The Motion of the Minute Hand

If I look at the minute hand of a clock I generally cannot see it move, but I can be pretty sure it is moving, especially if it's reading the right time. The rate at which the minute hand moves is 360 degrees/hour, or a degree every 10 seconds. It seems what I detect is instantaneous motion when my mind determines if something is moving or not. I'm not referring to hands that move in steps, but those that move continuously. I don't know enough about clocks to know if any hands move continuously, or if they all move in steps, just more of them. But I bet that on some level, if I don't see the steps, that they can be approximated as moving continuously. Of course, the larger the clock, and the closer I am to it, the more likely I'll be able to see that the hands are moving.

There's this concept of an adiabatic change, which as I understand it, is that the rate at which something changes which affects a system is slow compared to the rate at which the parameters that describe the system change. When that happens, the 'something' that changes does not increase the disorder of the system. It's like kicking a car versus pushing it. If you kick a car hard enough you dent it and it moves, if you just push it, it just moves.

I wonder if this concept of adiabaticity can be extended to a clock. In the sense that, I can see things changing around me, but I can't see the minute hand changing. So, the rate at which the minute hand changes is slow compared to the changes in the world on the scale that I can perceive them. What does this say about the perception of time? Is this minute hand phenomenon an indication of what is adiabatic for a human? The second hand moves fast enough to easily be seen, and the hour hand is clearly too slow, but the minute hand is rather tantalizing, because its motion seems like it might be close to the edge of perceptibility, on the cusp of subjective adiabaticity.

I wonder if with practice, but without cheating, one could see the motion of a particular minute hand where initially one couldn't. You might think that this could be a good exercise at work for example, but I think it would tend to make the day pass more slowly. Since if you can perceive the same rate of movement on a shorter time scale, then you'll be more aware of time's passage. I think this is because the perception of duration is related to the awareness of the passage of time. Like the mind's clock only adds successive intervals up, counting them, but not multiplying each successive interval by the actual duration of each. I guess that's why when I wake up, it seems like little time has passed since I fell asleep. At least in part this is perhaps why I'm a night owl, since I intuitively realize that the earlier I get to sleep the sooner it will be before I have to get up.