third, vastly freakier, way of telling time.
telling time by sound is something i never understood but was always aware of, ad while i wasn't sure of it, i was just waiting for na example like yours to prove it: as long you comprehend somthing, even if you're not consciously aware of it, subconsciously you're still going to internalize the information. that being said, as for why i've not been able to understand telling time by sound even though i live in a country where nearly every town has a bell tower(italy), well... i guess i just suck at interpreting audio cues into complex information. i can easily use headphones in a first person shooter or other game to tell which treath is where, but that's a fairly subset of information needed to make that split second decision(direction and type of sound, both which i can get with just a little practice in the game and mere logical thinking) but telling the HOUR? that's way different, i can't even keep track of 28 frikking bell clocks in a row, unless i was hyper-aware of how it worked for months, i would just not get it simply because i can't keep track of it. i always thought though(well, always, since i was 17) that it was because of being on the ASD... but who knows.
The interesting thing to me is that this method of telling time you've described predates pocket watches, wristwatches (analog or digital), and even clocks on the wall! Bells rang on the quarter hour in churches were how people kept track of time well before individuals had clocks on their walls and/or person. People used to instant information would pooh-pooh telling time by clock tower bells as inferior, but as you said it's surprisingly accurate once you are accustomed to it.
Bell in my city usually off by a few minutes. If you think about it its just how any clock works, but they have 32khz resonator while you had like 1/15hz which is of to tell time within a few minutes.
I’m finding the use of the word trivially interesting. “The entire school was trivially within earshot of Big Ben…” 1. In the one sense it is anything but trivial - the entire story is dependent upon being within earshot, so it’s not trivial. 2. In the sense of “proved” it’s just a redundant word; of course you are within earshot of something you can hear. But this is an uncommon usage. 3. Just to clarify that there is no special relationship between the school and Big Ben. One would think there would be several schools close enough to Big Ben to hear the bells. (A fun trivia question though - “How many schools are within earshot of Big Ben?” Whatever distance earshot would be). 4. Every time you tell someone you went to school near Big Ben, this initiates questions as to "why" as people might assume a specialness, or an association, between the school's location and the bell - thus requiring additional, unimportant explanation. This would make it a trivial defense, against trivial questions, in an amusing way.
I'm only twelve minutes in, and I love this so much. A few points: 1. I'm a lot like you. I'm quite at home with an analog 12-hour clock-face. 2. When I perform any operations on digital times (e.g., how much time separates 1:23 from 4:56?), the clock-face is in my head-not as a thing with arrows pointing at marks that represent numbers that have been wrapped around a circle after coming from my usual mental number-line (which doesn't stop at 12 or 60), but as a disc chopped into fractions. 3. It's not just the minute-hand. The hour-hand, too, is 'a progress-bar': when we've just gotten to school and already we're itching for lunch, we're aware that we have to wait for the little hand to move x-way around the circle. 4. Unlike the usual computery progress-bars, these ones are traversed at a constant rate. 5. Our base-ten digits are hugely useful, but they really hide proportions. As an amount of text on a page, 100 is no more than 900 (three characters in each number, and two thirds of them are the same)-and 1,000,000,000 is only about fifty percent longer than 1,000,000, even though it means a quantity that's _a thousand times_ as big. As space in a written recipe, "1/4 cup" and "3/4 cup" are equal (as are "250 mL" and "750 mL")-but one is three times as big as the other. This is why we so often convert spreadsheets of digits into lines and bars and pies. 6. Maybe this is one of the keys to fixing our current screwy relationship with time. Maybe it's even worse for people who haven't learned to read analog clocks easily; maybe it's worse for people who can read them easily but didn't learn to read _them first_ and therefore don't automatically mentally convert digital times into parts of the circle. Maybe, even for those of us who do have that ease and that automatic conversion, it would be better to have more analog timepieces around and fewer digital ones. Maybe this graphical advantage is not only in the circle (or octagon or oval or square or rectangle) of the clock, but also in the calendar with rows and columns. Maybe we need more paper monthly calendars in our lives, not only with upcoming events flagged, but also with the passed days crossed out. ADDENDA: 7. I also have no trouble with the hour-hand-and it's rare that I don't already know what hour we're in. 8. Roughly (sometimes very roughly), the sweep of the hour-hand is like the sweep of the sun across the sky.
On point 5: The core reason why our perception of size based on digits is screwy is that as a quantity increases, the length of the number needed to represent that quantity scales logarithmically. Most people aren’t really equipped to think about logarithms in daily life so it can be tricky to think about.
@@redpepper74what's funny is that's a product of being taught arithmetic. If you ask someone that went through modern school, "What's halfway between 1 and 9", they'll say, "5". If you ask an indigenous person with no formal education, they'll say, "3". "3" is the right answer. 3 is 3 times 1 and 9 is 3 times 3. They think geometrically/logarithmically, we think linearly.
@@williamreynolds6475 That’s pretty interesting. I wouldn’t say that 3 is the “correct” answer though, because “halfway between” doesn’t indicate what measuring system you’re using. It would only be correct if logarithmic scale was the canonical system of measurement (which it isn’t, at least as a programmer, I use linear scale much more often)
I remember trying to learn about reading time... I'd ask my dad what time it is now. "10 after". Still not sure if he intuitively knew the hour like you do, or if he was just not up to the task of teaching me. Either way, I'm sure most peoples' introduction into trying to learn time isn't like "quarter 'til" and I'm so happy for you all. It has been rough.
Progress bar app for the day, with a couple color coded subsections to set wake up/sleep, work/break, and maybe an analog clock underneath for precision. That would be interesting.
Bad idea. If you put up a progress bar Bill Gates will make software to run that bar til you don't know how many days it's actually been. Politicians will get their cut while telling you how they want to end progress bars. I mean humans don't need sleep right, and you don't want to be replaced with a robot do ya. Nah. It'as a bad idea.
This is actually really interesting to me because as a fairly young person, I have grown up primarily reading digital clocks, thus time in my head is processed digitally, quite literally the opposite of how you explained that you interpret time. For myself, whenever I look at an analog clock, I have to do the conversion to digital time in my head before the info actually means anything, because I think of time in digits. Just looking at an analog clock is quite meaningless for me until I look exactly at what point the minute hand is, and convert that to digital time to then get a sense of what time it is.
Actually, converting an analog clock into digits that make sense to me, makes even less sense to me, because i'd need to visualise the digits written next to each other as an image in order to intuitively parse it as time. Like, i need to see _all_ of the digits in my mind's eye _at the same time_ because otherwise the time just doesn't make sense to me.
I don't necessarily think this is because you are younger. I think it's because you experience what it feels like for time to pass, so thinking "it's 3:50, I have ten minutes before it's 4" is a non-issue. But myself, I have ADHD, so time doesn't pass normally for me. If you asked me to tell you when 10 minutes had passed in a room without a clock, I would say it's been 10 minutes after about 4 minutes of boredom or after about an hour and a half of doing something I like. I don't need to know how many minutes until a certain time is happening. I need to know what percent of the way I am through the block of time I am currently in, otherwise time has no meaning to me. If I started at 2pm and I see its 2:45, and I planned to stop at 3pm, I have a sense of how long the next 15 minutes will feel... roughly 1/3rd of what already passed. But that only works if I keep doing the same thing. If I change things, I have no idea. Those 15 minutes could feel 3x as long as the first 45, or they could go by in what feels like 1 minute. But if I'm doing the same task, that percentage... that sense that I'm 3/4 of the way through the time slot, grounds my sense of time passing.
@@thirdpedalnirvana Hm. I think I disagree that this is why _I_ experience it though, because even though I have ADHD (inattentive type), I don't have a problem with time blindness. Mind you I will absolutely get distracted and lose several hours of time, or be bored and feel like time is crawling, but my memories from before that are still "marked" with the right objective-time, so I can still tell how much time passed even if I don't remember it actually passing.
I have quite the same functionning, except that I nearly automatically convert digital time to an analog representation in my head, but its not the same as the regular analog clocks (there are several analog representation systems I use to get around in my life: something for the time around the year (that is a little bit off too), something for distances, forces, counting, etc...). The thing is, in order to understand an analog clock, I have to translate it into digital, and then translate it again to understand it.
This kinda blew my mind my brain works the same way as your describing but ive just never thought of it. After i was out of school I’ve pretty much only had digital clocks around me so ive just gotten used to it but thinking about it i do miss the “progress bar” aspect of a regular clock.
Great video. I consider a classic Movado watch. No digits. Just a circle to symbolize the twelve position. But it perfectly illustrates that the numbers aren't actually necessary at all for the piece to achieve its purpose.
As a person who always struggled with analog clocks, this video really helped me "get it". Thinking of a minute hand as a progress bar is a wild idea to me.
It's really apparent in the way we used to talk about times in terms of quarter to and quarter pass, half past.. that we learned to read time as a ratio and place emphasis on time in terms fractions of hours, not in specific minutes
I also find it interesting that there are different ways to speak these times, based likely on where you are from and the terms specific to your region. Many say as you do, quarter to, quarter past, half past. Where I am from you say quarter of, quarter after and X-thirty, you actually always say "thirty" and never "half". I guess it's like dresser vs bureau, toilet vs commode, etc, but still interesting to me.
Yes!!! As a child that really confused me most. Hey it’s a quarter of 3 ? Would that be 3:15? Hey it’s a quarter to 3. 2:45? I guess it’s that keyword “of” “To” … but, I see time or understand the length better on analog.
@@volkerlange7251 Not really. I say 3-15 and 2-45 etc etc. Most students I teach do too. My mum definitely says things like half past and quarter to. But it wasn't until it came up here that I realised that is not the norm anymore. (I was born in the 80s so im not that young either). I might occationally say "quarter to" but its the exception not the rule. In part it must be because the digical clocks are everywhere but I suspect that its also because we communicate in text so much more and 315 is much faster to write than quarter past 3 and because we communicate like that a lot we talk like that too.
It's also that minutes are too small a division for human-scale time. 10-minute increments is probably the smallest I'd recommend using (again, this is human-scale time, if you're cooking, that's chemistry which requires much higher precision), but quarter-hours are simpler than dealing in 10-minute increments.
I think this is super interesting and my parents and anyone older would definitely agree with you. I’m 22, so I’ve mostly used digital growing up. I have never considered using the hands as a radial progress bar, but I can understand its intuitive speed. However, I am unable to instantly feel the time and deduce an amount of time until my next meeting just by glancing at the hands. I always have to translate to digits, but when I read digital, I can instantly tell my next meeting is in an hour and a half without thinking about the math. The only caveat is the precision is within 5 minutes for times more than an hour, but I would expect this is to be the same for analogue. While I can understand your perspective, I know the consensus will pass with the generations. Growing up on digital provides the same intuition and speed as growing up on analogue, and due to its smaller size and convenience for placing in many more places, digital will continue to take over and the youth will be able to feel the time with the same speed and precision, and I think will be able to keep better track of the current time due to the ease of finding a digital clock somewhere such as: your computer screen, your phone, or tour car.
I'm from an older generation (god, it feels weird to say that, lol), and I think your comment is a good illustration that it's a lifetime of familiarity which leads to the ability to look at a clock and have an immediate intuition for what it means, rather than one or the other of digital and analog being "naturally" more intuitive. When I'm getting my daughter ready for the bus on a chaotic morning, an analog clock gives me an immediate feel for how much urgency is required, while I'll stare at a digital clock dumbly trying to figure out if it means "go faster" or "relax". I'm guessing that for you'd it'd be exactly the opposite.
I'm only 24 and while I guess I also didn't have an analog clock in the house growing up, I have one in every room in my apartment today aside from the bedroom. My watch is analog and I can't imagine how late I'd be everywhere if it were digital. This is crazy to think when we grew up similarly and are practically the same age.... I'm mindblown by all this haha
I don't think the consensus will pass with generations. Time ultimately is a dimension. Human minds visualize dimensions. You look at a wall or a stick and you say "halfway up the wall" or 'halfway along the stick" far more than you ever say "Let's come up with a unit, then see how many of those units fit into the length or height of that stick or wall, then divide that number by two, and then count from the origin a number of those units equal that quotient." You just look at the stick and picture its midpoint and call that "half" or "midway" or "midpoint" or "center" or whatever. I think that almost any person who reads a digital clock but has never learned to read an analog clock is still doing the back-translation. Set aside time for a moment and consider just numbers. I think it very unlikely that anybody who knows how 30 relates to 60 doesn't have a number-line in mind: you have in mind an origin, and a spot some distance away designated 60, and the knowledge that 30 is halfway between the origin and 60. Well, once you've learned how to tell time (just from digits, never an analog clock, let's say), you understand that 60 seconds make 1 minute, that 60 minutes make 1 hour, &c.-and most such persons, I posit, do not read "30" and think of it as halfway to "60" without visually processing the mental number-line. Very fast, in a faction of a second-but still visually. Well, the analog clock _is_ that number line-just wrapped around a curve, so that, when it reaches its maximum limit, it is back at its origin to start the next cycle. Someone reading a digital clock without seeing an analog clock in his mind is still doing the visuo-spatial part: the digits are turned into spots on a number line, and position/movement/progress along that line then is processed visually. Even someone applying arithmetic to the digits ("Well, let me see: 56 minus 19: borrow 1; that's 16 minus 9 makes 7; 4 minus 1 is 3: so 17") probably still can't help having a mental image of those numbers on a line. The difference for someone who can read an analog clock, especially someone who _first_ read time on analog clocks, is that he can skip the _digitization_ of space: he considers just the space, with no intermediate step: only if he has to put it into words for another mind or for a record does he bother to turn that space into numbers.
@@smadaf Funny thing... I do plenty of mental arithmetic in my head, but I never do it while visualizing a number line. I suspect that it's because I wasn't taught math using number lines. But I did grow up with analog clocks everywhere, so reading time on the circle is pretty automatic for me. What I've gotten from reading a bunch of these comments is that it's not very useful to think about "the most natural" when it comes to numbers. Our young brains have the potential to learn how to interact with numbers and proportions in many different ways, kind of like how we have the potential to learn one of any number of languages. We get so good at the specific way we've learned that it starts to feel "the most natural" and we're surprised that what's "natural" for us is "unnatural" for other people.
@@clawsoon , I appreciate the depth and details in your comments. I also think that certain ways of processing information come earlier than other ways-earlier in, say, the evolution from monocellular organisms to humans with their mathematical abstractions, and earlier in the life of a human who grows from infancy to adulthood. Certain things are acquired by instinct, and others tend to be taught: it is by instinct that we learn spoken language; it is by others' teaching that we learn to read and write a written language. I think that the same thing goes on with our processing of dimensions, both spatial and temporal. A baby who has never learned the words "one", "two", "three", &c., nor learned to distinguish the quantities that those words represent, still has a concept of whether his hand is very close to what he wants to reach, or still very far from what he wants to reach, or only about half as far as it was when he started to reach it. The same idea applies when the baby crawls to a more distant goal. It is only when humans want to communicate these perceptions to other minds, or to put them into external records for future reference, that they start coming up with the words and the numbers and the units of measure to make these perceptions transmissible and recordable. In answer to another comment on this video, I wrote a bit more about that. It may be hard for you to find it among more than 11,000 other comments, so I'll paste here. The part that I wish most to share with you especially is the third paragraph: ===== Yes-and, because, in a clock, two number-lines (one running 1-12 (or 0-12); the other, 1-60 (or 0-60)) have been wrapped around a circle, each with both of its ends at the same point, you can make the origin ("zero" in "waiting for the bell to ring at zero") anywhere around the circle. If we're talking about twelve hours (a whole circle) from four o'clock, we know to relate any time between the start and the end to the "4"-point on the clock. If we're talking about an hour from 5:07, we know the "7"-mark is the crucial thing. If we're talking about five minutes, we can make any combination of hour and minute the start (or end) and just move the five little marks (or a twelfth of the circle) in one direction or another, even if it means crossing the "12" at the top of the clock. There's great advantage in treating some numerical concepts as continuous loops, on which any points can be the origins. In the end, it makes much sense that we do this with time (but not, say, dollars or apples), because time as we experience it is repeated loops-the diurnal loop of night and day, the annual loop of the seasons, and even the seven-day loop that is the week. Numbers are just our way of processing and sharing information about the natural world when what we have is hard to visualize or is going to involve a lot of steps or a lot of inputs. When what we're trying to do is simple, we keep the numericization as little as possible: if I want you to hang a picture at a certain spot on the wall, I say to put it "half way up": I chop the wall only into two equal parts (halves), and I tell you to move from the bottom of the wall to the top of the bottom part: I don't bother to go compare the height of the wall to a stick or ribbon on which dozens or hundreds of equal spaces have been marked, and then read digits that tell me how many of those spaces separate a certain point from the end of the stick or ribbon, and then tell you to go to that number and put the picture there. Simplifying numericization is one of the unspoken advantages that older units have over those of the metric system. The metric system has many benefits and even advantages, yes. But think of the ease of writing "1 c" or "1 cup" compared to that of "100 mL" or "240 mL or "250 mL" or "0.25 L". Then, set aside the writing and just consider the speaking-the quickness of pronouncing "one cup" and "a cup" (two syllables), compared to the slowness of pronouncing "two hundred and fifty milliliters" (ten syllables) or even "a quarter liter" (five) or "a deciliter" (five). ===== A cat who has never come up with the concept of "a hundred" may still recognize that he is now much closer to an interesting thing that he wants to investigate than he was when he started walking toward it. Maybe he is now 100 centimeters away, after starting at a distance of 300 centimeters. He doesn't need the units and the numericization of them, and the names for the units and the numbers, to have a perception of those points and the distance between them and his progress between them. His perception of position and of changes in position is analog. Apples are discrete, and so it's very early in our comprehension of apples that we start to treat them as countable (some non-human species show consistent understanding of the difference between three apples and four apples, for example). But distance in space we don't so readily think of as countable-only when we have invented units by which to measure it do we start to _numericize_ space. The same is true of time within the day. (Time on a scale larger than a day is another story, because we have the cycle of day and night to turn time naturally into countable units. People probably started talking about "Two days from now" many thousands of years before they started talking about "Two hours from how".) I think that the mature human mind that doesn't have a spatial image in mind in response to the word "sixty" (or the equivalent word in that person's language) is very rare, even if number-lines were not part of that person's formal mathematical education. I think that even a person who has been blind from birth has a mental sensory idea of the difference between five (a whole hand's worth of digits) and one (just one finger or thumb), for example. So, when we turn "It's almost time to stop" into "Just eight minutes remain until it'll be time to stop", we are applying something that comes later in the evolution of minds and later in the maturing of minds. Earlier minds have "far", "near", "almost", &c. without learning of such things as "minutes" (a unit of measure) and "eight" (a number of those units). We invented number-names and units of measure to ease our processing of details of the natural world-but we do some of that processing even before we have numbers with which to work. Spoken language is natural, but written language is artificial. Translating the dimension of time into a visuo-spatial dimension comes naturally, whereas turning sub-day amounts of time into numbers is artificial-so one tends to come before the other in the development of most minds. (Rare, for example, is the person who learns to read and write before he learns to speak and hear his native tongue.) This is why I think that, regardless of the relative populations of digital and analog clocks, we cannot escape the human mind's dimensional, non-numerical processing of time: think of how often we say "soon", "later", "in a while", "it'll be a long wait" without bothering to name and enumerate hours and minutes and seconds and days and weeks and years and so on: this trait is unlikely to disappear from the human mind. Anyway, I've taken enough of your time. Thanks for listening. Your interaction is one of the unexpected treats for my birthday.
Funnily I'm equally comfortable with both digital and analog clocks. What I absolutely struggle with is "left" and "right": whether written or spoken, it takes me a completely unjustified amount of processing to translate it into what left and right are actually to me: a hand gesture. I'm dead serious, to me left and right are the act of pointing, not any string of letters or sound. When someone needs mento guide them, my hand always points the right direction, but the word coming from my mouth is increasingly haphazard as the cognitive effort to recall the path or the urgency increases.
Do you find cardinal directions more natural? Like can you quickly describe directions in terms of North/South even when not looking at a map or not in view of the sun?
The dial effect is well documented. In my case, as a machinist, I can read a dial caliper measurement much faster than a digital one. Similarly, fighter pilots in the late 20th century suffered degraded performance when the dial instruments were replaced with digital ones. As a former typographer, I contend this is the same effect as the reduced readability of all caps text compared to mixed case, as the latter provides a more detailed outline and the former makes all words rectangle shaped.
i kind get it for clocks but for measuring i can not understand why a dial would make it simpler to read than just the numbers that you want to compare with the required dimension.
I'm surprised to hear it helps as a machinist since you're given a spec you need to meet in digits. But I guess maybe the dial makes it easier to see how "close" you are to the spec?
I frequently would check the time on a digital clock only to completely forget what time it was a moment after. That doesn’t happen with analog. I now realize now that it’s because there’s no spacial representation of the time on the digital clock which makes it harder to conceptualize
Years ago, I had a digital watch that tended to gain time, and after a few years of not bothering to correct it, it was about 10 minutes fast, enough to make it worth subtracting 10 to work out the actual time. Previous to that, I'd often found myself glancing at my watch multiple times in short succession because I hadn't remembered the time well enough.. After I started doing the subtraction, I didn't do that nearly as much - having to do even a simple subtraction kept the time more easily accessible in my memory. After that, I actually started occasional resetting to keep it ~10 minutes fast. It was actually kind of convenient - I lived ~9 minutes walk from work, so if I set off at '9am', I'd get to work on time. Also, my route from work into town for lunch/shopping/after-work pub went right by the railway station, and it was surprising how often I had people walking to the station ask me the time. Normally I told them the right time, but if it was someone in a suit who seemed to think it was my *job* to tell them, I'd just show them my watch to see if they would start running.
For me it's exactly the other way around, I think its just an exclusive-or operation. One or the other is easier depending on what you learned first, but if you learn one the other is much harder to read.
I think the reason you forget the time with a digital clock, is that a digital clock is much faster to read to get the exact hour and minute. With the analog watch, okay, the minutes you can kind of just intuit the rough time at a glance, but for the hour I find myself having to follow the arrow to find the right number. If you spend more time looking at something, of course it'll be easier to remember. And yes, I also think the minute hand gives a more visual intuitive representation that also makes it easier to remember. Not trying to take away from that point. The ultimate watch, IMO, would have the hour as a number in the center, and the minutes as in an analog watch, but then you could perhaps number it 5-60 instead of 1-12 to make it even clearer (if there are numbers at all)
@@auspiciouslywild Jumping-hour watches. It’s a thing. About the only reason I really want an Apple Watch is that I finally found a face for it that displays the time like the Harry Winston Opus watch the year it was designed by Urwerk. To me that is the nearly perfect representation of time. Hour is a digit, swinging through 60° in 60 minutes. No it does not give you that relative sense of progression for hours; but when it gets past an hour I’m pretty well doing sums anyway. Only thing is that it really needs a 360° second hand sitting on top. I’ll have to see if I can make that work, since the left 2/3 of the watch face is useless.
Personally I think it's down to what you learned to read time with. I was born in 2005; I've been reading with digital clocks most of my life. When I look at a digital clock I get an immediate sense of what time it is and how close we are to the next hour. Look at it this way. All methods of visualizing time are abstractions of time itself. Whichever way we first learn to read the time is how we process it in our heads and how we most easily tell it. This is the reason that sayings such as "a quarter past" have fallen out of favor with younger generations; they simply visualize time in a different way in their heads.
Wow, you have opened my eyes. I was born in 2000, all clocks in the house were digital. The first time I saw an analogue clock I was years into my schooling. I never understood why people preferred analogue. I interpreted analogue as you said I would: as a really round-about way to express a numeric value. After your explanation, I understand it now. While I don't automatically see it myself, I completely understand what you see. It does tempt me to put an analogue clock by my desk next to my digital one to see if I can intuit it how you do. I will say, possibly similarly, that certain numbers on a digital clock give me distinct "feelings" of closeness to the hour. Particularly the numbers in the 40s and 50s, I can see them without properly reading them and they make me feel like it's really close to the hour. If I look at my digital watch and it's 3:46, I'll feel like it's very close to 4 and I've got a pretty good idea of how much time I have without doing the subtraction. But if someone were to then ask me what time it was, I would have to look at my watch again because I didn't actually read it the first time. It's not like I only read the first number, I didn't read any of the numbers. I just kinda looked at the shape of the numbers.
I ran with digital time up until school, where all the clocks were analogue. once that was comfortable I went to an analogue watch. the real advantage is your not thinking in units of numbers, but units of time. your halfway there, your thinking in "its a short while to 4" not 3:46. its shape recognition rather than parsing the numbers. for me, the term 15 minutes is a 90 degree sweep, rather than 900 seconds. If im asked the time, I'll quote it as "quarter to 4" rather than 3:46 or "half Five" for 5:27. unless I know they are counting the minutes. Give it a go, there are plenty of cool clocks out there.
I grew up with digital time as well and a couple years ago switched all my smart screens to analogue.. solely because I found ones with the second hand movement I liked. But after a while I developed a sense of time in relation to a circle, in radians, and I really don’t want to go back. If I’m writing down the current time it’s a PITA to turn analogue into written, I’ll look at my phone for that or smth. But for clocks around the house, having the association of an L shape, an I shape, etc of the hands to times, it does develop and it’s very interesting. My preference has totally shifted in the last few years.
I was born in the late 60s but I think I am with you. I don't do maths in my head to compare two times I just sort of know but the difference is I do this equally with analogue and digital. I guess that I just was brought up with both side-by-side so I learnt to visualise using both.
@@arjovenzia So basically analog is less precise, which is precisely why digital exists? Who'd have guessed that? Basically, Analog is the Imperial system of time. Gotcha. Analog isn't accurate to the second, digital is. Analog is ONLY usable in practicality, digital is both practically and objectively useful for precise and imprecise measurement of time. This is ALL I took from this, people who read time based on their close approximation think they read time more accurately than people who read the most accurate portrayal of any given moment. 1:27 is objectively NOT half past 1, but because it looks close enough, that's what you would report. Imagine doing that, but every day, without adjusting for the drift. You'd be hours and hours out of time by the next day. The entire reason analog is dying is because it is objectively not as accurate. The seconds hand on ANY watch doesn't ACTUALLY match the number of seconds that has elapsed in a given moment, it's an indicator for when the next hand up will pass the line next it. The seconds hand STOPS, exactly where you stopped it, to adjust your watch, right? That's already proof enough your watch is far less accurate than mine is. Even from factory settings, where the most common dial face is mapped to the vibrations of a quartz crystal, the seconds hand stops in place when you set the time; not only this, but the dial on quartz analog watches is still controlled in an analog manner, the tick rate is the only accurate part, any other part of an analog watch is an extreme point if failure
I’m one of those people with no preference. They are both equally easy to read and for my brain to interpret. I do agree looking at an analog clock reading 9:46 definitely gives you a clear impression about 1/4 of an hour is left… but my brain can infer identical information from the digital clock. I also have no preference for analog or digital speedometers although for a tachometer, I prefer analog. (Or a representation of an analog graph by a digital display) You can see the needle sweeping and heading towards redline a bit more quickly as the exact number it’s reading isn’t really important, just how close to redline you are.) The progress bar metaphor really works for techometers.
While with clocks I like both analogue and digital (and have no issue interpreting the time on either equally fast), when it comes to a speedometer I vastly prefer digital. With a digital speedo, I just get the absolute number instantly, which I can compare to the current speed limit sign that I have memorized in my head. Whereas with an analog speedometet, I have to check "okay, the needle is between this number and this number, and that means I am driving that fast." Wich takes my attention off the road for several seconds longer. I suppose if the roadsigns were not showing numbers but instead an analogue dial telling you how fast you are allowed, it would be the opposite, as I then yould just compare the picture with the analogue speedometer. Interesting how different brains can work.
Do you prefer 12hr digital or 24hr digital tho? One has it hours represented twice, the other has each hour uniquely represented hence my preference for 24hr digital.
Wow. I just found this video and wish I'd found it when it was still new. It definitely stirred some thoughts for me. Very good video! I'm old enough to have learned to tell time on analog clocks myself. I caught on to your point quite early just from seeing the different clocks visually next to each other. The difference seemed quite evident when they were side-by-side. To me, your choice of comparing the analog clock to a "progress bar" made sense, but it's perhaps a little too "modern" for me. It worked, but wasn't the most intuitive imagery to pop into my head. What did immediately come to mind for me, and what I felt helped me see your point about how you can just glace at an analog clock and know the time, without worrying about the numbers: a pie chart. Perhaps it seems less intuitive to you as it doesn't usually "move" or "progress," but in my mind, just as a pie chart might be used in a presentation to quickly show proportions rather than trying to impart those with a list of numbers, so the analog clock quickly shows you the amount of the hour past/remaining without having to consider specific numbers in your head. It presents that same sort of intuitive visual tool.
This makes perfect sense, I totally agree with your "progress bar" analogy. That's exactly how I grew up interpreting time, and now with a digital watch and time in the corner of the PC screen, I'm less intuitively aware of the *passage of time* Awesome video, thanks heaps!
Your “weird class times” story is EXACTLY what I thought about when you started explaining preference for analog clocks. I’ve never really sat down and thought about it.
The progress bar analogy is perfect!! Analog clocks are great in that you can see the approximate time or the exact time, depending on your needs at the moment.
This concept is so obvious once you think about it. I've watched lots of videos giving me insights about things, but this one blew my mind. It makes so much sense. I'm almost equally comfortable with both analogue and digital clocks, but since very young age I'm using digital watches more. And since my classes also started and ended in weird times I'd do the math how much time is left all the time. Maybe that also explains why math was kinda easy for me. I'd do this kind of calculations hundreds of times each day for years.
This made me realize why I never picked up using language like "a quarter to" or "half past", and that I always had to translate those kinds of phrases into numbers to fully contextualize them (having grown up primarily reading time digitally) I always associated "quarter" with the number 25, not 15, so that was a whole other layer of translating... This is really interesting to think about, thank you for bringing this up
Pieces of possibly useful insight..my emotional relationship with 3:39 is deeply different from 3:50. Research has been done on how we understand hard numbers in subjective ways, but I’ve only seen it in terms of pricing. Second, what if you mixed the ideas and had actual progress bars. Top bar is the day. Bottom bar is the hour. Like, how would you design a progress bar clock that doesn’t use the slightly less intuitive radial design.
It really is quite strange, I feel like 3:39 and 3:50 are not different, at least not as seeing those times in their analog forum. It seems that it really differs from person to person which is quite intriguing.
Progress bars don't have that same symmetry, though. The progress bar "completes" at the end of the hour, but the minute hand just keeps on moving like normal. The only notable thing is that it went past the top of the clock. So it likely wouldn't help with times that cross the hour as much.
You made me realize when I look at digital, an image of a clock comes up in my mind. In fact I have a quirk where in my head I imagine months of the year as a circular clock.
When we were teaching my nephew (now in his 30s) to tell time way back when, his mom got him a "regular" watch. bold hands and simple numerals. And several of her friends thought that was making learning to tell time harder and suggested a digital watch would be better for the nephew. Mom's thinking was that a digital would show "the" time but would not effectively show the *passage* of time and would not help the nephew understand quickly if he was about to be late or if he had plenty of time still to do something. She(my sister) thought that understanding time as more than just a number was important. I had not thought about it this way before she and I talked about it and, yeah, I think she was right.
I’m in my 30s as well, I always hated analog clocks, have used digital clocks from the beginning and developed the same “feeling” that everyone else here describes for reading analog clocks. I see that as an advantage. To me, analog clocks are a relict from the past.
In the military (at least back in the 90's) ALL the Special Forces guys and gals had analog watches... Some were big old-school pocket watches, and some "regular" wrist watches... The seniors almost always had a wind-up... They were trained that if you point the hour-hand toward the sun, (In the Northern Hemisphere) "Due South" was directly between the hour-hand and 12 o'clock (or 1 o'clock on Daylight Savings Time)... In the Southern Hemisphere, it worked the same, except it found "Due North", because the earth is ROUND... SO they almost NEVER used a compass, preferring instead to rely on their skills and a time-piece nobody would think twice about leaving with them... In case of hold up or capture... AND as they told me, "Wind-ups never have dead batteries... just stupid owners." They might be a relic, but they're no less useful... AND I never bother keeping a compass around for camping or hiking either... AND I rarely bother myself with a cell phone that's going to take up space, be delicate, and probably not get a signal (in half the places I go camping) anyway... Now... Obviously, there are other tricks to navigation... BUT for "quick and easy" and a clever "trick" to screw with people's heads, you can't beat an analog clock navigating you out of "the middle of nowhere squared" while everyone else is concerned that you've lost what mind you had... ;o)
@@HuskyNET indeed, I don't see fractions and analog clocks easily and if someone tells me an apointment is 5 minutes before half- 4 ( in dutch), I need to prosess it to be 1525. Its completely unambiguous and easy to understand
Dude, I’m the same way!! When I see “3:45” on a digital clock, I visualize in my head an analog clock to see the hands at 3:45 to tell time because the digital numbers don’t have a frame of reference for me. I love the “progress bar” analogy. All of my watches are always analog clocks for this reason. Great video!
This is so interesting to me. I grew up basically only with digital and if I see 3:45 it just automatically clicks that we are 3/4 of the way through the hour.
Yep, same here. But I'm also an old millennial. One look at an analog clock and I instantly know what time it is. Even though I grew up with analog and digital clocks, I'm always visualizing an analog clock when I look at a digital clock.
Holy cow, this video made me realize I do the same thing. Without thinking about it, I've been automatically converting digital clock readouts into analog in my head.
Really interesting, I don't follow honestly. Time is time to me, 3:45 is 3:45. I look at a clock, see the time and that's it. Sure, with analog I'll think stuff like "oh it's about 3:40", and not focus on the exact minute much. But it still works in the exact same way be it a dial or LCD. The idea of not being able to understand time just by looking at a clock seems bizarre personally.
I’m amazed by these comments here. For me it’s the other way round, I need to convert analog clocks into digital to see that “time axis” in my head which functions as that progress bar to me. @Tayler Robinson, we seem to be in the minority here, let’s unite! 😂
Very good points. I never thought about it, but I totally agree. The analog is a visual representation of the numbers and is quicker to interpret. I would say it's the same with my car's speedometer - I have a digital readout, but come to think of it, I usually just glance at the needle because I know where I want to be on the analog gauge.
What would make the analog clocks even more special in this regard is if we got used to 24 hour clocks. Just like the progression from the minute hand, in a 24 hour clock the hour hand is at the top at midnight and it's pointing straight down at midday. And dawn and dusk are perfectly horizontal 6's. If the hand is on the right side, it's the morning, and if it's on the left side, it's the after noon. If we got used to it for a long time, we'll get to a point where just a small glimpse of the clock and we'll know exactly which time of day it is. Gone will be the times when you wake up and look at the clock and wonder whether it's the morning or the evening.
I also read analogue clocks this way: when I read an analogue clock I always feel like I know *"where"* I am in time, so to speak, almost literally as a "location" of the hands on the dial; whereas a digital clock just feels like it's just telling me strictly *what* the time is. I can gauge the same knowledge from a digital clock, but with analogue it just feels like it's all right there. I feel grounded knowing I can physically see things like how long I have until a certain important time. Whereas for a digital clock, I find I tend to compulsively keep checking it incessantly like I have to keep checking and making sure how much time I have left, or how much time has actually passed since I last checked.
Yes, to me it's the "feel" of time that I get from a simple glance at an analogue clock. And it's not just where in the hour I am (although it absolutely is that) but it is also where in the day I am. A big chunk of my awake day is right there at a glance without my thoughts having to divert in order to calculate. I think the "progress bar" is a reasonable analogy.
Whereas I don't read analogue clocks as a general rule so I have to orient myself before I can gain formation from it. If you want to talk about the where, it's like a map. If it's the map you look at every day in your home city you can look at the map and get a sense the the about location of a pin in real space (but in this case real time) very quickly. You know where to look and what features to look for to gain a sense of whats happening. I can read an analogue clock easily enough but I have to take a moment to go "thats the big hand thats the small hand there is 3 and 6 ok I know where everything is now whats the time?" So it takes me time to read the time. On a digital clock I am familiar with the map so to speak. I can get all the info I need in a split second even when the numbers are not laid out in a normal pattern. And it takes me not a split second longer if its a 24 hour clock either. It's just familiarity and practice. Knowing where the information is, what to look at first etc. (i think i always look at the general shape of the numbers first then the second digit of the hours and then the first of the minutes.) And I should point out when I see 3:37 what I think is 20 min to 4. It's just an automatic rounding to the or previous hour. Because thats what you check the time for yeah? To see how long you have till....whatever. Even end of the day. Or how much longer you have been at something than you thought.
It's more akin to a language than just a mere familiarity with an analogue vs digital device. Some language phrases convey a feeling that does not have a suitable translation in another language... the words translate but not their combined meaning I can read analogue or digital clocks well enough to *think* in either, but there is no digital equivalent to the entire phrase of information contained in one quick glance at the analogue clockface. A quick glance at either tells me what time it is, but only the analogue gives me the complete graphical interpretation of *when* I am from my unique perspective. Dagnabbit... it seems nearly impossible to convey this.
@@AlleyKatt For me its the opposite. One glance at a digital clock and I immediately place myself into the an incrimental alotment of time within 24 hours. It about association. The map analogy was there for a reason. You see the clock and you dont see numbers you see a marker that associates you with a time of day. Your mind has tied that image with a million expected events that associate with that time period. In the same way you can look at a map you are very familiar with and tie a location or a path with a million spacially related data points. You see the positions of the hands at 6 o'clock and you get a sense of how much day is left, what food you might normally eat, what the sun is likely to be doing what the temperature or what habits you normally do at that time or in the next few hours. You associate the image with a place in your day. And again. I don't. I get that association with digital clocks. I see 17:23 and immediately my mind goes to walking the dog and going shopping. I know when I am in time.
I remember reading a short story by Asimov regarding a murder mystery, in which a key point was a witness saying he saw someone go by at “half past four” while another witness said something happened at “shortly before five.” The first witness, accustomed to analog clocks, was reading a digital clock. Being more accustomed to seeing digits associated with MONEY than with TIME, that witness mentally translated “4:50” into “four and a half” or “half past four.” The second witness HAD been looking at an analog clock reading “hour hand almost five, minute hand on 10,” thus “ten minutes to five” or “almost five.”
If I'm remembering the same story, there was a plot point that one of the suspects claimed to be a train conductor, but when asked the time, he replied something like "ten minutes of 3 O'Clock". However, a real train man would always use exact times as displayed digitally (e.g. 2:51). Therefore, this was not a real conductor and was lying. Doesn't really work anymore, because it seems less common to estimate the time in general, plus most modern stories have women characters in them.
@@serifhim I like your story better, but it wasn’t the same. The Asimov story had to do with the time that a suspect in a motel room murder had been seen in the motel lobby. Most likely two authors used the same McGuffin to build two different stories independently.
Saw something similar with someone complaining about a parking meter, saying something like "I paid for a quarter of an hour, but the meter charged me after 15 minutes instead of 25!" I feel that confusions like these are why we should either change time or change money to roll over at the same number.
I grew up with digital clocks, I can clearly remember learning how to read digital clocks before analog clocks. In my head, I separate an hour into quadrants between 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes. When I glance at digital time, I know in which quadrant current time is and approximately what edge of a quadrant it is closer to. If I need exact time to an hour, I just do a subtraction within first half or subtraction within second half. When I look at an analog clock, I am only able to get approximate time from it. Sure, it's a lot easier to separate into quadrants, but as soon as I need to get exact time, I need to think back to the fact that a 7 is 35 minutes, and 8 is 40 minutes, after which I have to count the amount of notches from the 7 and finally understand that it actually shows 37 minutes. Very interestimg thought worm, very good video Alec
For the “it displays time with how it looks” the best way to explain it (to me) is to say a minimal clock with no numbers or notches is just as easy to read as a clock that does have those, as you’re actually reading the angles of the hands relative to vertical, and not what number they point to
It's a well-known psychology concept. Indicators are faster to parse than words/numbers. Words/numbers need to be processed, translated into meaning. Whereas Indexes/Indicators/Pictorials are, usually, immediately understood. Hence progress bars are faster to parse than a xx%, hence analog clocks are faster to parse than xx:xx AM/PM. Wiki to get people started: Picture superiority effect
Wow, that’s very interesting. I probably wouldn’t be able to easily read a analog clock without numbers. I would have to estimate where the numbers should be, then read the time and convert them into digital numbers to get a feeling for the current time. But that explains why other people can be so fast reading analog clocks. I can’t. But by looking at a digital clock I immediately imagine a “time axis” with marks for every hour and have an exact feeling of where we are at on that axis.
Take a look at the differences between "Internal Monologue" and "Abstract Thought". That helps explain the difference between working out the time in your head from looking at the clock vice just knowing the time from looking at the clock. I think that's what you were trying to explain in that section of the video.
This is what I thought about as well. Analogue clocks give me a good "sense" of the time, but as someone with a strong internal monologue, I always find myself taking the extra step to decipher the literal numerical value even when it's not necessary, only so that I can "say" the time in my head. It's kind of annoying because I know I don't have to take that step to have a passable appreciation of the general time and the added accuracy of assigning the numerals doesn't add a lot on it's own, but verbalization is just so inherent to most of my processing. In general, the verbalization of numerals is definitely more helpful when trying to communicate the time to someone else. The "time as shape/angle" or "time as area" is such an inherently personal experience that can't be easily transmitted, which is what I think he was running up against in this video.
Yeah, he pretty much ran into the concrete wall that is natural based versus manmade. The analog clock is based loosely on the Sundial but with the new units stuck around it. Digitial is wholely manmade and does related in any way to the rotation of the sun and moon even if it tries to replicate it. Or something to that effect. And mental gymnastics as well.
This is an interesting topic, as talking to people about how they think, it becomes clear that there is a diversity in the way people think. Some have a strong emphasis on the internal monologue, some form ideas as pictures rather than words, others think in a more abstract fashion, or use a combination of all three. Asking the question is interesting, as it is not something many have considered, and it take a little while before they can analysis how they think. The formation of thoughts must be time dependent, as is the processing of the external environment, and the formation of memories. This impinges on the nature of our internal clock and how thoughts and memories are internally time stamped. Is our perception of reality really analogue, or is it really sampled and quantised. What does this say about intelligence, genius, or even the more pedestrian suitability for a job, career, or profession.
@@moslaf I totally get the annoying part. I absolutely have to verbalize (sometimes aloud) everything conceptual to understand it - otherwise I completely miss it - can't even commit it to memory. But something natural and tangible, anything I sensed, I can just evoke in my mind at will, without any verbal component to it. It's weird, but seems like the best of both worlds. Weirder still, it kinda turns off when I'm inebriated or absolutely sleep deprived. Makes me think those who don't have to do that are simply not paying attention to anything, but then what of people who don't have mental images and senses?
That bit in the beginning about digital feeling harder to conceptualize, I totally agree with you. At this point in my life, I've been exposed to both pretty regularly, when I see a digital time, my mind automatically conjures a picture of an analog clock at the correct hour and minute, and my mind then properly "understands" the time. It's kinda trippy.
if i were to hazard a guess as i'm not deaf or an expert, it might be similar to how deaf people process sign language (analog clock) vs lip reading (digital clock) or perhaps text as well. sign language is natural and intuitive (all babies do it), and can form an inner voice. on the other hand lip reading needs translation as it's too abstract and incapable of forming an inner voice, which is why deaf people who only ever learned to lip read may have cognitive development issues (iirc), which is where the negative connotation of "dumb" comes from.
It's interesting because when the clocks read 3:41 I would look at the analog clocks and think "there's 20 minutes left in the hour" but if I read the digital one it gets rounded to 45 and I think "there's 15 minutes left in the hour". It's weird how the sub-parts of an hour I'm comfortable rounding to is different depending on the format.
I was thinking this exact same thing. some of the older members of my family will say "its 25 to 4", without thinking twice, and that takes me time to process. when I am asked what time it is I will say "3 35". Its odd how I have never put that much thought into this before. I much prefer digital clocks, they make more sense to me, and I naturally process that into my head as to how much time I have left until i need to do stuff. It might be a generational thing, with the advent of smartphones, and computers, where the time is most easily displayed as a text format, you dont see analogue clocks as often as digital ones. Its to this extent that I rarely ever use a watch, and just pull out my phone to check the time.
@@henmasman I agree with this. If anything my brain sees it as an ever moving faction, so of course it likes halves and quarters with that thought process
Would there be any benefits to use an analog clock? I use mainly the digital and if I am going somewhere I see the magnitude of time left to get ready "I have 10 minutes to get ready" and sometimes that estimation doesnt work. But with analog maybe you dont care so much with the number, only care about how close is to the desired position that is supposed to be, making it more urgent, so would be on time more often? ¿. The thought process would be "I have 10 minutes left, I have time left" vs "the clock hands are very close where they are supposed to be, I better hurry up".
@@10dige I'm more used to analog watches, so I'm actually quicker at determining how much time I've left with an analog watch. I have to quickly calculate it with a digital clock, but can tell it with just a quick glance from an analog clock. And I know that might sound like weird bragging, but I can tell the time from an analog clock down to a minute with just one glace. I couldn't put it into words (that would require a second or two of thinking), but for my own brain, one glance is enough to know how much time I have left.
This man is seriously emotionally invested in one particular technological representation of the concept of time and its passage... And I think it's beautiful.
You're bang on. Thanks for validating my own experience. Analog clogs give you a visual of where you are in relation to, say, your next appointment... At glance I know whether to rush or chill. With digital, I don't get a sense of where I am in relation to my next task, and tend to run late.
This way of considering time-as a space, in which we can move and have a position-is why it works quite well to have an analog clock that has _no_ numbers written on it (or even not any marks to divide the circle into quarters or twelfths or sixtieths), whereas a digital clock without digits would be useless.
I know there are jokes about psychologist & other professionals callously ending appointments exactly at the 50 minute mark, but as a therapist in training, managing time in sessions was really hard and I'd often go right up against the hour, which meant I fell behind on notes and went into my next appointments feeling rushed and flustered. It got so much easier after I bought a small travel analog clock that I put on the side table easily in my line of vision. At a glance, I could know and also feel how much time I had left. My time management improved appreciably.
I have to convert analog clocks to a digital clock and then I can understand time. It makes sense to me that someone would have to do the reverse if they grew up with analog. I think it's how we've developed our time literacy in a similar way to how when we read words, we read them by chunking the whole symbol.
I think it has more to do with types of intelligence/skills and which one is more natural to you (though upbringing does affect that, of course, merely reading a clock of whatever kind is itself a skill that can be practiced and generate familiarity after all). I say that because I grew up with analog clocks, digital being introduced/getting more common in my life a wee bit later. Still prefer the digital a bit more (though analog is usually just fine). Unsurprisingly, I am more of an analytical intelligence person than a spatial intelligence one.
Watched this some time ago, now I am here again, and now I understand the concept you are trying to explain, which I didn't get the first time. I will give analog clocks/watches another chance b/c of this, as I always had problems contextualizing time based on an analog clock and generally rely on digital ones rn. That also comes with "difficulties" of said time calculations and having a feel for time, usually leading to me being late. So yeah, you opened my eyes for visualizing time (somewhat, have to try if it works out)...
I believe this is the first video of yours that I watch in which I need to make an effort to understand what you are saying, and it is fascinating I've never really thought much of it, but seeing the concept of the circle and realisign how you can understand time conceptually through the pointers position made me wish to had the same ability. I have ADHD and keeping notion of time is somewhat difficult, I think this could help me in a myriad of ways
it's definitely helpful. I also have ADHD and this is the way I process and read clocks. as described in the video, it's like a progress bar. I find it faster to read because my eyes only need to pick up the shape with a short glance, instead of gathering all the numbers. like the progress bar of a TH-cam video, but absolute in scale, so the length consistantly mean the same amount of time.
yeah, fellow ADHD person here, the circular clock makes a noticeable difference in my ability to keep time. especially where hours are concerned! hours on a digital-format clock just, float in nowhere land. there's no real difference noted in my head until the hours go from single digits to double, at which point i'm left in the urgency of, "it's 10:00 pm already? what have i done all day!" that's an awful way to be living in time, you know? feels bad. like you're always struggling to catch up! shape gives time meaning; digital-format clocks reduce time into a meaningless set of squares. heck, half the time when i look at time in a digital format, i have to glance back at it two or three times because the numbers dropped so immediately out of my cognition that i may as well have not looked at them at all!
@@revelle8605 I have the same problem of having to look at a clock two or three times, I am trying to switch to analog clocks but it has been very hard, specially having so much digital clocks already at disposal, the mi fit smartband being the worst offender 😅
I feel the same. This is why swimming pool pace clocks are still analog: just two or four hands rotating, allowing you to check how many seconds you spent or counting down rest time until the next rep.
Really interesting. I grew up with digital clocks. To this day in my late 30s I have to force myself to interpret an analog clock. Watching your video makes me realize that I have a vague mental picture of an hour in my mind, and seeing the time on a digital display tells me where in that pattern we are. And it is not shaped like a circle in my mind. Different minutes are kind of located on a different spot in my mental picture. Terms like top of the hour and bottom of the hour have always been very confusing to me although I understand it's referring to an analog clock. Anyway, the most fascinating thing is the idea that everyone conceptualizes time, but not in the same way.
Absolutely the same for me. At some point in time (haha) I switched from analog to digital clocks. Somewhen in my early teens. This means when I read "4:20" I feel like I have a concept of how much of an hour is past an how much is left. Even though I'm perfectly able to read the analog clock and completely understand the concept and even remember applying it, I most of the time have to convert the analog clock's readout into its digital counterpart to get to a concept of how much time is passed in the hour. Also, the representation kind of breaks in my mind if the time "the class takes" is longer than an hour.
I'm with you. Terms like "top of the hour" and "quarter of" mean nothing to me. I know the precision of 3:47. It means we have slightly less than 15 minutes until 4, 15 minutes being my most typical block of time.
I grew up with digital, 24h, second precision clocks, and I conceptualize time differently on different scales. Seconds in a minute are cyclical, minutes combine with hours to form 24-hour day-cycles. This last part makes my understanding of time incompatible with analog clocks without a translation step. Days and months combine into year-cycles. Just like how it's said that the imperial measurement system is a hodgepodge of different systems used in different scenarios, the same goes for my interpretation of time. If I separate seconds from minutes, or minutes from their hour, they usually turn into an intuitive, uncounted impression of the amount of time that passes, and similarly if you talk about days without mentioning their corresponding month, I interpret them based on weeks, or day-cycles, if it's only a few. Digital clocks combine all time systems into 1 number, the number of milliseconds since 1970-01-01-00:00:00.0000 UTC. But because we generally talk about time in seconds, hours, days, weeks, months and years, all of those have established systems of their own to be used in my head.
Interestingly, 12:00 -> 12:30 -> 13:00 feels more like a progress bar to me than 🕛 -> 🕧 -> 🕐. Maybe that's a good indication of whether someone is used more to digital or analog clocks? Time in minutes (0 - 60) is intuitively similar to percentage (0 - 100) for me.
I never thought about this before and TH-cam randomly stumbled me into this video, and I completely jive with you here and it blows me away too. Seeing it as a progress bar is exactly what i do, without being consciously aware of it. When I look at a digital clock I convert it into the slice of the hour in my head.
I've always wondered why I prefer analog clocks despite it taking more "work" to figure out what specific time it is indicating. It's all so clear now -- it's a progress dial! Most of the time I don't need to know what specific time it is, so just a quick glance will do. Such a simple yet profound discovery you've made!
This video was pretty eye opening for two reasons: 1 - Now that you've drawn my awareness to how you can read analog clocks at a glance, I've forced myself to stop 'reading' them. Instead, when I now look at the grandfather clock in my home, I glance at the clock, force myself to look away, and ask myself what time it is... despite preferring digital clocks, I realize that I'm actually perfectly capable of quickly and accurately reading an analog clock without thinking about it at all. I've just been, like, forcing myself to stare and 'translate' to digital time. 2 - I've been taking for granted how I just understand that 15 = 1/4, 20 = 1/3, etc. etc. I've had very little difficulty with both 12 hour digital clocks and military time, but always been confused by other folk's trouble parsing those numbers at a glance. Like you said with analog, I don't really find I need to 'decrypt' a digital clock. I just kind of passively round the minutes to the nearest fraction of an hour, and combine that with the hour to know the time. Another strange behavior I have, somewhat related, is when someone asks me what time it is, and if I look at a digital clock, I give weird answers. Sometimes, for example, I've looked at "03:48" and said "twelve of four." Some folks don't react, other's look at me like I'm a crazy person. haha Generally, I've found most people fall into saying "quarter of four" or "three forty-eight"... I'm not sure where I picked my hybridizing them like that.
@@Anklejbiter quarter of four shows they meant remaining time to four (they are saying people normally round off the time). Using of instead of to is strange to me too. I would like to know where it’s from
This reminded me of a video I watched this morning about a person with adhd not having a concept of what, "you have 5 minutes to get ready" ment but hearing you have 300 seconds before we leave, helped her realize that there is no time for a shower.
this guy nailed it. I have an analog kitchen clock for 'old times sake' but in reality- when I want to know where I am in my day- i look at the kitchen clock... even though I got my phone, my computer, the digital clock on the microwave- the kitchen clock is the 'goto' without even thinking about it and until I watched this video- without even realizing it.
Dude, 4 minutes in and I had gone from thinking you were crazy to having my mind blown. I know EXACTLY what you mean by seeing the digital version as more of a "fact" whereas the analog version is actually seeing what time looks like as it progresses into the future.
You were so close to nailing this. Please consider making this a main channel video with 2 additions: 1) the abstraction between 3:45 and 'quarter to four'. In the UK saying 'half past two' or 'quarter past six' is still the norm, and IS that visual time telling you we're trying to describe. 2) being able to tell time on an analogue clock face with no numerals, just batons or pips, you can still know the time with needing the numbers. I learned to tell time with a roman numeral analogue watch my father bought me when I was 6. Infuriating yet valuable lesson.
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Great video!!! I am from the 50's and collect clocks and watches. The dial and hands represents the movement of the Sun in a sundial, we use them since the Middle ages for a reason. They represents Nature. Cheers Patagonia Argentina
Numbers are my native time language. Like you said, I usually "translate" analogue back to digital, which takes a bit more work for me. I never really thought about just being comfortable with a less specific analogue reading but it makes so much sense.
Same, I never really thought about using a clock to get anything other than the exact time (even though I usually round it to the nearest 15 minute mark).
Essentially, with analog clocks, I “feel” the time, giving me more sense of how much time I have. Digital clocks just lets me “know” the time without fully understanding how much time I have
The main reason to "know" the time is to communicate it to others. If you are not trying communicate it, it's much easier to "feel" the time. When people struggle with analog clocks, it's usually because someone asked them what time it is.
Maybe some people already talked about this, but hey, what's one more. As someone who didn't grow up with English as a first language and with analog clocks, the fact that the hour hand moves closer to the next hour as time progresses is incredibly intuitive and visually helpful. I've been living in the US for almost a decade now and did notice that people don't tend to refer to the minutes till next hour at all. For example, at 3:50, the hour hand will be almost on top of the 4, which in my opinion, and perception of time, is the most useful indication. It is more 10 min till 4 than 50 min after 3. The fact that it's almost hour 4 is way more important to me so the hand already almost indicating 4 matches with my internal perception of the time.
you did a very good job at explaing it. i have always seen time as numbers and found analog clocks annoying, as i would always try to deciper them into numbers. but you did an amazing job at explaing it visually. really opened my eyes to how other people percieve time
I've never realized until now but every time I read a digital clock I unconsciously visualize in my head an analog clock and read the time from this. On the other side if I drive a car without a digital speedometer I feel a bit unnerved. There's definitely something in the way I learned to tell the time they is inherently analog. You should definitely do more videos of this kind.
Oh I do that too but I trust digital speedos ever so slightly more because my mothers Golf changes the scaling after 50km/h but my Punto 188 doesn't do that (luckily) so whenever I drive my mothers Golf I just read the digital speedo... Much easier than explaining to a cop that I didn't properly read the speedometer because I assumed the indices had the same meaning across the scale
For me, when I look at the numbers of a digital clock, that is itself an intuitive progress bar to the next hour. I don't have to think about it or mentally visualize it a different way. I'm just so used to thinking with numbers, that the numbers have become themselves an immediate visual aid for the progression of time from the last hour to the next one. I can look at X:43 and immediately feel that means there's 17 minutes until the next hour, that it's about 28% left of the hour, and what that span of time actually feels like.
Same, I imagine if we suddenly introduced decimal time (100 minutes in an hour), I'd completely lose track and would have to re-learn all that. But as long as the range is 1-60 I can intuitively tell what it means in terms of 'progress'. But it's definitely not as intuitive as an actual progress indicator in an analogue clock, it just needs a long learning period, and today I learned it never happens for some.
@@moralapostel If decimal time swept the globe, I imagine Alec and other analog clock-users would feel like time is moving much slower, whereas people used to digital clocks would be completely lost.
See whenever I think about percentages in any context I immediately visualize a pie chart in my head. Otherwise the number doesn't have much significance to me. It's like I need to relate the precentage to the whole to actually get a feel for the quanity. Analog clocks are basically pie charts already so they let me skip a few steps cognatively.
I posit that it's faster to learn intuition for an analog clock, since it's already an abstract concept, whereas a digital clock requires really learning that 60 and 0 are the same thing. It's also like, the only area where we use modulo arithmetic, but dials, gauges, and clocks all use the same abstraction, so that conceptual understanding is portable and reinforceable in other contexts.
Yeah, it's not that I don't visualize time, I just don't visualize it radially. I see it more like filling a beaker and then moving on to the next one. It's definitely intuitive for me in a way that analog never was. And I was introduced to analog time first! I never had a firm, orienting sense of time until I started using digital more. But that was always at home, in school I always had to sit and think about it for a moment, I thought everyone did. And yes, it's definitely "knowing what that span of time actually feels like", I get that with digital, but not really with analog. Meanwhile others are the opposite. This is so cool.
You see the clock as a pie chart. I also grew up watching the minute hand as a "loading bar" to my next class. I'm fully digital now but now you've got me rethinking things. Thank you!
Analogue clocks always feel like a approximation of the time for me, despite them still showing the correct time. Both are fine for me but I favour digital. I also do a lot of computer programming so I'm heavily conditioned to process and use digital time.
I can equate to this as well, as well as personally working with actual numbers more natively than images. I also grew up being pretty broke so we always had cheaper analog clocks where toward the end of the hour, the hour hand would actually be partway inside the next hour (the hour after where it should display) and on top of the initial number conversion, there’s an extra little error correction step too that I grew up with that I do by habit to not be a full hour off. When I’m tired I’ll quite often mistake it being an hour removed from actual time either way due to this error correction step. Numbers make it a bit less error prone in that regard even if in its own way the time was always accurately displayed with analog (one input equals one output, if offset required, still consistent metric)
That is interesting because I would think the opposite, (at least for digital time without a seconds display). Digital time is less accurate because it only moves every minute, so you have no idea of it's accuracy or if it's actually working unless you watch it change.
Dive watches with movable bezels make excellent use of the hand movement - progress bar analogy. By having movable markers where you can point 0 at any point on the dial, and get the hands' distance from that 0, you can easily track the passage of time from an arbitrary spot. Whereas digital time is always indexed to 0 at 0 on the hour, you can easily index analog time to any point, which is made clearest by dive watches.
Yes 100%. I wear a dive watch as a daily driver at work, where I need to track how long I've been doing something. Throughout the day I track 3 different things: how many hours has it been since I started so I know when to take a break; what minute did I start my break at so I know when to clock back in; how many hours are left until I need to clock out. I love my collection of digital watches with chronographs and timers, but moving the bezel around a few times a day just works so well. My current daily is a Vostok Amphibia if you're curious.
It's definitely interesting. When I read digital clock, I instantly sense how much through the hour I am. This "progressbar-esque" feeling pops in my head without doing any arithmetic operations at all.
I think this is helping me understand a few things. 1- I think I've been using analog clocks wrong, because your explanation of a progress bar makes SO much more sense than trying to read the numbers on the clock like I've tried for all my life. Reading an analog clock has always been hard for me because I've been trying to read the exact numbers, and that takes me quite a while. 2- It helps me understand how there can be people in the world who have those watches that don't have any numbers or don't have many numbers and can still tell the time. Those always confused me.
A teacher friend of mine that teaches younger children 5 to 8 told me that the lack of analogue clocks is becoming a hindrance to small children learning how to tell the time, its not that they cant learn to tell the time, its just that without the use of an analogue clock somewhere obvious in their homes, the forming of the habits and observations that kids used to have don't happen in the same way, they can tell what time it is with a digital clock but have a much harder time translating those numbers to actual time. They get used to it eventually of course but he says it takes much longer than it did in our analogue riddled past. its almost as though having an analogue clock is giving you a picture of all the time in a day, and you can separate and divide it naturally. a digital clock is giving you a number that is completely abstract and means nothing on its own without the experience required to know what that means. of course, once the skills and experience is garnered in young kids, its a trivial matter to convert between the two. but still.... its a mental process that isnt required with analogue.
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Perhaps that's a good thing? Or at least not necessarily a bad thing: there was a time in history before ubiquitous clocks, and these kids get to live in that time a bit longer.
Is it the lack of _any_ obvious clock in their homes, or specifically an analog one? When I got my first digital watch as a child (around 10?), it made telling time and knowing when I need to do things _much_ easier for me. With analog, everything was always fuzzy in my mind, but with digital I actually started forming concrete understanding of the time of day, how many minutes I needed to walk somewhere, etc. I feel like the best clock (or watch) would actually show both some kind of analog display _and_ the time in digits. For example, you could have vertical bars that fill up from the bottom to the top, above the hours, minutes, and seconds on a digital display. (Bonus: if you make the bars look and sound like cylinders filling with drops of water. :)
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@@jasonbender2459 How do you know which country is involved here? And what does it have to do with the rest of the species?
No, they don’t live in a space without clocks, they live in a liminal space between exposure to clocks and understanding what they mean longer. This is a frustrating place to be.
@@AileTheAlien I think in part the analogue clock is a more visual display of time over time, showing how the progression of time relates to how much time is left. Again a digital clock is fine but there is still a disconnect between the numbers and the concept, whereas an analogue clock is inherently easier to determine passage of time. As the video said, it's pretty hard to explain but to simplify, a digital clock shows what time it is, and analogue clock shows what time it was, what time it is, and what time it will be.
I think the existence of clocks with no numbers at all back up the progress bar or pie chart idea. This is related to how to read the hour hand more easily it also shows progress. When the hour hand is between 3 and 4 but closer to 4 it gives me a clear indication that it will be 4 o’clock soon whereas on a digital clock I tend to forget that (although I do have 5, 10, 15, and 20 minutes to the hour memorised for quick conversion)
I also feel that the "analog" speedometers are easier to "read" compared to the digital speedometers. The place where this is especially noticible is the visual indicator of your acceleration/deceleration. The digital speedometer is tough to gauge the change in speed since it's just number changing, compared to the analog arm moving.
It also seems easier to keep track of in your peripheral vision. I'd guess it's easier for the brain to divide a circle and extrapolate from that than it is for it to convert a numeral into useful information.
Interesting I feel the same, but now I have a car with both I find I much prefer the digital. The "feel" of change of speed I get naturally from the acceleration and things going by, I've been driving over 20 years. Therefore I only need the readout for the exact number to not get a ticket, therefore find the need to look down is only for the accurate number.
@@QGazQ14if I want to stick to, or not exceed a a speed limit then the digital display is the best input. If I am 'driving' then analogue works better because it gives information about rate of change, visible targets, relationships. And no, one does not get the same information by seeing how fast stuff is whizzing past us. Same, same with clocks. If one knows how to use a clock face, and these days many people do not, at least not intuitively, then the analogue dial gives much more information. One does not even need nbers on the dial for the process to work. But how useful is a digital interface without the numbers? Relationships and proportions. In times past, before digital clocks, some people had problems with clocks and dials. They could read the time or see the speed on a speedo but lacked the cognitive ability to be able to infer anything more. For those people, a digital display will give them everything they need. For everyone else - we lose out.
Part of this might be that a quickly changing number is hard to read in general since it going from one number to the next means that half or all of it is different now and needs to be re-read whereas an analog indicator changes smoothly and the same change leaves it in almost the same position so your brain won't need to re-read anything.
I use both, but I literally imagine an analog clock in my head when computing time in general, and it’s much quicker for me to visualize. However, I prefer digital clocks for shorter periods of time (knowing exactly how many minutes do I have left before the train arrives, for instance). Like analog shows best time progression, but digital shows a clearer instant picture.
Same here. I seem to convert the digital time to analog, then start subtracting the pie slices of how much time I need to do each step to be on time in the end. Much easier on the brain, and the fudge factor is already included
As analogue computers, our brains are better at 'pattern-matching' an analogue clock, in my opinion. I think digital clocks give us _too much_ accuracy (I normally only want to know the time to the nearest 5 minutes, unless I have to be somewhere to 1-minute accuracy like catching a train).
In one of my jobs we would open to the public at 9:30. When people asked me the time I would say things like "It's 5 minutes to 9:30." They stopped asking me the time because even though they could read an analog clock, they understood time as just numbers and couldn't wrap their heads around contextual time. Thanks for figuring out how people develop such different understandings of time
This concept has changed my perspective on time! As someone with ADHD, it makes soooo much sense that having a visual remind of where in the hour you are rather than what time it is would make it easy to judge how much time you've spent on something and how much time till you need to switch tasks. I already use a visual timer with my kids and never figured out why that worked better than just telling them what time someway going to happen. Now I know. I'm getting an analog clock for my desk _today_! Definitely do this for your main channel, this is something we as a society have completely missed as we move into a digital age.
Interestingly for me, my ADHD favors solid blocks of time rather than trying to process the constant progression of time- So I prefer digital which gives me a solid distinction between different times and makes it easier for me to go 'ok in this 15 minute chunk I'll do *this*' which I understand better as a quarter of an hour than seeing it on a clock, I guess because it matters whether it's + or - a couple minutes, when looking at an analog clock it's like more of an estimation, there's not really a difference between 3:59 and 4:00 so it's harder to give myself the kick I need to switch tasks etc
I think I can give a pretty unique POV on this, as someone who grew up hating analogue time, and looking for a digital clock any time I could, but later developing EXACTLY what you’re talking about. So I work as a quality inspector at a factory. It’s a job that demands I write down the time MANY times per hour. Before I had a watch, I would need to get that time from one of the many analogue clocks around. At first it was a hassle as I wasn’t used to it, but after hundreds of 12-hour shifts, I learned to basically shoot a glance at the clock and absorb the time instantly. Even now that I have an Apple Watch with a digital readout in the corner at all times, I still look first to the analogue one across the room. It’s faster for me now, and I couldn’t really understand why until this video. Thanks 😊
All you have shown with this “experiment” is that it is faster (easier) to read time off the clock on your wall than it is to reach out & read the time off a tiny watch affixed to your arm. To prove it has nothing to do with digital/analogue, try repeating the experiment but with the clock types reversed, i.e. a digital wall clock, an analogue watch. I have. It’s quicker for me to read time off the wall clock than on my wristwatch.
In my smartwatch (Huawei GT Active) there is a watchface that has both digital and analogue time. For me Digital is easier to read because you dont have to think if its day or night.
What you write about is just getting accustomed to a new way time is displayed. From hours on the left, minutes on the right, you now see, hours against the small arrow, minutes against the big arrow. The guy seems to mean seeing hours a bit like Americans see inches, that is, not as consisting of 16 sixteenths, but as a whole, that can be split however small is practical, most practical being into 16 sixteenths. Same for the hour, it's not 4 quarters, it's a circle, that can be split however you want, but most practical is halves, quarters, sixtieths
If you're writing down the time, surely it should be faster to just copy the numbers of a digital display? Analogue clocks are great for _internalizing_ the time, but to turn it into text you have to do an extra conversion from internal time to numbers.
I purchased an LCD watch that had "Hands" and read out like an analog clock. I also used a "Goofy" watch for around 5 years. It literally ran backwards. (Counter-clockwise), with the number 3 on the left side and 9 on the right.
I like it. I know that my experience of time has changed since I was young and I think that this is a big part of it. I think that I largely appreciated time better when I was younger and I think that this was partly due to mostly seeing time in portions of an hour instead of this thing where the minutes tick buy so quickly. I'm sure that not everyone gets what you are talking about, but I really have a similar feeling and this video from 2 years ago rings very true to me.
This reminds me of something Douglas Adams wrote to his editor in 1992:
"(...) there is something inherently ridiculous about digital watches (...) Digital watches came along at a time that, in other areas, we were trying to find ways of translating purely numeric data into graphic form so that the information leapt easily to the eye. For instance, we noticed that pie charts and bar graphs often told us more about the relationships between things than tables of numbers did. So we worked hard to make our computers capable of translating numbers into graphic displays. At the same time, we each had the world’s most perfect pie chart machines strapped to our wrists, which we could read at a glance, and we suddenly got terribly excited at the idea of translating them _back_ into numeric data, simply because we suddenly had the technology to do it..."
Was that part of a longer letter about deadlines by any chance?
@@stamfordly6463 🗿 (I just really like this emoji and I want to be notified of an answer to your question.)
@@stamfordly6463 Fax from Douglas Adams to US editor Byron Preiss
LOL that explains the "an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea"
@@ooloncolluphid9975 😂
YES, this is exactly how I feel and look at the clock. Especially the "imaginary minute hand" that represents the end of a class for example. I can quickly glance at my watch, and know/feel/understand what time it is, but if somebody asks me what time it is, that means oh no I need to actually parse it and engage my brain. Also, it's so infrequent that you really need per-minute precision. Glad to have found someone actually talk about this.
100% agree with you on this. And I think if you ever do need to parse the time you usually round it. For example if the clock says it's 3:52 and someone asks for the time, usually you just say 3:50.
Same.
@@GalaxyOneFilms In that case I'd say ten to four. But it may well be because I'm not a native english speaker. I honestly don't know. Interesting.
Well I just learned something about myself, I do the same thing when asked the time. I can look at my watch and just know where in the day we are, but it takes a second look to verbalize it, and I never give minute-precision.
I think this concept ties into a lot of other ways people look at the world, in a digital vs analog sense. I drove long before GPS, so going to the store is forty minutes down the county road, not thirty miles.
I wonder where else the difference crops up.
I think this is why I love spring so much, it has to do with school
This is very interesting. In Sweden ( and probably the whole Europe too ) our digital clocks are almost always in what you call military time. As a swede, when i thought about your flip clock i had to think for a while that it was not set to morning but actually afternoon. 3 to me has always been 15. 3 is in the morning.
Nothing makes sense in occupied Turtle Island. 12 hour clocks, imperial measurements that are defined by metric, privatized everything, etc. I was lucky enough to spend a few months overseas and now exclusively use metric in my workshop and 24hr time in personal clocks.
I just automatically thought he was filming half past 3 in the morning.
Until I read your comment I hadn't even realized I thought that and that filming at 15 would make way more sense.
@@geobot9khow does having a 12 hour clock be the same as it has been for centuries not make sense though. Like everyone used 12 until digital came out.
The reason everyone uses seconds instead of the metric equivalent the French tried to come ip with when they standardized everything else is because time was the only thing that everyone in Europe already standardized.
Also if the French wanted the US to use their system they should have sent more than one sample or made sure it didn't get taken by pirates.
@@Pfish1000- Lol. Yeah no, until the middle of the 19th century when pocket watches started to spread because of railroads, the only clock most people had access to was the one on the village's church or town hall. Time in the day was not marked by the time on a clock, but by the position of the sun in the sky and the ringing of the Angelus bell.
The 24h format is vastly more practical, it entirely avoids confusion, and removes the need for a useless affix while displaying 12h time is already a 4 digit affair.
@@MadNumForce OK cool so these mechanical town clocks that existed for centuries, were they not 12 hour or did they have 24 hours marked on them? Oh it was 12 like every mechanical clock? The move to 24 hours in Europe is significantly more recent is half my point and digital makes that easier.
I bet if I went to Milan Italy TODAY and bought a wristwatch to go with my new tailored suit, it would have 12 denotations for the hours and not 24.
Sure a 24hr clock avoids ambiguity without the need for a suffux, that's why it's used in aviation and the military, but for your average person it offers relatively little advantage and is what people were already used to so we just didn't bother to make the switch.
Also before you argue that time wasn't standardized because everyone had a different noon. I'm specifically referring to the units and how many of them make up the next unit was agreed upon. Nobody had 90 second minutes, nobody had 75 minute hours, and nobody had 16 hour days. At least not in Europe which is all that matters as that standard an not the French attempt at metricify-ing it and not any other standard, is the standard the world now uses.
As a person with ADD this is why I decided, years ago, to keep an analog clock in my room. I have trouble with time management, so to have a visual of the progression of time does 2 things:
1 It allows me, like you said, to see where in the hour I am and how much time I have left at a glace.
2 Each time I glance at the clock I see the progression and relate it to how time FELT since the last time I looked and makes me aware of any distractions I may be allowing at that moment, or if I'm feeling a bit spaced out and loosing all track of time internally. This inevitably helps to instill a sense of urgency when these problems become apparent. And it's much more apparent and easily gauged with an analog clock.
Fellow ADHDer here, I like to use visual count down timers - it generates a sense of urgency especially in the morning when I really need to get going
@@deltastripesThat reminds me, I have to buy a pomodoro timer.
I'm ADD too, and I never really thought about it, but I think analog clocks actually are better for me for that reason. I think I'm gonna pick up like 2 of them--maybe a glow-in-the-dark one.
I'm not sure if it's just the layout of the digital clock so much as being desensitized to it because it's EVERYWHERE--namely on my phone, which I have basically integrated into my body at this point 😂
makes me think I might need to reanimate my wristwatches I left in a drawer once I struggled to set out to replace the baterries
Somewhat related: pilots and competitive drivers have recognized for years that it is MUCH faster to get the information that you _need_ from analog displays like needle gauges and bar gauges, than digital readouts. It isn't nearly as important to know that engine RPM is 7,449... 7,443... 7,438... than that you're about half-way between 7K and 8K and will need to shift soon. Likewise, for most purposes, it's more useful to know you're about 2/3 through the hour, than whether it's 3.37, 3.39, or 3.41.
Exactly! When information is rapidly changing and not precisely under your control, fast approximations and trends are more brain efficient than precise numbers.
Definitely agree -- and you can kind of "read" an analog tachometer without looking at it directly, and you can certainly see when it's moving. It's almost like parsing a digital readout requires interpretation, whereas the analog display is visceral and doesn't require that interpretation step.
I have seen many race cars where drivers have rotated their tachometers so the optimal shift point is at the 12'o'clock position. It requires zero thinking time to register the shift point; Thus reducing the cognitive load in critical timing or high stress situations. Every small advantage is an edge on your competitor.
Especially with information that changes rapidly. A digital readout cannot show the rate of change of the information in a sensible way. And when you should be primarily looking out of the window in front it makes no sense to have a speedometer that you have to *read* to obtain your speed, instead of a needle that shows your speed instantly.
Thats why there aren't digital gauges in cars much. Chevy tried something in the 90s but it didn't last. People had to sit and actually read the number to know how fast they were going. Analog gauges "read" faster. Once a person gets familiar with the gauge, a simple glance will tell them how fast they're going with enough accuracy to matter.
Plus analog gauges show rate of progression much better than digital ones, as far as diagnosis of pressures are concerned. Its easier to tell how fast a pressure is rising. A digital readout may not update fast enough to properly show information.
I realized this difference in perception of time as an EMT and needed to time 30 seconds for people’s pulse. When I was a student I asked a guy why he had a manual instead of digital watch and the guy told me that it’s easier to time 30 seconds with analog.
I didn’t see how that made sense so I forgot about it until I started taking pulses and I realized that he was right. By glancing at the second hand’s position, you gain the number and the relative position of the hand. If you forget the number, you can reference your memory of the position of the hand to get an approximate idea of where it was. You also don’t need to add and subtract while extremely stressful situations are going on like you would need to with a digital.
Excellent example! While i do not need to time 30 seconds, i often get a safety relevant system to work on fortimeframaes like half an hour or 1 hour. And it's way easier to glance at an analog watch to see how much of the time i have left than a digital one. One of the reasons i usually wear an analog wrist watch. I can do it with my digital one too (for situations that the analoge ones are to precious to me i use a G-shock), but to make it easier i either use the stop watch or the timer to see how much there is left. (sometimes my brain translates the numbers then to an analog dial in my head)
You can literally just get a glance of the second hand, and when its inverted from that its been 30 seconds.
With digital its like, youre straight away doing sums. I dont even care about numbers, you just look at the little arrow and when its pointing the other way you are done.
And some analog watches even have pulse meters to help you more quickly calculate BPM.
Yup, whenever I need to estimate time intervals, I look at or mentally picture an analogue clockface, because you can visually see the interval on it. For knowing the exact time *now*, I prefer a digital readout though, because reading the tiny minute dots is annoying, but given the prevalence of digital clocks in devices it's not hard to have both available to you. An analogue wall clock and digital on your computer/phone.
There are even watches made for medics so they could time stuff like that, like Boldr Venture Medic...but that's a mechanical watch and those are basically for enthusiasts.
I also like that on an analog clock, the hour hand does not instantly jump from 3 to 4 when 3:59 becomes 4:00. It moves smoothly between the hours. When its 3:55, it's basically pointing at 4, which is good because 3:55 is basically 4:00. Or at least its much closer to 4:00 than 3:00.
Yep. I think a watch maker awhile back created a watch that only had an hour hand, it was meant to give people are more comfortable idea of time, since you can still get an idea of when it is without having to mull over exact minutes or seconds
@@FerrichromeI like that. It's like "take it easy, don't stress so much over the precise time."
@@Ferrichrome The earliest mediaeval clocks only had the hour hand. The minute hand was a later innovation.
@@owaing No doubt they were modelled on sundials.
Yeah the hour hand is like an "hours gauge" in the same way that you have pressure and fuel gauges with needles. It tells you the time of day coarsely (with 1/2-hour precision) completely independently of the other hands.
i feel the same way !! i've also noticed that as soon as i look at a digital clock and then look away, i immediately forget what time it was because something about a string of numbers just doesn't stick in my memory very well. but if i look at an analog clock, even if i don't "translate" it for myself, i have a much better chance of not only remembering what time it was but also just having a generally better understanding of what that means for my schedule or whatever. the visuals are definitely a huge part of it - i can pay better attention to the pattern of where the hands are on an analog clock and recall what that looked like than i can for a digital clock, so even if i don't remember exactly what the time was, i can recall the image of the clock face in my head and basically re-read it mentally. but this was super interesting, and although i had never thought about it like this, i'm absolutely the same way !
Doctoral candidate in education here:
This phenomenon is called "automaticity" and refers to the idea that our brains develop meaning from abstract combinations of stimuli. The term is most often used in reading education when we talk about developing fluency. It's the same reason that when you read the words in this comment, your brain is not literally parsing each letter, but rather, the words themselves hold automatic meaning based on their visual form, while at the same time can be broken down into their granular parts (phonemes and letters).
i kinda of feel like the disconnect comes from changes in our mentality. Being bored in school watching the minute hand till the end of class or end of school day to be able to get home, watching the minute hand at work to clock out and rush home to unwind. As someone who rarely leaves the house and works from home similar to how a youtubers life must work theres no structure to my days now. I sleep when im tired, technically speaking since i work off my computer, and i spend every waking moment on the computer i am technically always clocked into work. The only time an actual clock comes into play is when i have doctors appointments or if i want to order some food to be delivered and i need to order before the places close. Also theres the fact that the older we get the faster time seems to pass
And you can demonstrate this skill. Consider presenting a situation you're practiced with - knowing what the time when class ends looks like - and present a bunch of random analog clocks showing times within that time range. Sure, if you are asked, "What time is it?" you'll be processing things more than your digital counterparts, but if you have an assignment in front of you and are asked, for each clock, "Do you have time to finish this?" you'll give faster responses, because you're estimating distances rather than doing any math. Any question that interprets the time into something to make practical decisions on you'll be able to "compute" without math.
Another specific example to demonstrate the usefulness is to present clocks with a "ghost hand" and ask how much time is left until the real hand lines up, allowing practical responses like "just over 10 mins", and present the same for digital examples. If the times are wonky, like how long for 2:18 to become 2:46, it takes multiple steps to interpret that practically as "just under half an hour", yet the analog clock with a minute hand moved by 28 mins looks like "just under half an hour" of distance no matter where the starting time is.
@@jandew314 Now I wonder if I'm weird. I wouldn't think of either of those as concretely... I'd just round off and think 20 and 50, so about half an hour. I don't think the "progress bar" analogy works for me at all, cause I still need to think about roughly where I am versus where I'm going.
@@jandew314 yes thats a great example "what time is it" vs "do you have time to finish this"
when i get home from work and i know i should do a thing. i look at the clock(my phone with a digital clock) im like nah thats going to take the rest of the day(because i cant be bothered to actually calculate how much time i have before i need to sleep). for example change oil on my car or whatever. so i just watch youtube instead just wasting the day away. but if i would have looked at an analogue clock i would see that i have like half the day left and will with no problem be able to change oil even if i hit a snag. very interesting. i need more analogue clocks in my life. :)
The “progress bar” concept is entirely new to me and is blowing my mind. It was always taught to me since the beginning when we made paper plate clocks in elementary school in the ‘80s that the goal is to point to a number which you can then translate to the time. That’s why digital clocks are so much easier: they’re precise and unambiguous with no extra layer of translation required. But suddenly I understand why some analog clocks might not even have any numbers on the face at all, or only at the cardinal points. It’s not actually the point of the clock!
The progress bar concept works for the minute hand and the hour hand as well. I also find subtraction is far easier on an anolog clock.
I had to pause the video for a good couple of minutes just to let out some "What the hell that's perfect"s
@@MegaLokopo Yeah because subtraction is just figuring out how much you need to add to move clockwise to your target time. It's kind like how schools have introduced subtraction as addition of the difference between the two numbers, moving left to right on a number line, to help students conceptualize and visualize it when they are first learning it. It's not always the fastest technique, but it leads to the best/deepest understanding.
@@jshariff786 That is still widely debated. Lots of students are struggling with the changes made the past few years even pre covid changes unrelated to covid.
I find it super interesting how you conceptualize 03:40 as forty minutes into the hour, and not as twenty minutes until the next hour. I know both notations refer to the same point in time, but it seems to me like two completely different ways to perceive it.
I stand firmly in the digital time camp, having grown up with digital clocks and never really having used analog, but I can definitely see how the spacial aspect of literal hands rotating in a disk can help understand time. I don’t see time as fractions of a disk, so for me, converting the remaining trajectory of the minute hand into actual minutes is the harder of the two ways. Time is numbers in my head because that’s what I grew up with.
There might be a connection to that. Ive spent a good half or so of my life mainly with digital time but I still have a hard time keeping track of things. I know conceptually that 3:50 is 10 minutes until 4:00 but I always think of it as 50 minutes past 3:00.
I dont have the same issue with analog though, because I see analog as fractional. 2/3 into the hour is 1/3 until the next, but I dont seamlessly make that connection with digital because I dont see it as fractional. Also for me analog gives a sense of almost urgency while digital just doesn't until it's very close to the time I know I have to leave for example
That's probably because you call 3:40pm "03:40", which is incorrect
@@davecarsley8773 I actually call it "ti over halv fire", but thanks for making assumptions
I will think of it both ways. It's both 40 minutes after and 20 minutes til. I usually think of hours in groups of 5 (12 groups in an hour). I think of hours in 2 groups of 12 hours (am and pm). In most cases, being within 15 or 30 minutes is adequate. Then, I just refer to the quarter hour and the half hour. For example, I'll say, "It's about half past 4" or "It's a quarter to 4."
I actually find it interesting how a firmly digital person would still be accustomed to thinking of time as leading to the next hour, rather than time since the last hour.
Digital time, in numeric sense, is *always* counting up from the previous hour.
Figuring how many minutes are left until the next one requires mathematical calculations. With experience, one is used to such things and simply knows that "40 after" is "20 'til" because it just "is" that way, rather than doing the mental calculations of "60 minus 40 is 20."
But looking at an analog clock face, you can SEE the pie chart of time, rather than having memorized mathematical formulas in your head. The movement of the minute hand could be conceptualized as counting up, OR counting down, OR both- depending on your point of view. But a digital clock is ALWAYS counting up. The numbers are always rising, and counting down requires math.
So it's interesting to me how a firmly digital person would be a "counting down" type; I just find that interesting. Neither right nor wrong; there is no right or wrong; it's all the same time. Just different ways to express how we're thinking about it.
It's like how when something costs 3.99 it gives the illusion that it's closer to 3 than 4. Same thing when a digital clock reads 3:59. It throws you off, even if it's unconsciously
This was a highly enjoyable ramble that felt like someone who’s had just enough to drink to become philosophical AND verbose
More like a highly banal waste of time
Like they said, this is why it was on “Extras”.
I suggest you skip this channel.
@@obiwanpez (They, but you weren’t to know pronouns)
Try watching at 0.5 speed :-)
Mmm, I don't know, maybe one more glass? Or maybe I need one more glass. I just put an anolog watch on my wrist and now I can't get it off.
I found your "progress bar" analogy to be the best description about how you perceive time on an analog clock. Being a school retired school teacher, I really connected with your comparison to your school class schedule being at odd numerical times, but instead of constantly doing head-math to figure out the remaining numerical minutes, you view the analog clock more like a "count-down" timer waiting for the bell to ring at zero.
In some ways it's like reading a pie chart instead of just plain numbers. It's easier to understand proportions in that representation.
I don't get most students' obsession with "what time is it?". They already know when the bell rings. If you look at the large clock on the wall, you can instantly see how many minutes are left.
"What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?" "What time is it?"
And then half the time they don't even listen for the answer, they just want to interrupt the lecture. I mean, I got pretty serious ADHD as well, but then I at least try to find it interesting, think of my personal experiences with the subject or if it's really that boring, just draw in the notebook and shut up.
Yes-and, because, in a clock, two number-lines (one running 1-12 (or 0-12); the other, 1-60 (or 0-60)) have been wrapped around a circle, each with both of its ends at the same point, you can make the origin ("zero" in "waiting for the bell to ring at zero") anywhere around the circle. If we're talking about twelve hours (a whole circle) from four o'clock, we know to relate any time between the start and the end to the "4"-point on the clock. If we're talking about an hour from 5:07, we know the "7"-mark is the crucial thing. If we're talking about five minutes, we can make any combination of hour and minute the start (or end) and just move the five little marks (or a twelfth of the circle) in one direction or another, even if it means crossing the "12" at the top of the clock. There's great advantage in treating some numerical concepts as continuous loops, on which any points can be the origins.
In the end, it makes much sense that we do this with time (but not, say, dollars or apples), because time as we experience it is repeated loops-the diurnal loop of night and day, the annual loop of the seasons, and even the seven-day loop that is the week.
Numbers are just our way of processing and sharing information about the natural world when what we have is hard to visualize or is going to involve a lot of steps or a lot of inputs. When what we're trying to do is simple, we keep the numericization as little as possible: if I want you to hang a picture at a certain spot on the wall, I say to put it "half way up": I chop the wall only into two equal parts (halves), and I tell you to move from the bottom of the wall to the top of the bottom part: I don't bother to go compare the height of the wall to a stick or ribbon on which dozens or hundreds of equal spaces have been marked, and then read digits that tell me how many of those spaces separate a certain point from the end of the stick or ribbon, and then tell you to go to that number and put the picture there.
Simplifying numericization is one of the unspoken advantages that older units have over those of the metric system. The metric system has many benefits and even advantages, yes. But think of the ease of writing "1 c" or "1 cup" compared to that of "100 mL" or "240 mL or "250 mL" or "0.25 L". Then, set aside the writing and just consider the speaking-the quickness of pronouncing "one cup" and "a cup" (two syllables), compared to the slowness of pronouncing "two hundred and fifty milliliters" (ten syllables) or even "a quarter liter" (five) or "a deciliter" (five).
@@smadafCould you expand on this ...........
Thank you for this. It helps explain why I've always struggled with telling people what time it is when I look at a clock (both digital and analogue.)
I don't really think about time in "numbers" but in "how long until" or "do I have enough time" or "what should I be doing now." So, I'll look at my watch and see 12:45 and think, "I better eat some lunch" or, "Man, I've got an appointment in 15 minutes. I better get in my car." or, "There's just a few more minutes left in class."
When someone asks me the time, I struggle, because I have to translate my thoughts of "It's time to eat lunch" (or whatever) into some sort of number. I'll usually get the minutes right, but not the hour. The hour isn't terribly important to me, because I already KNOW what hour it is, because I've been glancing at the clock throughout the day.
This is fascinating! As someone who grew up mostly with (24 hour) digital clocks, it's never occurred to me to read analogue clocks graphically. I can read them, but my instinct is to translate the hands to numbers, and it takes me a second. It might get easier if I try to think of it as a portion of a circle instead.
To me, it's the numbers that give me that immediate intuitive understanding of the time. :30 immediately means "half-past" to me. :50 means "ten minutes left" etc. I look at a digital clock and I have a conceptual understanding of what time it is. With an analogue clock, I have to translate it back to numbers and only then do I have that conceptual understanding.
I think some people’s problem is that “reading a clock” is taught in public school as a math problem. Translate analog to digital in abstraction, not as a “how do you use this information the clock is giving you”. Also, on the hour hand is hard to read issue, it’s always closest to the hour that is closest. “Almost four” is more descriptive and useful than “54 minutes after 3”
I totally agree, I feel like the reason a lot of people have trouble with analogue clocks is because they are told and are always trying to, convert the time directly and exactly into a numerical, digital value. It creates a whole different perspective and yeah clearly a traditional clock is harder to read for an exact to the minute value, but its way better at visualizing where in the day or the hour you are.
When I was at school, whilst it wasn't taught as converting to digital, it was converting to words. To read an analogue clock, we were taught how to tell if it was o'clock, quarter past, half past, or quarter to, and name the hour with that. Whereas on a digital clock, I can look at it and see if it's :00, :15, :30 or :45 to answer the same question, and questions that were used to gauge our level of understanding were all about being able to tell the teacher what the time was on a drawing of a clock.
lol as if school could ever give you usage answer rather than sterile x=y answers.
Came into the comments to say this. Yeah, we were always taught "this is how you read an analog clock as numbers" and nobody ever pointed out that it could represent progress, not just a number.
I agree with the 1st part about how to teach the clock but disagree on the 2nd part, i find 3 54 (54 minutes past 3, ect) far more usefull, could be its my dyslexia, of just the evolution of my 1st learning of clocks that a struggled with, but knowing the exact time helps me more then a "about 4"
Is it 4? Is it 10 to 4? If its 5 to 4 that means im late but if its 12 to 4 then i still have some time. Or is it even past 4?! Its why i look at the time myself then ask someone else.
12:37 reminded me of a fun thing. I went to school in actual Westminster in actual London. The entire school was trivially within earshot of Big Ben, which strikes a distinctive set of chimes every quarter hour. Our lessons were also an odd duration - either 40 or 50 minutes each depending on the day. The first term there, the chimes were honestly pretty annoying. Every quarter hour these bloody great bells would peal these complex chimes (four chimes per quarter, so the full hour is 16 chimes, and then the number of chimes of the hour, so the midday chimes were 28 notes in total!). But after a while you tune them out and nobody notices them.
However, in the second year I noticed an odd thing. Although we all wore watches (it was the 80s - digital watches were cool), nobody ever looked at them. Or asked each other the time. Or was surprised when a lesson ended. Or even checked the clock on the wall. We all - the entire school - we just MAGICALLY KNEW WHAT TIME IT WAS. Because every quarter of an hour, this by-now-subliminal sound would reset our sense of time. So if someone (like a tourist) DID ask the time - you just knew to within a minute or so. It was very bizarre.
So that's a third, vastly freakier, way of telling time.
telling time by sound is something i never understood but was always aware of, ad while i wasn't sure of it, i was just waiting for na example like yours to prove it: as long you comprehend somthing, even if you're not consciously aware of it, subconsciously you're still going to internalize the information.
that being said, as for why i've not been able to understand telling time by sound even though i live in a country where nearly every town has a bell tower(italy), well... i guess i just suck at interpreting audio cues into complex information.
i can easily use headphones in a first person shooter or other game to tell which treath is where, but that's a fairly subset of information needed to make that split second decision(direction and type of sound, both which i can get with just a little practice in the game and mere logical thinking)
but telling the HOUR? that's way different, i can't even keep track of 28 frikking bell clocks in a row, unless i was hyper-aware of how it worked for months, i would just not get it simply because i can't keep track of it.
i always thought though(well, always, since i was 17) that it was because of being on the ASD... but who knows.
The interesting thing to me is that this method of telling time you've described predates pocket watches, wristwatches (analog or digital), and even clocks on the wall! Bells rang on the quarter hour in churches were how people kept track of time well before individuals had clocks on their walls and/or person. People used to instant information would pooh-pooh telling time by clock tower bells as inferior, but as you said it's surprisingly accurate once you are accustomed to it.
What school did you go to?
Bell in my city usually off by a few minutes. If you think about it its just how any clock works, but they have 32khz resonator while you had like 1/15hz which is of to tell time within a few minutes.
I’m finding the use of the word trivially interesting. “The entire school was trivially within earshot of Big Ben…”
1. In the one sense it is anything but trivial - the entire story is dependent upon being within earshot, so it’s not trivial.
2. In the sense of “proved” it’s just a redundant word; of course you are within earshot of something you can hear. But this is an uncommon usage.
3. Just to clarify that there is no special relationship between the school and Big Ben. One would think there would be several schools close enough to Big Ben to hear the bells. (A fun trivia question though - “How many schools are within earshot of Big Ben?” Whatever distance earshot would be).
4. Every time you tell someone you went to school near Big Ben, this initiates questions as to "why" as people might assume a specialness, or an association, between the school's location and the bell - thus requiring additional, unimportant explanation. This would make it a trivial defense, against trivial questions, in an amusing way.
I'm only twelve minutes in, and I love this so much. A few points:
1. I'm a lot like you. I'm quite at home with an analog 12-hour clock-face.
2. When I perform any operations on digital times (e.g., how much time separates 1:23 from 4:56?), the clock-face is in my head-not as a thing with arrows pointing at marks that represent numbers that have been wrapped around a circle after coming from my usual mental number-line (which doesn't stop at 12 or 60), but as a disc chopped into fractions.
3. It's not just the minute-hand. The hour-hand, too, is 'a progress-bar': when we've just gotten to school and already we're itching for lunch, we're aware that we have to wait for the little hand to move x-way around the circle.
4. Unlike the usual computery progress-bars, these ones are traversed at a constant rate.
5. Our base-ten digits are hugely useful, but they really hide proportions. As an amount of text on a page, 100 is no more than 900 (three characters in each number, and two thirds of them are the same)-and 1,000,000,000 is only about fifty percent longer than 1,000,000, even though it means a quantity that's _a thousand times_ as big. As space in a written recipe, "1/4 cup" and "3/4 cup" are equal (as are "250 mL" and "750 mL")-but one is three times as big as the other. This is why we so often convert spreadsheets of digits into lines and bars and pies.
6. Maybe this is one of the keys to fixing our current screwy relationship with time. Maybe it's even worse for people who haven't learned to read analog clocks easily; maybe it's worse for people who can read them easily but didn't learn to read _them first_ and therefore don't automatically mentally convert digital times into parts of the circle. Maybe, even for those of us who do have that ease and that automatic conversion, it would be better to have more analog timepieces around and fewer digital ones. Maybe this graphical advantage is not only in the circle (or octagon or oval or square or rectangle) of the clock, but also in the calendar with rows and columns. Maybe we need more paper monthly calendars in our lives, not only with upcoming events flagged, but also with the passed days crossed out.
ADDENDA:
7. I also have no trouble with the hour-hand-and it's rare that I don't already know what hour we're in.
8. Roughly (sometimes very roughly), the sweep of the hour-hand is like the sweep of the sun across the sky.
On point 5: The core reason why our perception of size based on digits is screwy is that as a quantity increases, the length of the number needed to represent that quantity scales logarithmically. Most people aren’t really equipped to think about logarithms in daily life so it can be tricky to think about.
@@redpepper74what's funny is that's a product of being taught arithmetic. If you ask someone that went through modern school, "What's halfway between 1 and 9", they'll say, "5". If you ask an indigenous person with no formal education, they'll say, "3". "3" is the right answer. 3 is 3 times 1 and 9 is 3 times 3. They think geometrically/logarithmically, we think linearly.
@@williamreynolds6475 That’s pretty interesting. I wouldn’t say that 3 is the “correct” answer though, because “halfway between” doesn’t indicate what measuring system you’re using. It would only be correct if logarithmic scale was the canonical system of measurement (which it isn’t, at least as a programmer, I use linear scale much more often)
I remember trying to learn about reading time... I'd ask my dad what time it is now. "10 after". Still not sure if he intuitively knew the hour like you do, or if he was just not up to the task of teaching me. Either way, I'm sure most peoples' introduction into trying to learn time isn't like "quarter 'til" and I'm so happy for you all. It has been rough.
I always thought that not stating the hour was just something that TV news shows did to work around time zones or tape-delayed rebroadcasts.
Progress bar app for the day, with a couple color coded subsections to set wake up/sleep, work/break, and maybe an analog clock underneath for precision. That would be interesting.
Bad idea. If you put up a progress bar Bill Gates will make software to run that bar til you don't know how many days it's actually been. Politicians will get their cut while telling you how they want to end progress bars. I mean humans don't need sleep right, and you don't want to be replaced with a robot do ya. Nah. It'as a bad idea.
@@pgtmr2713 hahahaha nice!! You’re funny as hell
With modern watch watch displays that's doable!
This sounds oddly dystopian lol.
There’s a product called “slow watch” which is fairly similar to this. It has one hand and no numbers and the hand goes around once a day
This is actually really interesting to me because as a fairly young person, I have grown up primarily reading digital clocks, thus time in my head is processed digitally, quite literally the opposite of how you explained that you interpret time. For myself, whenever I look at an analog clock, I have to do the conversion to digital time in my head before the info actually means anything, because I think of time in digits. Just looking at an analog clock is quite meaningless for me until I look exactly at what point the minute hand is, and convert that to digital time to then get a sense of what time it is.
Actually, converting an analog clock into digits that make sense to me, makes even less sense to me, because i'd need to visualise the digits written next to each other as an image in order to intuitively parse it as time. Like, i need to see _all_ of the digits in my mind's eye _at the same time_ because otherwise the time just doesn't make sense to me.
I don't necessarily think this is because you are younger. I think it's because you experience what it feels like for time to pass, so thinking "it's 3:50, I have ten minutes before it's 4" is a non-issue. But myself, I have ADHD, so time doesn't pass normally for me. If you asked me to tell you when 10 minutes had passed in a room without a clock, I would say it's been 10 minutes after about 4 minutes of boredom or after about an hour and a half of doing something I like. I don't need to know how many minutes until a certain time is happening. I need to know what percent of the way I am through the block of time I am currently in, otherwise time has no meaning to me. If I started at 2pm and I see its 2:45, and I planned to stop at 3pm, I have a sense of how long the next 15 minutes will feel... roughly 1/3rd of what already passed. But that only works if I keep doing the same thing. If I change things, I have no idea. Those 15 minutes could feel 3x as long as the first 45, or they could go by in what feels like 1 minute. But if I'm doing the same task, that percentage... that sense that I'm 3/4 of the way through the time slot, grounds my sense of time passing.
@@thirdpedalnirvana Hm. I think I disagree that this is why _I_ experience it though, because even though I have ADHD (inattentive type), I don't have a problem with time blindness. Mind you I will absolutely get distracted and lose several hours of time, or be bored and feel like time is crawling, but my memories from before that are still "marked" with the right objective-time, so I can still tell how much time passed even if I don't remember it actually passing.
Same with me, but I'm not a fairly young person.
I have quite the same functionning, except that I nearly automatically convert digital time to an analog representation in my head, but its not the same as the regular analog clocks (there are several analog representation systems I use to get around in my life: something for the time around the year (that is a little bit off too), something for distances, forces, counting, etc...).
The thing is, in order to understand an analog clock, I have to translate it into digital, and then translate it again to understand it.
This kinda blew my mind my brain works the same way as your describing but ive just never thought of it. After i was out of school I’ve pretty much only had digital clocks around me so ive just gotten used to it but thinking about it i do miss the “progress bar” aspect of a regular clock.
Great video.
I consider a classic Movado watch. No digits. Just a circle to symbolize the twelve position. But it perfectly illustrates that the numbers aren't actually necessary at all for the piece to achieve its purpose.
As a person who always struggled with analog clocks, this video really helped me "get it". Thinking of a minute hand as a progress bar is a wild idea to me.
Do you also struggle with wiping your own ass
It's really apparent in the way we used to talk about times in terms of quarter to and quarter pass, half past.. that we learned to read time as a ratio and place emphasis on time in terms fractions of hours, not in specific minutes
I also find it interesting that there are different ways to speak these times, based likely on where you are from and the terms specific to your region. Many say as you do, quarter to, quarter past, half past. Where I am from you say quarter of, quarter after and X-thirty, you actually always say "thirty" and never "half". I guess it's like dresser vs bureau, toilet vs commode, etc, but still interesting to me.
Yes!!! As a child that really confused me most. Hey it’s a quarter of 3 ? Would that be 3:15? Hey it’s a quarter to 3. 2:45? I guess it’s that keyword “of” “To” … but, I see time or understand the length better on analog.
Used to? Even young people I know who probably can’t even read a clock say “I’ll be there at a quarter to 4” etc.
@@volkerlange7251 Not really. I say 3-15 and 2-45 etc etc. Most students I teach do too. My mum definitely says things like half past and quarter to. But it wasn't until it came up here that I realised that is not the norm anymore. (I was born in the 80s so im not that young either). I might occationally say "quarter to" but its the exception not the rule.
In part it must be because the digical clocks are everywhere but I suspect that its also because we communicate in text so much more and 315 is much faster to write than quarter past 3 and because we communicate like that a lot we talk like that too.
It's also that minutes are too small a division for human-scale time. 10-minute increments is probably the smallest I'd recommend using (again, this is human-scale time, if you're cooking, that's chemistry which requires much higher precision), but quarter-hours are simpler than dealing in 10-minute increments.
I think this is super interesting and my parents and anyone older would definitely agree with you. I’m 22, so I’ve mostly used digital growing up. I have never considered using the hands as a radial progress bar, but I can understand its intuitive speed. However, I am unable to instantly feel the time and deduce an amount of time until my next meeting just by glancing at the hands. I always have to translate to digits, but when I read digital, I can instantly tell my next meeting is in an hour and a half without thinking about the math. The only caveat is the precision is within 5 minutes for times more than an hour, but I would expect this is to be the same for analogue. While I can understand your perspective, I know the consensus will pass with the generations. Growing up on digital provides the same intuition and speed as growing up on analogue, and due to its smaller size and convenience for placing in many more places, digital will continue to take over and the youth will be able to feel the time with the same speed and precision, and I think will be able to keep better track of the current time due to the ease of finding a digital clock somewhere such as: your computer screen, your phone, or tour car.
I'm from an older generation (god, it feels weird to say that, lol), and I think your comment is a good illustration that it's a lifetime of familiarity which leads to the ability to look at a clock and have an immediate intuition for what it means, rather than one or the other of digital and analog being "naturally" more intuitive. When I'm getting my daughter ready for the bus on a chaotic morning, an analog clock gives me an immediate feel for how much urgency is required, while I'll stare at a digital clock dumbly trying to figure out if it means "go faster" or "relax". I'm guessing that for you'd it'd be exactly the opposite.
I'm only 24 and while I guess I also didn't have an analog clock in the house growing up, I have one in every room in my apartment today aside from the bedroom. My watch is analog and I can't imagine how late I'd be everywhere if it were digital. This is crazy to think when we grew up similarly and are practically the same age.... I'm mindblown by all this haha
I don't think the consensus will pass with generations. Time ultimately is a dimension. Human minds visualize dimensions. You look at a wall or a stick and you say "halfway up the wall" or 'halfway along the stick" far more than you ever say "Let's come up with a unit, then see how many of those units fit into the length or height of that stick or wall, then divide that number by two, and then count from the origin a number of those units equal that quotient." You just look at the stick and picture its midpoint and call that "half" or "midway" or "midpoint" or "center" or whatever.
I think that almost any person who reads a digital clock but has never learned to read an analog clock is still doing the back-translation. Set aside time for a moment and consider just numbers. I think it very unlikely that anybody who knows how 30 relates to 60 doesn't have a number-line in mind: you have in mind an origin, and a spot some distance away designated 60, and the knowledge that 30 is halfway between the origin and 60. Well, once you've learned how to tell time (just from digits, never an analog clock, let's say), you understand that 60 seconds make 1 minute, that 60 minutes make 1 hour, &c.-and most such persons, I posit, do not read "30" and think of it as halfway to "60" without visually processing the mental number-line. Very fast, in a faction of a second-but still visually. Well, the analog clock _is_ that number line-just wrapped around a curve, so that, when it reaches its maximum limit, it is back at its origin to start the next cycle. Someone reading a digital clock without seeing an analog clock in his mind is still doing the visuo-spatial part: the digits are turned into spots on a number line, and position/movement/progress along that line then is processed visually. Even someone applying arithmetic to the digits ("Well, let me see: 56 minus 19: borrow 1; that's 16 minus 9 makes 7; 4 minus 1 is 3: so 17") probably still can't help having a mental image of those numbers on a line. The difference for someone who can read an analog clock, especially someone who _first_ read time on analog clocks, is that he can skip the _digitization_ of space: he considers just the space, with no intermediate step: only if he has to put it into words for another mind or for a record does he bother to turn that space into numbers.
@@smadaf Funny thing... I do plenty of mental arithmetic in my head, but I never do it while visualizing a number line. I suspect that it's because I wasn't taught math using number lines. But I did grow up with analog clocks everywhere, so reading time on the circle is pretty automatic for me. What I've gotten from reading a bunch of these comments is that it's not very useful to think about "the most natural" when it comes to numbers. Our young brains have the potential to learn how to interact with numbers and proportions in many different ways, kind of like how we have the potential to learn one of any number of languages. We get so good at the specific way we've learned that it starts to feel "the most natural" and we're surprised that what's "natural" for us is "unnatural" for other people.
@@clawsoon , I appreciate the depth and details in your comments. I also think that certain ways of processing information come earlier than other ways-earlier in, say, the evolution from monocellular organisms to humans with their mathematical abstractions, and earlier in the life of a human who grows from infancy to adulthood. Certain things are acquired by instinct, and others tend to be taught: it is by instinct that we learn spoken language; it is by others' teaching that we learn to read and write a written language. I think that the same thing goes on with our processing of dimensions, both spatial and temporal.
A baby who has never learned the words "one", "two", "three", &c., nor learned to distinguish the quantities that those words represent, still has a concept of whether his hand is very close to what he wants to reach, or still very far from what he wants to reach, or only about half as far as it was when he started to reach it. The same idea applies when the baby crawls to a more distant goal.
It is only when humans want to communicate these perceptions to other minds, or to put them into external records for future reference, that they start coming up with the words and the numbers and the units of measure to make these perceptions transmissible and recordable.
In answer to another comment on this video, I wrote a bit more about that. It may be hard for you to find it among more than 11,000 other comments, so I'll paste here. The part that I wish most to share with you especially is the third paragraph:
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Yes-and, because, in a clock, two number-lines (one running 1-12 (or 0-12); the other, 1-60 (or 0-60)) have been wrapped around a circle, each with both of its ends at the same point, you can make the origin ("zero" in "waiting for the bell to ring at zero") anywhere around the circle. If we're talking about twelve hours (a whole circle) from four o'clock, we know to relate any time between the start and the end to the "4"-point on the clock. If we're talking about an hour from 5:07, we know the "7"-mark is the crucial thing. If we're talking about five minutes, we can make any combination of hour and minute the start (or end) and just move the five little marks (or a twelfth of the circle) in one direction or another, even if it means crossing the "12" at the top of the clock. There's great advantage in treating some numerical concepts as continuous loops, on which any points can be the origins.
In the end, it makes much sense that we do this with time (but not, say, dollars or apples), because time as we experience it is repeated loops-the diurnal loop of night and day, the annual loop of the seasons, and even the seven-day loop that is the week.
Numbers are just our way of processing and sharing information about the natural world when what we have is hard to visualize or is going to involve a lot of steps or a lot of inputs. When what we're trying to do is simple, we keep the numericization as little as possible: if I want you to hang a picture at a certain spot on the wall, I say to put it "half way up": I chop the wall only into two equal parts (halves), and I tell you to move from the bottom of the wall to the top of the bottom part: I don't bother to go compare the height of the wall to a stick or ribbon on which dozens or hundreds of equal spaces have been marked, and then read digits that tell me how many of those spaces separate a certain point from the end of the stick or ribbon, and then tell you to go to that number and put the picture there.
Simplifying numericization is one of the unspoken advantages that older units have over those of the metric system. The metric system has many benefits and even advantages, yes. But think of the ease of writing "1 c" or "1 cup" compared to that of "100 mL" or "240 mL or "250 mL" or "0.25 L". Then, set aside the writing and just consider the speaking-the quickness of pronouncing "one cup" and "a cup" (two syllables), compared to the slowness of pronouncing "two hundred and fifty milliliters" (ten syllables) or even "a quarter liter" (five) or "a deciliter" (five).
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A cat who has never come up with the concept of "a hundred" may still recognize that he is now much closer to an interesting thing that he wants to investigate than he was when he started walking toward it. Maybe he is now 100 centimeters away, after starting at a distance of 300 centimeters. He doesn't need the units and the numericization of them, and the names for the units and the numbers, to have a perception of those points and the distance between them and his progress between them. His perception of position and of changes in position is analog. Apples are discrete, and so it's very early in our comprehension of apples that we start to treat them as countable (some non-human species show consistent understanding of the difference between three apples and four apples, for example). But distance in space we don't so readily think of as countable-only when we have invented units by which to measure it do we start to _numericize_ space. The same is true of time within the day. (Time on a scale larger than a day is another story, because we have the cycle of day and night to turn time naturally into countable units. People probably started talking about "Two days from now" many thousands of years before they started talking about "Two hours from how".)
I think that the mature human mind that doesn't have a spatial image in mind in response to the word "sixty" (or the equivalent word in that person's language) is very rare, even if number-lines were not part of that person's formal mathematical education. I think that even a person who has been blind from birth has a mental sensory idea of the difference between five (a whole hand's worth of digits) and one (just one finger or thumb), for example. So, when we turn "It's almost time to stop" into "Just eight minutes remain until it'll be time to stop", we are applying something that comes later in the evolution of minds and later in the maturing of minds. Earlier minds have "far", "near", "almost", &c. without learning of such things as "minutes" (a unit of measure) and "eight" (a number of those units). We invented number-names and units of measure to ease our processing of details of the natural world-but we do some of that processing even before we have numbers with which to work. Spoken language is natural, but written language is artificial. Translating the dimension of time into a visuo-spatial dimension comes naturally, whereas turning sub-day amounts of time into numbers is artificial-so one tends to come before the other in the development of most minds. (Rare, for example, is the person who learns to read and write before he learns to speak and hear his native tongue.) This is why I think that, regardless of the relative populations of digital and analog clocks, we cannot escape the human mind's dimensional, non-numerical processing of time: think of how often we say "soon", "later", "in a while", "it'll be a long wait" without bothering to name and enumerate hours and minutes and seconds and days and weeks and years and so on: this trait is unlikely to disappear from the human mind.
Anyway, I've taken enough of your time. Thanks for listening. Your interaction is one of the unexpected treats for my birthday.
Funnily I'm equally comfortable with both digital and analog clocks.
What I absolutely struggle with is "left" and "right": whether written or spoken, it takes me a completely unjustified amount of processing to translate it into what left and right are actually to me: a hand gesture. I'm dead serious, to me left and right are the act of pointing, not any string of letters or sound. When someone needs mento guide them, my hand always points the right direction, but the word coming from my mouth is increasingly haphazard as the cognitive effort to recall the path or the urgency increases.
This
Do you find cardinal directions more natural? Like can you quickly describe directions in terms of North/South even when not looking at a map or not in view of the sun?
The dial effect is well documented. In my case, as a machinist, I can read a dial caliper measurement much faster than a digital one. Similarly, fighter pilots in the late 20th century suffered degraded performance when the dial instruments were replaced with digital ones. As a former typographer, I contend this is the same effect as the reduced readability of all caps text compared to mixed case, as the latter provides a more detailed outline and the former makes all words rectangle shaped.
i kind get it for clocks but for measuring i can not understand why a dial would make it simpler to read than just the numbers that you want to compare with the required dimension.
Interesting. Thanks for putting a word to it
I'm surprised to hear it helps as a machinist since you're given a spec you need to meet in digits. But I guess maybe the dial makes it easier to see how "close" you are to the spec?
Double spacing between sentences also improves readability. And use of white space to separate paragraphs
I read analog dial faster for my own use, but digital is definitely better when I need to log the number in a log. Or type it into a program.
I frequently would check the time on a digital clock only to completely forget what time it was a moment after. That doesn’t happen with analog. I now realize now that it’s because there’s no spacial representation of the time on the digital clock which makes it harder to conceptualize
Years ago, I had a digital watch that tended to gain time, and after a few years of not bothering to correct it, it was about 10 minutes fast, enough to make it worth subtracting 10 to work out the actual time.
Previous to that, I'd often found myself glancing at my watch multiple times in short succession because I hadn't remembered the time well enough..
After I started doing the subtraction, I didn't do that nearly as much - having to do even a simple subtraction kept the time more easily accessible in my memory.
After that, I actually started occasional resetting to keep it ~10 minutes fast.
It was actually kind of convenient - I lived ~9 minutes walk from work, so if I set off at '9am', I'd get to work on time.
Also, my route from work into town for lunch/shopping/after-work pub went right by the railway station, and it was surprising how often I had people walking to the station ask me the time.
Normally I told them the right time, but if it was someone in a suit who seemed to think it was my *job* to tell them, I'd just show them my watch to see if they would start running.
For me it's exactly the other way around, I think its just an exclusive-or operation. One or the other is easier depending on what you learned first, but if you learn one the other is much harder to read.
I think the reason you forget the time with a digital clock, is that a digital clock is much faster to read to get the exact hour and minute. With the analog watch, okay, the minutes you can kind of just intuit the rough time at a glance, but for the hour I find myself having to follow the arrow to find the right number.
If you spend more time looking at something, of course it'll be easier to remember.
And yes, I also think the minute hand gives a more visual intuitive representation that also makes it easier to remember. Not trying to take away from that point.
The ultimate watch, IMO, would have the hour as a number in the center, and the minutes as in an analog watch, but then you could perhaps number it 5-60 instead of 1-12 to make it even clearer (if there are numbers at all)
That's absolutely true for me unless the minute ends in a 0
@@auspiciouslywild Jumping-hour watches. It’s a thing. About the only reason I really want an Apple Watch is that I finally found a face for it that displays the time like the Harry Winston Opus watch the year it was designed by Urwerk. To me that is the nearly perfect representation of time. Hour is a digit, swinging through 60° in 60 minutes. No it does not give you that relative sense of progression for hours; but when it gets past an hour I’m pretty well doing sums anyway.
Only thing is that it really needs a 360° second hand sitting on top. I’ll have to see if I can make that work, since the left 2/3 of the watch face is useless.
Wow. This made me realize that I often visualize an analog clock when I read a digital one so I can see that “physical” progression of time…
Personally I think it's down to what you learned to read time with. I was born in 2005; I've been reading with digital clocks most of my life. When I look at a digital clock I get an immediate sense of what time it is and how close we are to the next hour.
Look at it this way. All methods of visualizing time are abstractions of time itself. Whichever way we first learn to read the time is how we process it in our heads and how we most easily tell it. This is the reason that sayings such as "a quarter past" have fallen out of favor with younger generations; they simply visualize time in a different way in their heads.
Wow, you have opened my eyes. I was born in 2000, all clocks in the house were digital. The first time I saw an analogue clock I was years into my schooling. I never understood why people preferred analogue. I interpreted analogue as you said I would: as a really round-about way to express a numeric value.
After your explanation, I understand it now. While I don't automatically see it myself, I completely understand what you see. It does tempt me to put an analogue clock by my desk next to my digital one to see if I can intuit it how you do.
I will say, possibly similarly, that certain numbers on a digital clock give me distinct "feelings" of closeness to the hour. Particularly the numbers in the 40s and 50s, I can see them without properly reading them and they make me feel like it's really close to the hour. If I look at my digital watch and it's 3:46, I'll feel like it's very close to 4 and I've got a pretty good idea of how much time I have without doing the subtraction. But if someone were to then ask me what time it was, I would have to look at my watch again because I didn't actually read it the first time. It's not like I only read the first number, I didn't read any of the numbers. I just kinda looked at the shape of the numbers.
I ran with digital time up until school, where all the clocks were analogue. once that was comfortable I went to an analogue watch. the real advantage is your not thinking in units of numbers, but units of time. your halfway there, your thinking in "its a short while to 4" not 3:46. its shape recognition rather than parsing the numbers. for me, the term 15 minutes is a 90 degree sweep, rather than 900 seconds. If im asked the time, I'll quote it as "quarter to 4" rather than 3:46 or "half Five" for 5:27. unless I know they are counting the minutes.
Give it a go, there are plenty of cool clocks out there.
I grew up with digital time as well and a couple years ago switched all my smart screens to analogue.. solely because I found ones with the second hand movement I liked. But after a while I developed a sense of time in relation to a circle, in radians, and I really don’t want to go back. If I’m writing down the current time it’s a PITA to turn analogue into written, I’ll look at my phone for that or smth. But for clocks around the house, having the association of an L shape, an I shape, etc of the hands to times, it does develop and it’s very interesting. My preference has totally shifted in the last few years.
I was born in the late 60s but I think I am with you. I don't do maths in my head to compare two times I just sort of know but the difference is I do this equally with analogue and digital. I guess that I just was brought up with both side-by-side so I learnt to visualise using both.
Same. I think. The numbers give me a sense of how much time I have left, but I don't actually remember the numbers. It's weird.
@@arjovenzia So basically analog is less precise, which is precisely why digital exists?
Who'd have guessed that?
Basically, Analog is the Imperial system of time.
Gotcha.
Analog isn't accurate to the second, digital is.
Analog is ONLY usable in practicality, digital is both practically and objectively useful for precise and imprecise measurement of time.
This is ALL I took from this, people who read time based on their close approximation think they read time more accurately than people who read the most accurate portrayal of any given moment.
1:27 is objectively NOT half past 1, but because it looks close enough, that's what you would report.
Imagine doing that, but every day, without adjusting for the drift.
You'd be hours and hours out of time by the next day.
The entire reason analog is dying is because it is objectively not as accurate.
The seconds hand on ANY watch doesn't ACTUALLY match the number of seconds that has elapsed in a given moment, it's an indicator for when the next hand up will pass the line next it.
The seconds hand STOPS, exactly where you stopped it, to adjust your watch, right? That's already proof enough your watch is far less accurate than mine is.
Even from factory settings, where the most common dial face is mapped to the vibrations of a quartz crystal, the seconds hand stops in place when you set the time; not only this, but the dial on quartz analog watches is still controlled in an analog manner, the tick rate is the only accurate part, any other part of an analog watch is an extreme point if failure
I’m one of those people with no preference. They are both equally easy to read and for my brain to interpret. I do agree looking at an analog clock reading 9:46 definitely gives you a clear impression about 1/4 of an hour is left… but my brain can infer identical information from the digital clock. I also have no preference for analog or digital speedometers although for a tachometer, I prefer analog. (Or a representation of an analog graph by a digital display) You can see the needle sweeping and heading towards redline a bit more quickly as the exact number it’s reading isn’t really important, just how close to redline you are.) The progress bar metaphor really works for techometers.
Well hello there!
Agreed.
While with clocks I like both analogue and digital (and have no issue interpreting the time on either equally fast), when it comes to a speedometer I vastly prefer digital. With a digital speedo, I just get the absolute number instantly, which I can compare to the current speed limit sign that I have memorized in my head. Whereas with an analog speedometet, I have to check "okay, the needle is between this number and this number, and that means I am driving that fast." Wich takes my attention off the road for several seconds longer. I suppose if the roadsigns were not showing numbers but instead an analogue dial telling you how fast you are allowed, it would be the opposite, as I then yould just compare the picture with the analogue speedometer. Interesting how different brains can work.
Do you prefer 12hr digital or 24hr digital tho? One has it hours represented twice, the other has each hour uniquely represented hence my preference for 24hr digital.
I prefer digital, probably because i tend to deal with short amounts of time a lot. And i find it easier to see 3 minutes on digital vs analog.
Wow. I just found this video and wish I'd found it when it was still new. It definitely stirred some thoughts for me. Very good video!
I'm old enough to have learned to tell time on analog clocks myself. I caught on to your point quite early just from seeing the different clocks visually next to each other. The difference seemed quite evident when they were side-by-side. To me, your choice of comparing the analog clock to a "progress bar" made sense, but it's perhaps a little too "modern" for me. It worked, but wasn't the most intuitive imagery to pop into my head.
What did immediately come to mind for me, and what I felt helped me see your point about how you can just glace at an analog clock and know the time, without worrying about the numbers: a pie chart. Perhaps it seems less intuitive to you as it doesn't usually "move" or "progress," but in my mind, just as a pie chart might be used in a presentation to quickly show proportions rather than trying to impart those with a list of numbers, so the analog clock quickly shows you the amount of the hour past/remaining without having to consider specific numbers in your head. It presents that same sort of intuitive visual tool.
Great comparison.
This makes perfect sense, I totally agree with your "progress bar" analogy. That's exactly how I grew up interpreting time, and now with a digital watch and time in the corner of the PC screen, I'm less intuitively aware of the *passage of time*
Awesome video, thanks heaps!
Your “weird class times” story is EXACTLY what I thought about when you started explaining preference for analog clocks. I’ve never really sat down and thought about it.
The progress bar analogy is perfect!!
Analog clocks are great in that you can see the approximate time or the exact time, depending on your needs at the moment.
So, the clocks start and end the video showing the same time?
Yes
This concept is so obvious once you think about it. I've watched lots of videos giving me insights about things, but this one blew my mind. It makes so much sense. I'm almost equally comfortable with both analogue and digital clocks, but since very young age I'm using digital watches more. And since my classes also started and ended in weird times I'd do the math how much time is left all the time. Maybe that also explains why math was kinda easy for me. I'd do this kind of calculations hundreds of times each day for years.
"The minute hand is like a progress bar"
YES! I've never been able to put into words why I prefer analog clocks until you said that
That actually helps me read an analog clock a lot better. Thank you!.
This made me realize why I never picked up using language like "a quarter to" or "half past", and that I always had to translate those kinds of phrases into numbers to fully contextualize them (having grown up primarily reading time digitally)
I always associated "quarter" with the number 25, not 15, so that was a whole other layer of translating... This is really interesting to think about, thank you for bringing this up
Yeah, I've never liked those expressions either, probably because I prefer digital clocks.
25 is only a quarter of 100. One quarter of any other number is not. It seems like your association is flawed.
@@SineN0mine3 15 is a quarter of 60 and a quarter of the circle. That's why it works - in two different ways.
@@SineN0mine3 quarters are 25 cents. I assume that's where the association comes from
I see how it can be confusing. In Polish we have separate terms for a quarter meaning "¼ of any value" and a quarter meaning "15 minutes".
Pieces of possibly useful insight..my emotional relationship with 3:39 is deeply different from 3:50. Research has been done on how we understand hard numbers in subjective ways, but I’ve only seen it in terms of pricing. Second, what if you mixed the ideas and had actual progress bars. Top bar is the day. Bottom bar is the hour. Like, how would you design a progress bar clock that doesn’t use the slightly less intuitive radial design.
It really is quite strange, I feel like 3:39 and 3:50 are not different, at least not as seeing those times in their analog forum. It seems that it really differs from person to person which is quite intriguing.
Also, this is all made worse by the fact that time isn’t decimal. Imagine if the minute hand was between 5 and 6 when the time was between 50 and 60!!
You should do a survey and ask people clock questions.
Two progress bars stacked with ticks and in different colors
Progress bars don't have that same symmetry, though. The progress bar "completes" at the end of the hour, but the minute hand just keeps on moving like normal. The only notable thing is that it went past the top of the clock. So it likely wouldn't help with times that cross the hour as much.
I never understood why I like analog clocks, but thank you for putting it into words
You made me realize when I look at digital, an image of a clock comes up in my mind.
In fact I have a quirk where in my head I imagine months of the year as a circular clock.
When we were teaching my nephew (now in his 30s) to tell time way back when, his mom got him a "regular" watch. bold hands and simple numerals. And several of her friends thought that was making learning to tell time harder and suggested a digital watch would be better for the nephew. Mom's thinking was that a digital would show "the" time but would not effectively show the *passage* of time and would not help the nephew understand quickly if he was about to be late or if he had plenty of time still to do something. She(my sister) thought that understanding time as more than just a number was important. I had not thought about it this way before she and I talked about it and, yeah, I think she was right.
In Europe there’s a man in a glass coffin, under a clock. It shows the true passage of time (decay & disintegration).
I’m in my 30s as well, I always hated analog clocks, have used digital clocks from the beginning and developed the same “feeling” that everyone else here describes for reading analog clocks. I see that as an advantage. To me, analog clocks are a relict from the past.
I agree
In the military (at least back in the 90's) ALL the Special Forces guys and gals had analog watches... Some were big old-school pocket watches, and some "regular" wrist watches... The seniors almost always had a wind-up...
They were trained that if you point the hour-hand toward the sun, (In the Northern Hemisphere) "Due South" was directly between the hour-hand and 12 o'clock (or 1 o'clock on Daylight Savings Time)... In the Southern Hemisphere, it worked the same, except it found "Due North", because the earth is ROUND...
SO they almost NEVER used a compass, preferring instead to rely on their skills and a time-piece nobody would think twice about leaving with them... In case of hold up or capture... AND as they told me, "Wind-ups never have dead batteries... just stupid owners."
They might be a relic, but they're no less useful... AND I never bother keeping a compass around for camping or hiking either... AND I rarely bother myself with a cell phone that's going to take up space, be delicate, and probably not get a signal (in half the places I go camping) anyway...
Now... Obviously, there are other tricks to navigation... BUT for "quick and easy" and a clever "trick" to screw with people's heads, you can't beat an analog clock navigating you out of "the middle of nowhere squared" while everyone else is concerned that you've lost what mind you had... ;o)
@@HuskyNET indeed, I don't see fractions and analog clocks easily and if someone tells me an apointment is 5 minutes before half- 4 ( in dutch), I need to prosess it to be 1525. Its completely unambiguous and easy to understand
Dude, I’m the same way!! When I see “3:45” on a digital clock, I visualize in my head an analog clock to see the hands at 3:45 to tell time because the digital numbers don’t have a frame of reference for me. I love the “progress bar” analogy. All of my watches are always analog clocks for this reason. Great video!
This is so interesting to me. I grew up basically only with digital and if I see 3:45 it just automatically clicks that we are 3/4 of the way through the hour.
Yep, same here. But I'm also an old millennial.
One look at an analog clock and I instantly know what time it is.
Even though I grew up with analog and digital clocks, I'm always visualizing an analog clock when I look at a digital clock.
Holy cow, this video made me realize I do the same thing. Without thinking about it, I've been automatically converting digital clock readouts into analog in my head.
Really interesting, I don't follow honestly. Time is time to me, 3:45 is 3:45. I look at a clock, see the time and that's it. Sure, with analog I'll think stuff like "oh it's about 3:40", and not focus on the exact minute much. But it still works in the exact same way be it a dial or LCD. The idea of not being able to understand time just by looking at a clock seems bizarre personally.
I’m amazed by these comments here. For me it’s the other way round, I need to convert analog clocks into digital to see that “time axis” in my head which functions as that progress bar to me. @Tayler Robinson, we seem to be in the minority here, let’s unite! 😂
Very good points. I never thought about it, but I totally agree. The analog is a visual representation of the numbers and is quicker to interpret.
I would say it's the same with my car's speedometer - I have a digital readout, but come to think of it, I usually just glance at the needle because I know where I want to be on the analog gauge.
What would make the analog clocks even more special in this regard is if we got used to 24 hour clocks. Just like the progression from the minute hand, in a 24 hour clock the hour hand is at the top at midnight and it's pointing straight down at midday. And dawn and dusk are perfectly horizontal 6's. If the hand is on the right side, it's the morning, and if it's on the left side, it's the after noon. If we got used to it for a long time, we'll get to a point where just a small glimpse of the clock and we'll know exactly which time of day it is. Gone will be the times when you wake up and look at the clock and wonder whether it's the morning or the evening.
I also read analogue clocks this way: when I read an analogue clock I always feel like I know *"where"* I am in time, so to speak, almost literally as a "location" of the hands on the dial; whereas a digital clock just feels like it's just telling me strictly *what* the time is. I can gauge the same knowledge from a digital clock, but with analogue it just feels like it's all right there. I feel grounded knowing I can physically see things like how long I have until a certain important time. Whereas for a digital clock, I find I tend to compulsively keep checking it incessantly like I have to keep checking and making sure how much time I have left, or how much time has actually passed since I last checked.
Yes, to me it's the "feel" of time that I get from a simple glance at an analogue clock. And it's not just where in the hour I am (although it absolutely is that) but it is also where in the day I am.
A big chunk of my awake day is right there at a glance without my thoughts having to divert in order to calculate.
I think the "progress bar" is a reasonable analogy.
It's like a map verses coordinates
Whereas I don't read analogue clocks as a general rule so I have to orient myself before I can gain formation from it. If you want to talk about the where, it's like a map. If it's the map you look at every day in your home city you can look at the map and get a sense the the about location of a pin in real space (but in this case real time) very quickly. You know where to look and what features to look for to gain a sense of whats happening.
I can read an analogue clock easily enough but I have to take a moment to go "thats the big hand thats the small hand there is 3 and 6 ok I know where everything is now whats the time?" So it takes me time to read the time.
On a digital clock I am familiar with the map so to speak. I can get all the info I need in a split second even when the numbers are not laid out in a normal pattern. And it takes me not a split second longer if its a 24 hour clock either.
It's just familiarity and practice. Knowing where the information is, what to look at first etc. (i think i always look at the general shape of the numbers first then the second digit of the hours and then the first of the minutes.)
And I should point out when I see 3:37 what I think is 20 min to 4. It's just an automatic rounding to the or previous hour. Because thats what you check the time for yeah? To see how long you have till....whatever. Even end of the day. Or how much longer you have been at something than you thought.
It's more akin to a language than just a mere familiarity with an analogue vs digital device.
Some language phrases convey a feeling that does not have a suitable translation in another language... the words translate but not their combined meaning
I can read analogue or digital clocks well enough to *think* in either, but there is no digital equivalent to the entire phrase of information contained in one quick glance at the analogue clockface.
A quick glance at either tells me what time it is, but only the analogue gives me the complete graphical interpretation of *when* I am from my unique perspective.
Dagnabbit... it seems nearly impossible to convey this.
@@AlleyKatt For me its the opposite. One glance at a digital clock and I immediately place myself into the an incrimental alotment of time within 24 hours.
It about association. The map analogy was there for a reason. You see the clock and you dont see numbers you see a marker that associates you with a time of day. Your mind has tied that image with a million expected events that associate with that time period. In the same way you can look at a map you are very familiar with and tie a location or a path with a million spacially related data points. You see the positions of the hands at 6 o'clock and you get a sense of how much day is left, what food you might normally eat, what the sun is likely to be doing what the temperature or what habits you normally do at that time or in the next few hours.
You associate the image with a place in your day.
And again. I don't. I get that association with digital clocks. I see 17:23 and immediately my mind goes to walking the dog and going shopping. I know when I am in time.
I remember reading a short story by Asimov regarding a murder mystery, in which a key point was a witness saying he saw someone go by at “half past four” while another witness said something happened at “shortly before five.” The first witness, accustomed to analog clocks, was reading a digital clock. Being more accustomed to seeing digits associated with MONEY than with TIME, that witness mentally translated “4:50” into “four and a half” or “half past four.” The second witness HAD been looking at an analog clock reading “hour hand almost five, minute hand on 10,” thus “ten minutes to five” or “almost five.”
Spoiler Alert! 😉
Toonami used to shows their broadcast schedule using x.5 to meant x:30.
If I'm remembering the same story, there was a plot point that one of the suspects claimed to be a train conductor, but when asked the time, he replied something like "ten minutes of 3 O'Clock". However, a real train man would always use exact times as displayed digitally (e.g. 2:51). Therefore, this was not a real conductor and was lying.
Doesn't really work anymore, because it seems less common to estimate the time in general, plus most modern stories have women characters in them.
@@serifhim I like your story better, but it wasn’t the same. The Asimov story had to do with the time that a suspect in a motel room murder had been seen in the motel lobby. Most likely two authors used the same McGuffin to build two different stories independently.
Saw something similar with someone complaining about a parking meter, saying something like "I paid for a quarter of an hour, but the meter charged me after 15 minutes instead of 25!"
I feel that confusions like these are why we should either change time or change money to roll over at the same number.
I grew up with digital clocks, I can clearly remember learning how to read digital clocks before analog clocks.
In my head, I separate an hour into quadrants between 15, 30, 45 and 60 minutes. When I glance at digital time, I know in which quadrant current time is and approximately what edge of a quadrant it is closer to. If I need exact time to an hour, I just do a subtraction within first half or subtraction within second half.
When I look at an analog clock, I am only able to get approximate time from it. Sure, it's a lot easier to separate into quadrants, but as soon as I need to get exact time, I need to think back to the fact that a 7 is 35 minutes, and 8 is 40 minutes, after which I have to count the amount of notches from the 7 and finally understand that it actually shows 37 minutes.
Very interestimg thought worm, very good video Alec
I know exactly what you mean. Hit the nail on the head for me. Thank you for giving it your time to explain.
For the “it displays time with how it looks” the best way to explain it (to me) is to say a minimal clock with no numbers or notches is just as easy to read as a clock that does have those, as you’re actually reading the angles of the hands relative to vertical, and not what number they point to
Yup, this. It's about the shape of the thing. An illiterate person can still understand a pie chart.
Agreed. I dont really need to “know” the time, I just need to “feel” it
Some just have 3 6 and 9.
We even have one at home with pictures of birds instead of actual numbers.
So, yeah.
It's a well-known psychology concept. Indicators are faster to parse than words/numbers. Words/numbers need to be processed, translated into meaning. Whereas Indexes/Indicators/Pictorials are, usually, immediately understood. Hence progress bars are faster to parse than a xx%, hence analog clocks are faster to parse than xx:xx AM/PM. Wiki to get people started: Picture superiority effect
Wow, that’s very interesting. I probably wouldn’t be able to easily read a analog clock without numbers. I would have to estimate where the numbers should be, then read the time and convert them into digital numbers to get a feeling for the current time. But that explains why other people can be so fast reading analog clocks. I can’t. But by looking at a digital clock I immediately imagine a “time axis” with marks for every hour and have an exact feeling of where we are at on that axis.
Take a look at the differences between "Internal Monologue" and "Abstract Thought". That helps explain the difference between working out the time in your head from looking at the clock vice just knowing the time from looking at the clock. I think that's what you were trying to explain in that section of the video.
This is what I thought about as well. Analogue clocks give me a good "sense" of the time, but as someone with a strong internal monologue, I always find myself taking the extra step to decipher the literal numerical value even when it's not necessary, only so that I can "say" the time in my head. It's kind of annoying because I know I don't have to take that step to have a passable appreciation of the general time and the added accuracy of assigning the numerals doesn't add a lot on it's own, but verbalization is just so inherent to most of my processing. In general, the verbalization of numerals is definitely more helpful when trying to communicate the time to someone else. The "time as shape/angle" or "time as area" is such an inherently personal experience that can't be easily transmitted, which is what I think he was running up against in this video.
Yeah, he pretty much ran into the concrete wall that is natural based versus manmade. The analog clock is based loosely on the Sundial but with the new units stuck around it. Digitial is wholely manmade and does related in any way to the rotation of the sun and moon even if it tries to replicate it. Or something to that effect. And mental gymnastics as well.
This is an interesting topic, as talking to people about how they think, it becomes clear that there is a diversity in the way people think.
Some have a strong emphasis on the internal monologue, some form ideas as pictures rather than words, others think in a more abstract fashion, or use a combination of all three. Asking the question is interesting, as it is not something many have considered, and it take a little while before they can analysis how they think. The formation of thoughts must be time dependent, as is the processing of the external environment, and the formation of memories. This impinges on the nature of our internal clock and how thoughts and memories are internally time stamped. Is our perception of reality really analogue, or is it really sampled and quantised.
What does this say about intelligence, genius, or even the more pedestrian suitability for a job, career, or profession.
@@moslaf I totally get the annoying part. I absolutely have to verbalize (sometimes aloud) everything conceptual to understand it - otherwise I completely miss it - can't even commit it to memory. But something natural and tangible, anything I sensed, I can just evoke in my mind at will, without any verbal component to it. It's weird, but seems like the best of both worlds. Weirder still, it kinda turns off when I'm inebriated or absolutely sleep deprived. Makes me think those who don't have to do that are simply not paying attention to anything, but then what of people who don't have mental images and senses?
That bit in the beginning about digital feeling harder to conceptualize, I totally agree with you. At this point in my life, I've been exposed to both pretty regularly, when I see a digital time, my mind automatically conjures a picture of an analog clock at the correct hour and minute, and my mind then properly "understands" the time. It's kinda trippy.
if i were to hazard a guess as i'm not deaf or an expert, it might be similar to how deaf people process sign language (analog clock) vs lip reading (digital clock) or perhaps text as well. sign language is natural and intuitive (all babies do it), and can form an inner voice. on the other hand lip reading needs translation as it's too abstract and incapable of forming an inner voice, which is why deaf people who only ever learned to lip read may have cognitive development issues (iirc), which is where the negative connotation of "dumb" comes from.
A clock with a 24-hour dial has a calming effect on my scheduling.
It's interesting because when the clocks read 3:41 I would look at the analog clocks and think "there's 20 minutes left in the hour" but if I read the digital one it gets rounded to 45 and I think "there's 15 minutes left in the hour". It's weird how the sub-parts of an hour I'm comfortable rounding to is different depending on the format.
I was thinking this exact same thing. some of the older members of my family will say "its 25 to 4", without thinking twice, and that takes me time to process. when I am asked what time it is I will say "3 35". Its odd how I have never put that much thought into this before. I much prefer digital clocks, they make more sense to me, and I naturally process that into my head as to how much time I have left until i need to do stuff. It might be a generational thing, with the advent of smartphones, and computers, where the time is most easily displayed as a text format, you dont see analogue clocks as often as digital ones. Its to this extent that I rarely ever use a watch, and just pull out my phone to check the time.
@@henmasman I agree with this. If anything my brain sees it as an ever moving faction, so of course it likes halves and quarters with that thought process
Would there be any benefits to use an analog clock? I use mainly the digital and if I am going somewhere I see the magnitude of time left to get ready "I have 10 minutes to get ready" and sometimes that estimation doesnt work. But with analog maybe you dont care so much with the number, only care about how close is to the desired position that is supposed to be, making it more urgent, so would be on time more often? ¿. The thought process would be "I have 10 minutes left, I have time left" vs "the clock hands are very close where they are supposed to be, I better hurry up".
@@10dige I'm more used to analog watches, so I'm actually quicker at determining how much time I've left with an analog watch. I have to quickly calculate it with a digital clock, but can tell it with just a quick glance from an analog clock. And I know that might sound like weird bragging, but I can tell the time from an analog clock down to a minute with just one glace. I couldn't put it into words (that would require a second or two of thinking), but for my own brain, one glance is enough to know how much time I have left.
This man is seriously emotionally invested in one particular technological representation of the concept of time and its passage... And I think it's beautiful.
You're bang on. Thanks for validating my own experience. Analog clogs give you a visual of where you are in relation to, say, your next appointment... At glance I know whether to rush or chill. With digital, I don't get a sense of where I am in relation to my next task, and tend to run late.
This way of considering time-as a space, in which we can move and have a position-is why it works quite well to have an analog clock that has _no_ numbers written on it (or even not any marks to divide the circle into quarters or twelfths or sixtieths), whereas a digital clock without digits would be useless.
I know there are jokes about psychologist & other professionals callously ending appointments exactly at the 50 minute mark, but as a therapist in training, managing time in sessions was really hard and I'd often go right up against the hour, which meant I fell behind on notes and went into my next appointments feeling rushed and flustered. It got so much easier after I bought a small travel analog clock that I put on the side table easily in my line of vision. At a glance, I could know and also feel how much time I had left. My time management improved appreciably.
I have to convert analog clocks to a digital clock and then I can understand time. It makes sense to me that someone would have to do the reverse if they grew up with analog. I think it's how we've developed our time literacy in a similar way to how when we read words, we read them by chunking the whole symbol.
There must be some study out there where a neurologist has hooked people up and seen what parts of the brain are used to read clocks.
I think it has more to do with types of intelligence/skills and which one is more natural to you (though upbringing does affect that, of course, merely reading a clock of whatever kind is itself a skill that can be practiced and generate familiarity after all). I say that because I grew up with analog clocks, digital being introduced/getting more common in my life a wee bit later. Still prefer the digital a bit more (though analog is usually just fine). Unsurprisingly, I am more of an analytical intelligence person than a spatial intelligence one.
Watched this some time ago, now I am here again, and now I understand the concept you are trying to explain, which I didn't get the first time.
I will give analog clocks/watches another chance b/c of this, as I always had problems contextualizing time based on an analog clock and generally rely on digital ones rn. That also comes with "difficulties" of said time calculations and having a feel for time, usually leading to me being late.
So yeah, you opened my eyes for visualizing time (somewhat, have to try if it works out)...
I believe this is the first video of yours that I watch in which I need to make an effort to understand what you are saying, and it is fascinating
I've never really thought much of it, but seeing the concept of the circle and realisign how you can understand time conceptually through the pointers position made me wish to had the same ability. I have ADHD and keeping notion of time is somewhat difficult, I think this could help me in a myriad of ways
it's definitely helpful. I also have ADHD and this is the way I process and read clocks. as described in the video, it's like a progress bar. I find it faster to read because my eyes only need to pick up the shape with a short glance, instead of gathering all the numbers. like the progress bar of a TH-cam video, but absolute in scale, so the length consistantly mean the same amount of time.
yeah, fellow ADHD person here, the circular clock makes a noticeable difference in my ability to keep time. especially where hours are concerned! hours on a digital-format clock just, float in nowhere land. there's no real difference noted in my head until the hours go from single digits to double, at which point i'm left in the urgency of, "it's 10:00 pm already? what have i done all day!"
that's an awful way to be living in time, you know? feels bad. like you're always struggling to catch up!
shape gives time meaning; digital-format clocks reduce time into a meaningless set of squares. heck, half the time when i look at time in a digital format, i have to glance back at it two or three times because the numbers dropped so immediately out of my cognition that i may as well have not looked at them at all!
@@revelle8605 I have the same problem of having to look at a clock two or three times, I am trying to switch to analog clocks but it has been very hard, specially having so much digital clocks already at disposal, the mi fit smartband being the worst offender 😅
I feel the same. This is why swimming pool pace clocks are still analog: just two or four hands rotating, allowing you to check how many seconds you spent or counting down rest time until the next rep.
Really interesting. I grew up with digital clocks. To this day in my late 30s I have to force myself to interpret an analog clock. Watching your video makes me realize that I have a vague mental picture of an hour in my mind, and seeing the time on a digital display tells me where in that pattern we are. And it is not shaped like a circle in my mind. Different minutes are kind of located on a different spot in my mental picture. Terms like top of the hour and bottom of the hour have always been very confusing to me although I understand it's referring to an analog clock. Anyway, the most fascinating thing is the idea that everyone conceptualizes time, but not in the same way.
Absolutely the same for me. At some point in time (haha) I switched from analog to digital clocks. Somewhen in my early teens. This means when I read "4:20" I feel like I have a concept of how much of an hour is past an how much is left. Even though I'm perfectly able to read the analog clock and completely understand the concept and even remember applying it, I most of the time have to convert the analog clock's readout into its digital counterpart to get to a concept of how much time is passed in the hour.
Also, the representation kind of breaks in my mind if the time "the class takes" is longer than an hour.
I'm with you. Terms like "top of the hour" and "quarter of" mean nothing to me. I know the precision of 3:47. It means we have slightly less than 15 minutes until 4, 15 minutes being my most typical block of time.
In my early 30's also but grew up with analog clocks in school. The way he describes the minute hand as a progress bar makes perfect sense to me.
I grew up with digital, 24h, second precision clocks, and I conceptualize time differently on different scales. Seconds in a minute are cyclical, minutes combine with hours to form 24-hour day-cycles. This last part makes my understanding of time incompatible with analog clocks without a translation step.
Days and months combine into year-cycles.
Just like how it's said that the imperial measurement system is a hodgepodge of different systems used in different scenarios, the same goes for my interpretation of time. If I separate seconds from minutes, or minutes from their hour, they usually turn into an intuitive, uncounted impression of the amount of time that passes, and similarly if you talk about days without mentioning their corresponding month, I interpret them based on weeks, or day-cycles, if it's only a few.
Digital clocks combine all time systems into 1 number, the number of milliseconds since 1970-01-01-00:00:00.0000 UTC. But because we generally talk about time in seconds, hours, days, weeks, months and years, all of those have established systems of their own to be used in my head.
Interestingly, 12:00 -> 12:30 -> 13:00 feels more like a progress bar to me than 🕛 -> 🕧 -> 🕐. Maybe that's a good indication of whether someone is used more to digital or analog clocks?
Time in minutes (0 - 60) is intuitively similar to percentage (0 - 100) for me.
I never thought about this before and TH-cam randomly stumbled me into this video, and I completely jive with you here and it blows me away too. Seeing it as a progress bar is exactly what i do, without being consciously aware of it. When I look at a digital clock I convert it into the slice of the hour in my head.
"THESE NUMBERS are AN ABSTRACTION of THAT MOVEMENT." One of the best lines!
I've always wondered why I prefer analog clocks despite it taking more "work" to figure out what specific time it is indicating. It's all so clear now -- it's a progress dial! Most of the time I don't need to know what specific time it is, so just a quick glance will do. Such a simple yet profound discovery you've made!
This video was pretty eye opening for two reasons:
1 - Now that you've drawn my awareness to how you can read analog clocks at a glance, I've forced myself to stop 'reading' them. Instead, when I now look at the grandfather clock in my home, I glance at the clock, force myself to look away, and ask myself what time it is... despite preferring digital clocks, I realize that I'm actually perfectly capable of quickly and accurately reading an analog clock without thinking about it at all. I've just been, like, forcing myself to stare and 'translate' to digital time.
2 - I've been taking for granted how I just understand that 15 = 1/4, 20 = 1/3, etc. etc. I've had very little difficulty with both 12 hour digital clocks and military time, but always been confused by other folk's trouble parsing those numbers at a glance. Like you said with analog, I don't really find I need to 'decrypt' a digital clock. I just kind of passively round the minutes to the nearest fraction of an hour, and combine that with the hour to know the time.
Another strange behavior I have, somewhat related, is when someone asks me what time it is, and if I look at a digital clock, I give weird answers.
Sometimes, for example, I've looked at "03:48" and said "twelve of four." Some folks don't react, other's look at me like I'm a crazy person. haha
Generally, I've found most people fall into saying "quarter of four" or "three forty-eight"... I'm not sure where I picked my hybridizing them like that.
idk if this a regional difference but I've more commonly heard quarter TO four if it's before the hour
@@user.d.maybe it's meant as 48 being 12×4? so they could be doing 4 twelve minute segments, each of which is ⅕ an hour
@@Anklejbiter quarter of four shows they meant remaining time to four (they are saying people normally round off the time).
Using of instead of to is strange to me too. I would like to know where it’s from
certified 3 before half past 9 moment
@coolcax99 oh, you're right. yeah that's weird. Hopefully I get notified if they reply
This reminded me of a video I watched this morning about a person with adhd not having a concept of what, "you have 5 minutes to get ready" ment but hearing you have 300 seconds before we leave, helped her realize that there is no time for a shower.
this guy nailed it. I have an analog kitchen clock for 'old times sake' but in reality- when I want to know where I am in my day- i look at the kitchen clock... even though I got my phone, my computer, the digital clock on the microwave- the kitchen clock is the 'goto' without even thinking about it and until I watched this video- without even realizing it.
I’ve been trying to explain this to others and everyone makes me feel like I’m crazy. The progress bar analogy is perfect and I’ll be using that
Me too!
i used to compare the numbers on a clock to page numbers in a book. the progress is easier to see if you just ignore the numbers.
He also articulates this in a way I have a hard time doing in conversation.
Pie chart.
Dude, 4 minutes in and I had gone from thinking you were crazy to having my mind blown. I know EXACTLY what you mean by seeing the digital version as more of a "fact" whereas the analog version is actually seeing what time looks like as it progresses into the future.
Dude, do you need help putting on a shirt?
If he was a woman, I bet you wouldn’t mind the shirtless photo
@@0LoneTech Lmao! 🤣 Why? Are you offering? Nah, I'm messing with you. I appreciate the offer but I have a wife. 👍🏻
You were so close to nailing this. Please consider making this a main channel video with 2 additions: 1) the abstraction between 3:45 and 'quarter to four'. In the UK saying 'half past two' or 'quarter past six' is still the norm, and IS that visual time telling you we're trying to describe. 2) being able to tell time on an analogue clock face with no numerals, just batons or pips, you can still know the time with needing the numbers. I learned to tell time with a roman numeral analogue watch my father bought me when I was 6. Infuriating yet valuable lesson.
Great video!!! I am from the 50's and collect clocks and watches. The dial and hands represents the movement of the Sun in a sundial, we use them since the Middle ages for a reason. They represents Nature. Cheers Patagonia Argentina
Numbers are my native time language. Like you said, I usually "translate" analogue back to digital, which takes a bit more work for me. I never really thought about just being comfortable with a less specific analogue reading but it makes so much sense.
Think of it as geometry Vs arithmetic. Same thing, different benefits to each.
Same, I never really thought about using a clock to get anything other than the exact time (even though I usually round it to the nearest 15 minute mark).
Essentially, with analog clocks, I “feel” the time, giving me more sense of how much time I have. Digital clocks just lets me “know” the time without fully understanding how much time I have
The main reason to "know" the time is to communicate it to others. If you are not trying communicate it, it's much easier to "feel" the time. When people struggle with analog clocks, it's usually because someone asked them what time it is.
Maybe some people already talked about this, but hey, what's one more.
As someone who didn't grow up with English as a first language and with analog clocks, the fact that the hour hand moves closer to the next hour as time progresses is incredibly intuitive and visually helpful. I've been living in the US for almost a decade now and did notice that people don't tend to refer to the minutes till next hour at all.
For example, at 3:50, the hour hand will be almost on top of the 4, which in my opinion, and perception of time, is the most useful indication. It is more 10 min till 4 than 50 min after 3. The fact that it's almost hour 4 is way more important to me so the hand already almost indicating 4 matches with my internal perception of the time.
you did a very good job at explaing it. i have always seen time as numbers and found analog clocks annoying, as i would always try to deciper them into numbers. but you did an amazing job at explaing it visually. really opened my eyes to how other people percieve time
I've never realized until now but every time I read a digital clock I unconsciously visualize in my head an analog clock and read the time from this. On the other side if I drive a car without a digital speedometer I feel a bit unnerved. There's definitely something in the way I learned to tell the time they is inherently analog. You should definitely do more videos of this kind.
Same here with the digital to analog conversion.
I was thinking about this while watching the video and found the same thing. I’d never even thought about how I think about clocks.
I do the same thing when I read a digital clock
Oh I do that too but I trust digital speedos ever so slightly more because my mothers Golf changes the scaling after 50km/h but my Punto 188 doesn't do that (luckily) so whenever I drive my mothers Golf I just read the digital speedo... Much easier than explaining to a cop that I didn't properly read the speedometer because I assumed the indices had the same meaning across the scale
For me, when I look at the numbers of a digital clock, that is itself an intuitive progress bar to the next hour. I don't have to think about it or mentally visualize it a different way. I'm just so used to thinking with numbers, that the numbers have become themselves an immediate visual aid for the progression of time from the last hour to the next one. I can look at X:43 and immediately feel that means there's 17 minutes until the next hour, that it's about 28% left of the hour, and what that span of time actually feels like.
Same, I imagine if we suddenly introduced decimal time (100 minutes in an hour), I'd completely lose track and would have to re-learn all that. But as long as the range is 1-60 I can intuitively tell what it means in terms of 'progress'. But it's definitely not as intuitive as an actual progress indicator in an analogue clock, it just needs a long learning period, and today I learned it never happens for some.
@@moralapostel If decimal time swept the globe, I imagine Alec and other analog clock-users would feel like time is moving much slower, whereas people used to digital clocks would be completely lost.
See whenever I think about percentages in any context I immediately visualize a pie chart in my head. Otherwise the number doesn't have much significance to me. It's like I need to relate the precentage to the whole to actually get a feel for the quanity. Analog clocks are basically pie charts already so they let me skip a few steps cognatively.
I posit that it's faster to learn intuition for an analog clock, since it's already an abstract concept, whereas a digital clock requires really learning that 60 and 0 are the same thing. It's also like, the only area where we use modulo arithmetic, but dials, gauges, and clocks all use the same abstraction, so that conceptual understanding is portable and reinforceable in other contexts.
Yeah, it's not that I don't visualize time, I just don't visualize it radially. I see it more like filling a beaker and then moving on to the next one. It's definitely intuitive for me in a way that analog never was. And I was introduced to analog time first! I never had a firm, orienting sense of time until I started using digital more. But that was always at home, in school I always had to sit and think about it for a moment, I thought everyone did. And yes, it's definitely "knowing what that span of time actually feels like", I get that with digital, but not really with analog. Meanwhile others are the opposite. This is so cool.
The face of an analog timekeeping device represents an entire day, and your position in time within that day, at a glance.
You see the clock as a pie chart. I also grew up watching the minute hand as a "loading bar" to my next class. I'm fully digital now but now you've got me rethinking things. Thank you!
Analogue clocks always feel like a approximation of the time for me, despite them still showing the correct time.
Both are fine for me but I favour digital.
I also do a lot of computer programming so I'm heavily conditioned to process and use digital time.
I can equate to this as well, as well as personally working with actual numbers more natively than images. I also grew up being pretty broke so we always had cheaper analog clocks where toward the end of the hour, the hour hand would actually be partway inside the next hour (the hour after where it should display) and on top of the initial number conversion, there’s an extra little error correction step too that I grew up with that I do by habit to not be a full hour off. When I’m tired I’ll quite often mistake it being an hour removed from actual time either way due to this error correction step. Numbers make it a bit less error prone in that regard even if in its own way the time was always accurately displayed with analog (one input equals one output, if offset required, still consistent metric)
That is interesting because I would think the opposite, (at least for digital time without a seconds display). Digital time is less accurate because it only moves every minute, so you have no idea of it's accuracy or if it's actually working unless you watch it change.
Maybe I just grew up with too many analogue clocks that were very cheap or set "close enough".
Dive watches with movable bezels make excellent use of the hand movement - progress bar analogy. By having movable markers where you can point 0 at any point on the dial, and get the hands' distance from that 0, you can easily track the passage of time from an arbitrary spot. Whereas digital time is always indexed to 0 at 0 on the hour, you can easily index analog time to any point, which is made clearest by dive watches.
Yes 100%. I wear a dive watch as a daily driver at work, where I need to track how long I've been doing something. Throughout the day I track 3 different things: how many hours has it been since I started so I know when to take a break; what minute did I start my break at so I know when to clock back in; how many hours are left until I need to clock out. I love my collection of digital watches with chronographs and timers, but moving the bezel around a few times a day just works so well. My current daily is a Vostok Amphibia if you're curious.
I’m lucky enough that I was raised reading both digital and analog clocks. I am able to understand both ways of interpreting time perfectly well.
It's definitely interesting. When I read digital clock, I instantly sense how much through the hour I am. This "progressbar-esque" feeling pops in my head without doing any arithmetic operations at all.
I think this is helping me understand a few things. 1- I think I've been using analog clocks wrong, because your explanation of a progress bar makes SO much more sense than trying to read the numbers on the clock like I've tried for all my life. Reading an analog clock has always been hard for me because I've been trying to read the exact numbers, and that takes me quite a while.
2- It helps me understand how there can be people in the world who have those watches that don't have any numbers or don't have many numbers and can still tell the time. Those always confused me.
A teacher friend of mine that teaches younger children 5 to 8 told me that the lack of analogue clocks is becoming a hindrance to small children learning how to tell the time, its not that they cant learn to tell the time, its just that without the use of an analogue clock somewhere obvious in their homes, the forming of the habits and observations that kids used to have don't happen in the same way, they can tell what time it is with a digital clock but have a much harder time translating those numbers to actual time. They get used to it eventually of course but he says it takes much longer than it did in our analogue riddled past.
its almost as though having an analogue clock is giving you a picture of all the time in a day, and you can separate and divide it naturally. a digital clock is giving you a number that is completely abstract and means nothing on its own without the experience required to know what that means. of course, once the skills and experience is garnered in young kids, its a trivial matter to convert between the two. but still.... its a mental process that isnt required with analogue.
Perhaps that's a good thing? Or at least not necessarily a bad thing: there was a time in history before ubiquitous clocks, and these kids get to live in that time a bit longer.
Is it the lack of _any_ obvious clock in their homes, or specifically an analog one? When I got my first digital watch as a child (around 10?), it made telling time and knowing when I need to do things _much_ easier for me. With analog, everything was always fuzzy in my mind, but with digital I actually started forming concrete understanding of the time of day, how many minutes I needed to walk somewhere, etc.
I feel like the best clock (or watch) would actually show both some kind of analog display _and_ the time in digits. For example, you could have vertical bars that fill up from the bottom to the top, above the hours, minutes, and seconds on a digital display. (Bonus: if you make the bars look and sound like cylinders filling with drops of water. :)
@@jasonbender2459 How do you know which country is involved here? And what does it have to do with the rest of the species?
No, they don’t live in a space without clocks, they live in a liminal space between exposure to clocks and understanding what they mean longer.
This is a frustrating place to be.
@@AileTheAlien I think in part the analogue clock is a more visual display of time over time, showing how the progression of time relates to how much time is left. Again a digital clock is fine but there is still a disconnect between the numbers and the concept, whereas an analogue clock is inherently easier to determine passage of time. As the video said, it's pretty hard to explain but to simplify, a digital clock shows what time it is, and analogue clock shows what time it was, what time it is, and what time it will be.
When I see time displayed digitally, I instantly turn it into a picture of a clock face in my mind.
I think the existence of clocks with no numbers at all back up the progress bar or pie chart idea. This is related to how to read the hour hand more easily it also shows progress. When the hour hand is between 3 and 4 but closer to 4 it gives me a clear indication that it will be 4 o’clock soon whereas on a digital clock I tend to forget that (although I do have 5, 10, 15, and 20 minutes to the hour memorised for quick conversion)
I also feel that the "analog" speedometers are easier to "read" compared to the digital speedometers. The place where this is especially noticible is the visual indicator of your acceleration/deceleration. The digital speedometer is tough to gauge the change in speed since it's just number changing, compared to the analog arm moving.
It also seems easier to keep track of in your peripheral vision. I'd guess it's easier for the brain to divide a circle and extrapolate from that than it is for it to convert a numeral into useful information.
Yes I feel the same way.
Interesting I feel the same, but now I have a car with both I find I much prefer the digital. The "feel" of change of speed I get naturally from the acceleration and things going by, I've been driving over 20 years. Therefore I only need the readout for the exact number to not get a ticket, therefore find the need to look down is only for the accurate number.
@@QGazQ14if I want to stick to, or not exceed a a speed limit then the digital display is the best input.
If I am 'driving' then analogue works better because it gives information about rate of change, visible targets, relationships. And no, one does not get the same information by seeing how fast stuff is whizzing past us.
Same, same with clocks. If one knows how to use a clock face, and these days many people do not, at least not intuitively, then the analogue dial gives much more information.
One does not even need nbers on the dial for the process to work. But how useful is a digital interface without the numbers?
Relationships and proportions.
In times past, before digital clocks, some people had problems with clocks and dials. They could read the time or see the speed on a speedo but lacked the cognitive ability to be able to infer anything more. For those people, a digital display will give them everything they need. For everyone else - we lose out.
Part of this might be that a quickly changing number is hard to read in general since it going from one number to the next means that half or all of it is different now and needs to be re-read whereas an analog indicator changes smoothly and the same change leaves it in almost the same position so your brain won't need to re-read anything.
I use both, but I literally imagine an analog clock in my head when computing time in general, and it’s much quicker for me to visualize. However, I prefer digital clocks for shorter periods of time (knowing exactly how many minutes do I have left before the train arrives, for instance). Like analog shows best time progression, but digital shows a clearer instant picture.
Spot on for how my brain does it.
Same here. I seem to convert the digital time to analog, then start subtracting the pie slices of how much time I need to do each step to be on time in the end. Much easier on the brain, and the fudge factor is already included
As analogue computers, our brains are better at 'pattern-matching' an analogue clock, in my opinion. I think digital clocks give us _too much_ accuracy (I normally only want to know the time to the nearest 5 minutes, unless I have to be somewhere to 1-minute accuracy like catching a train).
Yea, digital is great when you need a specific time. Analog is great when you need to quickly know roughly where in the hour you are
Exactly how my brain work too!
I’ve come to this realization myself, and now I’m putting as many analog clocks as I can in my life: on my wrist, on my phone, in my house, etc
In one of my jobs we would open to the public at 9:30. When people asked me the time I would say things like "It's 5 minutes to 9:30." They stopped asking me the time because even though they could read an analog clock, they understood time as just numbers and couldn't wrap their heads around contextual time. Thanks for figuring out how people develop such different understandings of time
This concept has changed my perspective on time! As someone with ADHD, it makes soooo much sense that having a visual remind of where in the hour you are rather than what time it is would make it easy to judge how much time you've spent on something and how much time till you need to switch tasks. I already use a visual timer with my kids and never figured out why that worked better than just telling them what time someway going to happen. Now I know. I'm getting an analog clock for my desk _today_! Definitely do this for your main channel, this is something we as a society have completely missed as we move into a digital age.
Interestingly for me, my ADHD favors solid blocks of time rather than trying to process the constant progression of time- So I prefer digital which gives me a solid distinction between different times and makes it easier for me to go 'ok in this 15 minute chunk I'll do *this*' which I understand better as a quarter of an hour than seeing it on a clock, I guess because it matters whether it's + or - a couple minutes, when looking at an analog clock it's like more of an estimation, there's not really a difference between 3:59 and 4:00 so it's harder to give myself the kick I need to switch tasks etc
I think I can give a pretty unique POV on this, as someone who grew up hating analogue time, and looking for a digital clock any time I could, but later developing EXACTLY what you’re talking about.
So I work as a quality inspector at a factory. It’s a job that demands I write down the time MANY times per hour. Before I had a watch, I would need to get that time from one of the many analogue clocks around. At first it was a hassle as I wasn’t used to it, but after hundreds of 12-hour shifts, I learned to basically shoot a glance at the clock and absorb the time instantly. Even now that I have an Apple Watch with a digital readout in the corner at all times, I still look first to the analogue one across the room. It’s faster for me now, and I couldn’t really understand why until this video. Thanks 😊
All you have shown with this “experiment” is that it is faster (easier) to read time off the clock on your wall than it is to reach out & read the time off a tiny watch affixed to your arm.
To prove it has nothing to do with digital/analogue, try repeating the experiment but with the clock types reversed, i.e. a digital wall clock, an analogue watch.
I have. It’s quicker for me to read time off the wall clock than on my wristwatch.
In my smartwatch (Huawei GT Active) there is a watchface that has both digital and analogue time. For me Digital is easier to read because you dont have to think if its day or night.
What you write about is just getting accustomed to a new way time is displayed. From hours on the left, minutes on the right, you now see, hours against the small arrow, minutes against the big arrow. The guy seems to mean seeing hours a bit like Americans see inches, that is, not as consisting of 16 sixteenths, but as a whole, that can be split however small is practical, most practical being into 16 sixteenths. Same for the hour, it's not 4 quarters, it's a circle, that can be split however you want, but most practical is halves, quarters, sixtieths
If you're writing down the time, surely it should be faster to just copy the numbers of a digital display? Analogue clocks are great for _internalizing_ the time, but to turn it into text you have to do an extra conversion from internal time to numbers.
I purchased an LCD watch that had "Hands" and read out like an analog clock.
I also used a "Goofy" watch for around 5 years. It literally ran backwards. (Counter-clockwise), with the number 3 on the left side and 9 on the right.
I like it. I know that my experience of time has changed since I was young and I think that this is a big part of it. I think that I largely appreciated time better when I was younger and I think that this was partly due to mostly seeing time in portions of an hour instead of this thing where the minutes tick buy so quickly.
I'm sure that not everyone gets what you are talking about, but I really have a similar feeling and this video from 2 years ago rings very true to me.
What a fascinating perspective, that I hadn’t considered! Thanks for sharing. 🙏