At some point, our leader, probably or at least possibly a semi-professional mountain climber, told us a story about how he woke up in the morning, when out in the wilds. So, he would get into his sleeping bag in the evening and decide when he wanted to be up in the morning, say 0500 or 0600, with mountaineers liking to start early. He would then look at his watch. And then he would tap the side of his head on the pillow the appropriate number of times. Five times for 0500, six times for 0600 or whatever. Note that he is specifying the clock time, a point in time, not the interval, not the number of elapsed hours. He would then go to sleep and wake up at the designated time, without the help of an alarm clock. He told us that he found this a pretty reliable way of getting up in the morning at the right time.
For present purposes, we suppose that he could really do this. That one had tested him on various occasions with various times, in various conditions of weather and light – it being possible that for these purposes the brain uses cues from these conditions.
An ability which is unusual on at least three counts.
First, he was exerting mind control over a bodily function which one does not usually think of having any such control over. So, for example, while one can learn, perhaps by means of breathing exercises, to slow one’s heart down and some people can learn to go to sleep in fairly short order, most minds cannot waggle the ears, although the necessary machinery is all present and correct. Most minds cannot control a blush. Most minds do not have very good control over individual fingers, in the way of a violist or a pianist. And the conscious mind can’t control the workings of the liver or the lights.
Second, the brain was exerting this control at some hours remove. It is one thing for the brain to get on and do something – but it is quite another matter for it to store up the necessary command in memory and then to activate it some time later. And in order to do something like this, the brain must in some limited way keep a personal calendar, in the way of a smart phone. A calendar which it checks against a clock every few seconds, to see if it needs to send out an alarm call, or whatever. Perhaps limited in the sense that it can only manage to track the status of one alarm call at a time. Perhaps people with really big grains can manage two.
Third, if it was not doing absolute time in the way of you or I, it was doing relative time, elapsed time, it must have been doing sums. It must have been converting the wake up time into something the brain did understand, perhaps the elapsed time in seconds, heartbeats or something. To which end the brain did have the necessary information as, before going to sleep, the mountaineer both decided the time to wake up and checked the time by looking at his watch. Maybe the head tapping was another part of the input to this sum?
I associate to the electrical circuits called delay lines. Maybe they are relevant here? Can they do milliyears rather than milliseconds? Reference 1 rather suggests not.
Does the brain include instead a reliable oscillator coupled to a counter? And a gadget which can keep comparing the count with the target – and which, in consequence, knows when to stop? Or does it fill some chemical tank to some appropriate level, set it to dripping and then raise an alarm when the tank is empty, when the dripping stops?
There is also the consideration that for all this to work one needs to make a conscious decision about the time one wants to wake up, the time one wants to be called. A conscious decision which is translated into taps of the head on the pillow. With the outcome being checked on waking. Perhaps one needs a conscious decision to muster the considerable neural energy needed to do this thing?
Then the consideration that the alarm call involves more than just projecting some thought or message into consciousness. It has to activate the physiology needed to wake someone up, to move them from unconsciousness to consciousness, to a state in which thoughts and messages can be received. But this sort of thing, at least, the brain does all the time: it has no trouble converting thought into the physiology which drives the hands and feet. Or, to give an unconscious example, the state of digestion into appropriate contractions of the intestines.
I seem to remember reading that some eastern gurus can exert mind control over bodily functions that we in the west have no control over. And that is about it. I do not recall anything else along the lines outlined above. But, assuming there is some foundation in fact in my story, one would have thought that someone, somewhere, would have taken a look - so I would be interested to be pointed in the right direction.
Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analog_delay_line.
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