Quote Originally Posted by johnny means View Post
But doesn't that visual at some point just become attached to the number? Like way 100 yards is a football field.
I can't speak for anyone but me but when I look at an analog watch that displays 11:49 AM I do not "translate" that in my head to 11:49 unless I am communicating it to someone or memorializing it by writing or typing it. To me, my brain sees it as a chunk of time prior to the middle of the day. I don't think of that chunk of the watch dial as eleven minutes but as an amount of time that I have a rough understanding of completely separate from minutes and seconds.

My brain works the same way with measurements like your football field. I would not translate the distance to feet, yards or football fields unless I needed to communicate or memorialize the distance. The times I am most interested in measurements of that distance is on the (ball) golf or disc golf field. Looking at 100 yards I am thinking a strong pitching wedge (ball) or full control driver (disc) not in feet or yards.

With time and distance, the "native" language of my brain is not minutes or feet those are just constructs that allow me to translate time and distance to a common language in order to effectively communicate. In the end, many of the constructs are still pretty poor. A person that has never seen a feeler gauge or light peeking out between 2 pieces of metal are unlikely to be able to visualize .005" even though they know what feet and inches are. That is one reason people use a football field instead of 300 feet when describing something the same way with a piece of paper in regards to thickness, or a human hair.