3 ms·
I was aware of my synesthesia for quite some time (numbers and letters had their colors for as long as I can remember, it also extends to some sound/taste/color
by pawelk 9y ago
I was aware of my synesthesia for quite some time (numbers and letters had their colors for as long as I can remember, it also extends to some sound/taste/color combinations). I don't remember how it occurred to me that it's not how everyone perceives the world, must have been early in my childhood.
But I have never heard of this number form concept so thank you for unlocking it for me. My number form for natural numbers is quite smooth, like a tangent line progressing just slightly for numbers 0 - 20, then becoming almost vertical at >70. Of course the numbers (or, to be precise, digits, but sometimes they blend) have their colors. Negative numbers progress horizontally along the x axis to the left.
Does visualizing time also fall under a number form phenomenon? Or is it described by some other term? I'd love to learn more! Thinking of a year I see a disc, slightly tilted so winter months are a bit lower than summer, the time progress is counter-clockwise and I am constantly oriented spatially on this disc. So I always go "left" and "uphill" in the spring, and "downhill" in autumn, and past months are not simply "behind" me, I can point to them in space (so now, in October, January is more in front and slightly to the left, April is across on the other side, November just down the road, etc. To make things more fun every month has its color). Thinking about time brings me there just like thinking about walking around my real neighborhood brings awareness of how am I positioned in relation to my house. Thinking on smaller time scales just zooms it in and positions me like I was observing the edge of the disc from the inside (so weeks progress to the left as well; thinking about any week in a year makes me spatially aware of where I am in relation to the year).
Just trying to describe it for the first time makes it seem strange to me, while it was something that simply always has been with me all the time, and I half expect you to tell me that, in fact, this is basically how everyone perceives time.
tl;dr: is there a separate term to describe mapping time to space, or more generally applying spatial awareness to other phenomena / prceiving time using other senses?
- amyjess 9y ago> Does visualizing time also fall under a number form phenomenon? I think it depends on how it's visualized. Number forms are idiosyncratic two-dimensional visualizations of any numerical sequence. If the visualization is three-dimensional, it's spatial sequence synesthesia, which is a different phenomenon. For me, months of the year are something like a sine wave, which is still a number form. The peak is in June, and the trough is in December. Edit: According to Wikipedia, spatio-temporal synesthesia is also a thing. I think that's what you have.