Since most of us were never called on in class to answer a tough time-estimation question, or quizzed on the lengths of tones in milliseconds, we don't have a good grasp of our skill in this area. It's kind of exciting. You could be a prodigy and not know it! But a cold dose of reality comes from new research saying skill in time estimation is tied to mathematical intelligence. If you're not amazing at math, your temporal abilities probably aren't A-plus either.
Writing in PLos ONE, a group of Italian researchers describe a study done on 202 adults. The subjects listened to a series of tones through headphones, and estimated the length of each tone in milliseconds. ("We first made sure that participants knew that one millisecond is a thousandth of a second.") Tones ranged from 100 to 3000 milliseconds long. That's a tenth of a second to three ...
