As someone who was a past military jet pilot and navigator, the one thing I still notice I have is an uncanny unconscious/subconscious sense of time. It's not perfect, but I rarely sleep through alarms and if I intend to wake up at a certain time, I have about an 85 percent chance of waking up, looking over at my phone, and seeing 1-2 minutes prior. If I'm going something like cooking in the kitchen, I still set timers, but often get an uncomfortable feeling of "you should go check that" that's within a minute or two.
I always figured it went back to what you mentioned, being able to be on timelines down to the second while doing all the other ancillary tasks like listening to three radios, monitoring sensors, etc.
> As someone who was a past military jet pilot and navigator, the one thing I still notice I have is an uncanny unconscious/subconscious sense of time. It's not perfect, but I rarely sleep through alarms and if I intend to wake up at a certain time, I have about an 85 percent chance of waking up, looking over at my phone, and seeing 1-2 minutes prior. If I'm going something like cooking in the kitchen, I still set timers, but often get an uncomfortable feeling of "you should go check that" that's within a minute or two.
It's interesting, I have the same ability: waking up 2-5 minutes before the alarm clock, feeling the washing machine or the oven alarm will ring in 20 seconds~2 minutes. I am rarely off and when I am it's by a huge margin. But I have no background or job or hobby history that would have helped fine tuned that. I also don't rely on it, I often set timers.
As a kid I trained myself to keep track of time through using the 15m beep on my Casio watch.
Eventually I was quite accurate on the current time, rarely missing by more than a minute, but at some point it felt like it wasn't really helping me since I had the watch anyway. It also was too weird for becoming a party trick (first time I admit to learning this), and didn't help with the idea that I had just wasted X minutes of my life between any 2 moments I thought about time or checked it without having done something useful, so I ended up disabling that.
I was like that for several decades but after I retired I got better.
I'm fairly certain that, at least in my case, it was a form of hypervigilance and based in anxiety. I'm less anxious these days and hope to live longer as a result.
Although I do still have a better-than-average ability to know when to check what's in the oven for doneness. This "feels" much different, though - I'm completely unaware of the passage of time until something just says to me "that stuff should be about done now."
Prior Air Force, but not a pilot. 40 years later my internal clock is still usually accurate to 10-15 minutes. Not good enough to replace a kitchen timer, sadly.
The saying when I was in was "If you're not five minutes early, you're late." Which I understand they have optimized to everyone showing up fifteen minutes early now. Such a time-waste.
I have no military training like that but I'm also often wake up a few mins before alarms and also have a good sense of time. It seems to me that it's more rather a personal trait. And it's possible it's a skill one can learn.
I always figured it went back to what you mentioned, being able to be on timelines down to the second while doing all the other ancillary tasks like listening to three radios, monitoring sensors, etc.