7 ms·

Humans Who See Time (2010)

101 points by georgecmu 10y ago

ginko 10y ago
I do that. Didn't know it was that uncommon. Maybe that's why I never had the discipline to keep a calendar.
- unsignedqword 10y ago
  I did some googling out of curiosity and was actually kind of surprised to find out that, statistically, synesthesia affects about 3-5% of the population. Certainly uncommon, but not as rare as I expected. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/14073/1/p5469.pdf http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/14073/1/p5469.pdf http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html Unfortunately, couldn't find that much data on the specific kind of "time-space" synesthesia that was mentioned in the article. Bummer.
ta_donk_gt 10y ago
Weird, I generally assumed most people visualize the calendar as a circle when recalling dates. I've always been good at associating dates with events, but never would have thought the circle had anything to do with it.
- dave2000 10y ago
  I don't think i picture it at all in the same way that synasthetes literally "see" other senses, but I do picture a year as a 2d row divided into rectangles. I don't see it as a circle because I see no connection between the end of December and the January of the same year. The next January starts at the beginning of another row entirely unconnected to the previous year.
rl3 10y ago
The headline seemed perplexing, but after seeing the article's illustration I was shocked to realize that's me (sort of). Whenever I think of time on a scale of at least weeks, the mental picture I have is circular. The center is always the house I grew up in. Months aren't represented as just colors, but images: views of the yard surrounding the house, based on the season a particular month corresponds to. Perspective changes based on the timescale I'm focusing on. As a kid I used to picture numbers in color, mostly as gradients. On the number line, the hue would change subtly about every ten numbers. That went away shortly before adolescence though. Granted, these are all purely mental images—there's no spatial or perceptual component as in the article. Unfortunately no exceptional memory or recall abilities either.
khedoros 10y ago
The year's a circle, roughly. December is at 12 o'clock, March is at 9 o'clock, and I move around it in a counter-clockwise direction. September through December are a little more squished together than the other months. May through August are a little more spread out. I thought everyone experienced that, until a thread on Reddit about 4 years ago (and I still don't think that it's as rare as the title implies).
- ta_donk_gt 10y ago
  Interesting. Mine goes clockwise, with the line between December and January at 6 o'clock. Agree I doubt it is really as rare as the article makes it seem.
  - etjossem 10y ago
    When I was growing up, my parents drew up a circular calendar with the months of the year (so my sister and I could learn them) and put it on the fridge with magnets. December and January were at 6 o'clock, like you mentioned. I recently bought a watch with a circular month dial, then realized January and December were at noon. It always throws me off; I can't unsee the way I visualize the year.
  - eddyl 10y ago
    Mine is the same as yours: a circle with months going clockwise, Jan/Dec at 6 o'clock. It occurred to me a couple years ago that thinking of the calendar like this might not be something everyone does. I asked my friend how he thought of it and he said he saw it as a LINE.
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      I see the months in a year as a sort of sine wave, with december at the bottoms and july at the tops. I guess it's like a combination of the linear and circular view.
      - filoeleven 10y ago
biot 10y ago
The comments on that page are more fascinating than the article itself. Many people chiming in and describing their own personal brand of time/calendar visualization.
- pessimizer 10y ago
  And how similar they are. I do not relate to them in any way, but there seems to be something there. I'm the kind of person who has to be reminded what month it is.
- astrobe_ 10y ago
  There was an article some time ago, describing how different peoples around the globe had different words to describe time (for instance "it's below us" meaning "it's in the past") and how it influenced their common representation of time.
hackney 10y ago
Time is not seen. However one does, or does not, spatially relate the pittance of that which we call memory is hardly what could be construed as 'seeing time'. Try light from the circular construct that is the surrounding universe and then you will get a perfect picture of time. I've witnessed it and it is a mindblower to say the least.
tzs 10y ago
I've not read the actual paper (paywall) so this could just be a problem with the reporting about it, but it doesn't sound to me like that test they did on the 183 people that involved asking them to visualize the months and then reconstruct that visualization on a computer screen, and then later found that when asked to do the same thing four months later and were prompted with one month placed in the same position they had placed it the first time, 4 of the 183 recreated the same layout they did the first time suggests time-space synesthetes. I'm not a time-space synesthete, for instance, but if you asked me to visualize the months and then represent that on a computer screen I would not just randomly toss the months around. I'd decide on some logical ordering and arrangement and use that. Ask me again 4 months later, even without prompting me by pre-placing one of the months where I placed it before, and I'd almost certainly recreate my original arrangement. I probably would not choose a spiral, but from what the article quotes it doesn't sound like it was the shape of the visualizing that the authors consider to be significant. It was the consistency of the visualization across trials. The second test, where they tested how well people could memorize and recall an unfamiliar spatial calendar seems much better.
tuewocnc 10y ago
I also see the year (not "time") as roughly a circle going round my body, but vertically not horizontally as in the illustration. Also, the circle is pitched at an angle so that I view it from my left side arcing over my body (at a height of about a tall tree in front, with the future in front). Each month has a colour but no shape, they are all more like a volume of air. It rotates so that a given month is going through me, with future months going high in the air in front and previous months there but not visible. The months through November to January are more acutely curved. Each week is also a circle and each day has a colour but the weeks are all the same circle instance, not individual ones. I don't have a good memory at all and none of my memories are in the circle.
jarmitage 10y ago
I have this. I see the year as a donut with December at the bottom. I've thought about building a GUI calendar and a smart watch face for this. Has anyone attempted / seen something like that?
- AckSyn 10y ago
  I thought this kind of thing was "normal" for some people on par with how many have photographic memories, or almost innate math abilities.
sandworm101 10y ago
Do these people "see time" or do they simply have a great memory for dates and times? "Seeing time" is trek-level Xmen stuff. I expect someone who can perceive gravity waves, someone who can witness relativity in action. Doctor Manhattan had such a perception. That isn't the same as someone who is very good at remembering artificial constructs such as dates and calenders.
- therein 10y ago
  Agreed. The title is misleading because it gives the impression that these people have some supernatural awareness of the timeline while that's not what's happening here. What this article depicts doesn't seem all that rare looking at this thread. I can relate to some of these experiences as well and while I am a spatial thinker, I definitely don't have synesthesia, I wish I did. And here is a (non-exhaustive) list of people with synesthesia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_synesthesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_synesthesi...
dxhdr 10y ago
Isn't this mental model of time fairly common? If you don't picture the year as a circle or donut, what do you think of when considering the year?
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tux3 10y ago
  It's interesting reading all these different ways people have to picture a year. I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it. If I had to think of an image the first thing that would come to my mind is a boring old paper calendar, but that's not something I would naturally think of.
  - micah94 10y ago
    I'm amazed by all this too. I don't have any visualization of a calendar. It always seemed quite arbitrary to me as Kings and Popes down the line have added months, removed weeks, etc.
  - nickcano 10y ago
    >I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it. Right. When I'm asked "what happened in January", I just think back to January. There's no mental picture or anything; I just select for January. Typically I'll use some significant event markers and a sort of relativistic system to remember when things happened (e.g. x happened before y but after z, and I know y was in February and z was early January). No imagery ever comes in to play. This is really tripping me out that so many people think so differently.
    - gatesphere 10y ago
      >I just select for January. So, you have a time-series database model? Because that's pretty cool. Especially if you're running mentalSQL queries. SELECT '*' from MEMORIES where MONTH = 'January';
BjoernKW 10y ago
I visualize not only discrete amounts of time like months or days as some sort of circular (or rather elliptic) strip but also pretty much any kind of sequence of contiguous numbers. I almost can't believe it's really that uncommon because - from my point of view - it just makes sense. How would you imagine time or numbers if not in a visual, spatial manner? I suppose for humans arranging objects that come after another in a spatial order that expresses this relation comes pretty naturally, given that we're very visual creatures and we're used to the 3 dimensions of space we perceive.
Artlav 10y ago
I wonder if that can even be called synesthesia. Sounds more like how visual-oriented people would think of time. For me, it's kind of an ellipse in front. The spring is on the right, the fall is on the left, the summer is on the top, and winter below. When i think of a date, i look at where that date is located. And vice-versa, the events are located somewhere, and looking at them gives me the date. Kind of like this http://i.imgur.com/7PJMf9O.png http://i.imgur.com/7PJMf9O.png I later worked out a way to tell the day of the week by a date based on this. Every month is marked depending on the offset of it's first day from january's (assuming january starts on thursday, which is 0). For me it's | - -/ --| kind of symbol marks, on one side or the other of the ellipse, which denotes the 0, 1, 2 and 3 days off. Next is an image like that that you need to memorize: http://i.imgur.com/dpfn2lX.png http://i.imgur.com/dpfn2lX.png - a month on a calendar page, monday thru sunday, with thursday in the center. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 are the centreline of thursdays. 2016 starts on friday, the offset of the year is +1, and it's a leap year, so every month after feburary gets another +1. Today is June 12th, 2016. June is -3 (look at the year ellipse). 12th is -3 (look at the image #2 ). 2016 is +1 and leap year is +1 (have to keep in mind). Sum it up, you get -3-3+1+1 = -4, ring it 7 is +3. Add to thursday, and it's sunday. Another example: September 13th, 2014. September is -2. 13th is -2. 2014 is -1. Add up to -5, ring it 7 to get +2, which is saturday. It may sound hard, but a few hours of practice would make it automatic, especially if you are a visual type.
- fnayr 10y ago
  That's really neat. I'm tracking with how you are getting everything but the year offset. Could you explain where that's from? (E.g. why is 2016 +1 and 2014 -1?) Is it just determined by anchoring at Thursday Jan 1st for 2015, and every year before/after moves the day back/forward one (adjusting for leap years)?
  - Artlav 10y ago
    Don't have a good way to figure it out for an arbitrary year. The year's offset is 0 when jan 1st is a thursday (since the whole system is based on determining the day's offset wrt a thursday), i.e. 1998, 2004, 2009, 2015, and increase every year by 1 and every mod 4=0 year by another 1. If you remember the offsets for a few years, then it's quite straightforward to get the offset for a nearby one. But i can't quickly determine the offset of an arbitrary distant year.
bane 10y ago
Weird, I think of time as more like an unending river going forwards and backwards, and as it goes away from me it spreads out and becomes hazy and less certain. More of a spatial vector than a loop as in this illustration. But I can't say it's a strong visual image, more of a sense like smell or hearing.
JeremyMorgan 10y ago
I didn't realize this was rare. I think of a year in an ellipsis with January at the far left, June at the far right. Years are a giant ribbon of various colors. I thought everyone had some kind of mental model of time. Though I am able to remember great details just by "pins" on my ribbon, and there is an ellipsis for each year ("oh yeah, that was in June of 1996" etc) so I guess it works well for me. I just didn't know it was that rare.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
mbrock 10y ago
I experience time as a series of revolving problems: painful awkward spring yields to sweaty sleepy summer yields to deathly gloomy fall which decays into desolate hostile winter... yet for a week in March one imagines the world good, a splendid week of hope.
Kiro 10y ago
I see time as a 3D wall. Very hard to explain.

101 points by georgecmu 10y ago

ginko 10y ago

I do that. Didn't know it was that uncommon. Maybe that's why I never had the discipline to keep a calendar.

unsignedqword 10y ago
I did some googling out of curiosity and was actually kind of surprised to find out that, statistically, synesthesia affects about 3-5% of the population. Certainly uncommon, but not as rare as I expected. http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/14073/1/p5469.pdf http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/14073/1/p5469.pdf http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html http://www.daysyn.com/Types-of-Syn.html Unfortunately, couldn't find that much data on the specific kind of "time-space" synesthesia that was mentioned in the article. Bummer.

ta_donk_gt 10y ago

Weird, I generally assumed most people visualize the calendar as a circle when recalling dates. I've always been good at associating dates with events, but never would have thought the circle had anything to do with it.

dave2000 10y ago
I don't think i picture it at all in the same way that synasthetes literally "see" other senses, but I do picture a year as a 2d row divided into rectangles. I don't see it as a circle because I see no connection between the end of December and the January of the same year. The next January starts at the beginning of another row entirely unconnected to the previous year.

rl3 10y ago

The headline seemed perplexing, but after seeing the article's illustration I was shocked to realize that's me (sort of). Whenever I think of time on a scale of at least weeks, the mental picture I have is circular. The center is always the house I grew up in. Months aren't represented as just colors, but images: views of the yard surrounding the house, based on the season a particular month corresponds to. Perspective changes based on the timescale I'm focusing on. As a kid I used to picture numbers in color, mostly as gradients. On the number line, the hue would change subtly about every ten numbers. That went away shortly before adolescence though. Granted, these are all purely mental images—there's no spatial or perceptual component as in the article. Unfortunately no exceptional memory or recall abilities either.

khedoros 10y ago

The year's a circle, roughly. December is at 12 o'clock, March is at 9 o'clock, and I move around it in a counter-clockwise direction. September through December are a little more squished together than the other months. May through August are a little more spread out. I thought everyone experienced that, until a thread on Reddit about 4 years ago (and I still don't think that it's as rare as the title implies).

ta_donk_gt 10y ago
Interesting. Mine goes clockwise, with the line between December and January at 6 o'clock. Agree I doubt it is really as rare as the article makes it seem.
- etjossem 10y ago
  When I was growing up, my parents drew up a circular calendar with the months of the year (so my sister and I could learn them) and put it on the fridge with magnets. December and January were at 6 o'clock, like you mentioned. I recently bought a watch with a circular month dial, then realized January and December were at noon. It always throws me off; I can't unsee the way I visualize the year.
- eddyl 10y ago
  Mine is the same as yours: a circle with months going clockwise, Jan/Dec at 6 o'clock. It occurred to me a couple years ago that thinking of the calendar like this might not be something everyone does. I asked my friend how he thought of it and he said he saw it as a LINE.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    I see the months in a year as a sort of sine wave, with december at the bottoms and july at the tops. I guess it's like a combination of the linear and circular view.
    - filoeleven 10y ago

biot 10y ago

The comments on that page are more fascinating than the article itself. Many people chiming in and describing their own personal brand of time/calendar visualization.

pessimizer 10y ago
And how similar they are. I do not relate to them in any way, but there seems to be something there. I'm the kind of person who has to be reminded what month it is.
astrobe_ 10y ago
There was an article some time ago, describing how different peoples around the globe had different words to describe time (for instance "it's below us" meaning "it's in the past") and how it influenced their common representation of time.

hackney 10y ago

Time is not seen. However one does, or does not, spatially relate the pittance of that which we call memory is hardly what could be construed as 'seeing time'. Try light from the circular construct that is the surrounding universe and then you will get a perfect picture of time. I've witnessed it and it is a mindblower to say the least.

tzs 10y ago

I've not read the actual paper (paywall) so this could just be a problem with the reporting about it, but it doesn't sound to me like that test they did on the 183 people that involved asking them to visualize the months and then reconstruct that visualization on a computer screen, and then later found that when asked to do the same thing four months later and were prompted with one month placed in the same position they had placed it the first time, 4 of the 183 recreated the same layout they did the first time suggests time-space synesthetes. I'm not a time-space synesthete, for instance, but if you asked me to visualize the months and then represent that on a computer screen I would not just randomly toss the months around. I'd decide on some logical ordering and arrangement and use that. Ask me again 4 months later, even without prompting me by pre-placing one of the months where I placed it before, and I'd almost certainly recreate my original arrangement. I probably would not choose a spiral, but from what the article quotes it doesn't sound like it was the shape of the visualizing that the authors consider to be significant. It was the consistency of the visualization across trials. The second test, where they tested how well people could memorize and recall an unfamiliar spatial calendar seems much better.

tuewocnc 10y ago

I also see the year (not "time") as roughly a circle going round my body, but vertically not horizontally as in the illustration. Also, the circle is pitched at an angle so that I view it from my left side arcing over my body (at a height of about a tall tree in front, with the future in front). Each month has a colour but no shape, they are all more like a volume of air. It rotates so that a given month is going through me, with future months going high in the air in front and previous months there but not visible. The months through November to January are more acutely curved. Each week is also a circle and each day has a colour but the weeks are all the same circle instance, not individual ones. I don't have a good memory at all and none of my memories are in the circle.

jarmitage 10y ago

I have this. I see the year as a donut with December at the bottom. I've thought about building a GUI calendar and a smart watch face for this. Has anyone attempted / seen something like that?

AckSyn 10y ago
I thought this kind of thing was "normal" for some people on par with how many have photographic memories, or almost innate math abilities.

sandworm101 10y ago

Do these people "see time" or do they simply have a great memory for dates and times? "Seeing time" is trek-level Xmen stuff. I expect someone who can perceive gravity waves, someone who can witness relativity in action. Doctor Manhattan had such a perception. That isn't the same as someone who is very good at remembering artificial constructs such as dates and calenders.

therein 10y ago
Agreed. The title is misleading because it gives the impression that these people have some supernatural awareness of the timeline while that's not what's happening here. What this article depicts doesn't seem all that rare looking at this thread. I can relate to some of these experiences as well and while I am a spatial thinker, I definitely don't have synesthesia, I wish I did. And here is a (non-exhaustive) list of people with synesthesia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_synesthesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_with_synesthesi...

dxhdr 10y ago

Isn't this mental model of time fairly common? If you don't picture the year as a circle or donut, what do you think of when considering the year?

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tux3 10y ago
It's interesting reading all these different ways people have to picture a year. I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it. If I had to think of an image the first thing that would come to my mind is a boring old paper calendar, but that's not something I would naturally think of.
- micah94 10y ago
  I'm amazed by all this too. I don't have any visualization of a calendar. It always seemed quite arbitrary to me as Kings and Popes down the line have added months, removed weeks, etc.
- nickcano 10y ago
  >I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it. Right. When I'm asked "what happened in January", I just think back to January. There's no mental picture or anything; I just select for January. Typically I'll use some significant event markers and a sort of relativistic system to remember when things happened (e.g. x happened before y but after z, and I know y was in February and z was early January). No imagery ever comes in to play. This is really tripping me out that so many people think so differently.
  - gatesphere 10y ago
    >I just select for January. So, you have a time-series database model? Because that's pretty cool. Especially if you're running mentalSQL queries. SELECT '*' from MEMORIES where MONTH = 'January';

BjoernKW 10y ago

I visualize not only discrete amounts of time like months or days as some sort of circular (or rather elliptic) strip but also pretty much any kind of sequence of contiguous numbers. I almost can't believe it's really that uncommon because - from my point of view - it just makes sense. How would you imagine time or numbers if not in a visual, spatial manner? I suppose for humans arranging objects that come after another in a spatial order that expresses this relation comes pretty naturally, given that we're very visual creatures and we're used to the 3 dimensions of space we perceive.

Artlav 10y ago

I wonder if that can even be called synesthesia. Sounds more like how visual-oriented people would think of time. For me, it's kind of an ellipse in front. The spring is on the right, the fall is on the left, the summer is on the top, and winter below. When i think of a date, i look at where that date is located. And vice-versa, the events are located somewhere, and looking at them gives me the date. Kind of like this http://i.imgur.com/7PJMf9O.png http://i.imgur.com/7PJMf9O.png I later worked out a way to tell the day of the week by a date based on this. Every month is marked depending on the offset of it's first day from january's (assuming january starts on thursday, which is 0). For me it's | - -/ --| kind of symbol marks, on one side or the other of the ellipse, which denotes the 0, 1, 2 and 3 days off. Next is an image like that that you need to memorize: http://i.imgur.com/dpfn2lX.png http://i.imgur.com/dpfn2lX.png - a month on a calendar page, monday thru sunday, with thursday in the center. 1, 8, 15, 22, 29 are the centreline of thursdays. 2016 starts on friday, the offset of the year is +1, and it's a leap year, so every month after feburary gets another +1. Today is June 12th, 2016. June is -3 (look at the year ellipse). 12th is -3 (look at the image #2 ). 2016 is +1 and leap year is +1 (have to keep in mind). Sum it up, you get -3-3+1+1 = -4, ring it 7 is +3. Add to thursday, and it's sunday. Another example: September 13th, 2014. September is -2. 13th is -2. 2014 is -1. Add up to -5, ring it 7 to get +2, which is saturday. It may sound hard, but a few hours of practice would make it automatic, especially if you are a visual type.

fnayr 10y ago
That's really neat. I'm tracking with how you are getting everything but the year offset. Could you explain where that's from? (E.g. why is 2016 +1 and 2014 -1?) Is it just determined by anchoring at Thursday Jan 1st for 2015, and every year before/after moves the day back/forward one (adjusting for leap years)?
- Artlav 10y ago
  Don't have a good way to figure it out for an arbitrary year. The year's offset is 0 when jan 1st is a thursday (since the whole system is based on determining the day's offset wrt a thursday), i.e. 1998, 2004, 2009, 2015, and increase every year by 1 and every mod 4=0 year by another 1. If you remember the offsets for a few years, then it's quite straightforward to get the offset for a nearby one. But i can't quickly determine the offset of an arbitrary distant year.

bane 10y ago

Weird, I think of time as more like an unending river going forwards and backwards, and as it goes away from me it spreads out and becomes hazy and less certain. More of a spatial vector than a loop as in this illustration. But I can't say it's a strong visual image, more of a sense like smell or hearing.

JeremyMorgan 10y ago

I didn't realize this was rare. I think of a year in an ellipsis with January at the far left, June at the far right. Years are a giant ribbon of various colors. I thought everyone had some kind of mental model of time. Though I am able to remember great details just by "pins" on my ribbon, and there is an ellipsis for each year ("oh yeah, that was in June of 1996" etc) so I guess it works well for me. I just didn't know it was that rare.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

mbrock 10y ago

I experience time as a series of revolving problems: painful awkward spring yields to sweaty sleepy summer yields to deathly gloomy fall which decays into desolate hostile winter... yet for a week in March one imagines the world good, a splendid week of hope.

Kiro 10y ago

I see time as a 3D wall. Very hard to explain.