A while back a study was published and making the rounds regarding “inner reading voices”. When you’re reading silently to yourself, how does it register in your brain? Most people, when reading to themselves, have an inner voice reading the words aloud in their brain. Seems it’s most often their own voice, but some people have what sounds like a cast of voice actors in their brains! On the other end of the spectrum are people who have no inner reading voice; the words on the page go straight to whatever concept or idea is being communicated.

At the time, I asked around to my friends to see where people fell on that spectrum, and nearly everyone was in the “own voice” camp. I don’t recall anyone having the voice actor cast. I found two people (including myself) in the “straight to idea” camp. It was one of those epiphanies along the lines of the “does everyone see red as the same red I see red?” sort of thought, only without the smokey haze.

Fast forward a year or two. I was nerding out with a watch friend a night or two ago. Thinking of cool things to do with watch designs (I want to be able to have a line of watches as soon as I can manage), and I was showing him a watch that had a feature that turned out not to be an original idea after all (are there any left at this point in the game?). He latched onto something I had totally missed: the hour hand had a little window in it centered on a ring of numbers for the hour. The number showed through the window, ostensibly to make it easier to read.

My knee jerk reaction was that this was some sort of gimmick. I hadn’t even noticed it initially, but actively disliked it once it was pointed out to me. It was at this point (you see where I’m going here) that this study came roaring back to my mind! What if people read time differently just like with the inner reading voice?!?!?!

I know how I read a watch dial, and it’s very similar to the straight-to-idea inner reading voice. I sort of have a running awareness of the hour from some combination of looking at my watch every so often out of habit, as well as a procedural awareness of where I am in the day (as in, I just ate a late lunch, so it’s in the neighborhood of 2-3). Then I just glance at the minute hand (this takes a fraction of a second), and wherever it is in the dial tells me the time in that specific, but not entirely specific way. If there’s some event I’m interested in, I compare it to where that would be on the dial (i.e., something occurring at X:20 would have me looking at where the minute hand is in relation to the 4 o’clock index). There are no numbers in this manner of reading. No hours, no minutes, no “o’clock”; just the wordless, numberless concept of a time. I don’t like digital clocks, because they don’t display time in a format that registers cleanly in this manner. It takes longer. If someone ASKS me what time it is, it actively trips me up. I KNOW what time it is, but I have to stop, backtrack, re-read the watch in a way that is sort of uncomfortable, and say numbers that are only tangentially related to the concept of the “time” that it is. My dad makes fun of me for being a watchmaker that can’t read a clock.

Immediately upon realizing that people might read clocks differently, I ran into the bedroom to ask my wife (who reads in her own voice like most people do) how she reads a clock. Sure enough, exactly as you’d expect! She looks at the hour hand, which is pointing at a number. She reads that number aloud in her head in a “it’s between X and Y, so it’s X o’clock”. Then looks at the minute hand, which is pointing at Z. Then puts those two numbers together to form a complete numerical time that makes considerably more sense in the context of the real world.

This got me thinking about all sorts of alternate ways of displaying the time. Jump hour watches, digital clocks, there’s this one display module I’ve admired for years that uses to Wankel style rotors to display the time (I’m a big fan of rotary engines)… A lot of cool stuff out there! But… I now realize I would probably hate them in practice… Which is pretty disappointing. I have a ’70’s Swiss jump hour with a red dial in my “to do” box for service. The case is brassed, so it probably won’t pretty up very well, so it’s been a low priority. I’ll probably need to move it up the queue for purposes of experimentation.

This brings me back to watch design for future Rocinante Watch models. It would be neat to be able to cater to one, the other, or both of these styles of reading the time now that I know it’s a thing. What I don’t have is a meaningful sample size though. What would the “voice actor cast” equivalent be like for reading a watch dial? Are there other methods? How do people read their watches? There’s a comment section down there. Please let me know. Not in some “audience engagement” fashion thing, but genuinely I want to know out of an academic curiosity (this is just super cool stuff!), but also to hopefully inform my future watch designs!