In my home office I have a counterclockwise clock. Why? Well, why not? There is no fundamental reason why clocks must run clockwise. The fact that “normal” clocks run clockwise is merely a convention. On the counterclockwise clock, the “3” is on the left, the “9” is on the right, and the hands run in the reverse direction from a normal clock. (The numbers themselves are not reversed, so it does not look like a normal clock reflected in a mirror.)
My Brain Adapted. When I first got the clock I thought it might take a while to get used to reading counter-clockwise time, and indeed, for the first few times I had to think like a child – “When the little hand is on the five and the big hand is on the ten …”. However, my brain soon adapted and within a couple of weeks I was reading the time semi-automatically. All it took was a look at the clock face, a blip of conscious thought to decide that it was counterclockwise, and then the automatic translation of the sensory image into the knowledge of the time of day.
No, Wait, I Messed It. However, something else happened after those first two weeks that surprised me. When I looked at normal clockwise clocks, I was no longer reading them automatically. Instead of just looking at the clock face and immediately knowing the time, I had to do the blip of conscious thought to decide that the clock face was really clockwise. It now took a similar mental effort to read a traditional clock as it did to read a counterclockwise one. A couple of weeks glancing at a novel clock face seemed to have messed a mental process that I thought was well-hardened into my brain by decades of practice.
There Must Be a Reason. But then maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Doing something new and novel requires conscious concentration by your brain, which takes a lot of mental energy. Practice it enough times, however, and your brain creates a neural “program” to do it automatically, with much less energy. So it is with learning to read a clock (or as they say, “telling time”). Unfortunately those neural programs depend on simplifying assumptions – such as all clocks running clockwise. When the brain detects the presence of some new pattern, something anomalous that breaks the assumption, it cannot trust the program anymore. The brain must consciously step in and override the automatic program to avoid disaster, despite requiring more mental energy. So it was once my brain realized that there exist clocks that work like nothing it was used to.
My Brain Really Adapts. Several months later, I think my brain has now re-programmed its neural program for clock faces. I can now look at normal clocks and at counterclockwise clocks and instantly know what time it is without needing a blip of conscious thought. Maybe the updated mental program uses new clues: for example, in the afternoon the hour hand is in the range of noon to six PM no matter if it is on the left or right side of the clock face.
OK, That Was Fun. I suppose it might be interesting to next try introducing my brain to the so-called Australian clock with its upside-down face. If someone was really adventurous, which I’m not, they might go so far as to try living in an upside-down world by wearing special goggles that invert the wearer’s vision. Scientist George Stratton tried this in the 1890s and lived to tell the tale.
Sleepless Afternoon 