Mind Clock

Last week, I was bedridden due to Dengue. Well, it was a rough week. Had to visit the hospital twice a day to get a saline infusion for faster recovery. While I laid back for the saline unit to drip down into my blood, some thought struck me hard which I kept thinking for days.

Twice a day, as I lay down on the patient bed, the nurse administered the saline, setting the drip at a set amount while casually conversing with me. He used to set the drip to the same frequency every day and leave to attend to other patients. Exactly 5 minutes before the saline was at its final drops, he came and removed it.

On point

This happened twice a day for about a week. The fascinating part was after setting the saline up, he would come back exactly 5 min before completion, checking the level maybe once in between. His sense of time flow was on point with maybe an error of 1-2 minutes.

The first time I thought that it was just their daily task and they got habituated to it. Still, getting habituated to the flow of time at that precision is off the charts, while I am here putting up a timer of 15 minutes on my phone every time I boil eggs. At times when I don't put the timer, I have to either check way too many times or just miss it by another 15 minutes. How are nurses doing it that effectively with no timer?

Why not us

First, let's talk about why we are not able to do it. Doom scrolling. Scrolling on the phone pulls us away from knowing the flow of time. That is why you open Instagram to check out some reels just to realize you've been scrolling for 2 hours. The whole experience is designed for you to lose the internal clock. Now, how are nurses doing it?

Reference

They do it through reference. Let's say he's watching a cricket match while he has to administer an IV to a patient, he exactly knows how many overs of the match it'll take for the IV to drain out. They don't think of time as the number of minutes directly but reference it indirectly to the task they are doing. 15 minutes means for example 2 overs of cricket (or) administering 3 other patients (or) writing down 10 records. They know exactly how fast the time flows in reference to the tasks they do daily.

Of course, this isn't a taught skill at institutions but they've subconsciously learned it as their work went by. And they very well know the side effects of doom scrolling, so they try not to do it if there is a time-bound administration required.

For us

Now, one of the social media apps you can rely on without the tension of time is, watching set-duration videos like YouTube. Unlike reels or shorts, YouTube videos let you know the length of content even before you start consuming it. That might help as entertainment while still having the time reference. Well, this is one of many; but you get the idea. Time isn't the number on the clock, but the number of tasks that you frequently do.

Closing sentence; if I've named any medical terms wrong, just accept the fact that I'm bad at it. Physics and Maths guy.