Booting up

We have two electric clocks upstairs, one in the bedroom and one in the study, both with a quiet tick which one does not usually notice. With the newer one being noticed at reference 1.

So I was waking up around 06:15 this Wednesday morning. BH was pottering around in the kitchen, but all was quiet upstairs. All I could hear was the blood rushing around in my ears, that is to say a sort of humming. Then I thought that I ought be be able to hear the clock. But it took some seconds before the humming receded into the background and I could hear the ticking. A ticking which came and went. Sometimes I was not sure that I was not imagining that I was hearing the ticking.

After a bit of that, I relaxed and the ticking largely vanished. I became aware of the humming from distant roads, very probably the M25 (in blue, lower left), apt to be busy at this time of day. Maybe 5km or a couple of miles away. I am fairly sure that one can hear it, at least when conditions are right, and I would not have thought that the much nearer B280 (in brown, middle top) would make this sort of humming.

Then, if I concentrated, I could tune back into the ticking, albeit not very reliably.

Meanwhile, the world was waking up, and there were lots of more distinctive noises: trains at the railway station, cars in the road outside, aeroplanes in the sky above and a few birds. And, of course, the pottering in the kitchen.

A little later, I tried the same trick in the study. The dominant noise there was the humming of the fan in the laptop, but if I turned to face the clock and concentrated on it, I could tune into its ticking, again not very reliably.

Which all goes to show that even simple perception is complicated. Plenty of stuff there for an undergraduate student of psychology to bite on.

PS: it took me a little while to work out how to turn off my location on the map above. The IT people at Ordnance Survey did not have my privacy uppermost in their minds when they put this one together.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/10/the-new-clock.html.