8 ms·

This is what the year actually looks like (2018)

121 points by nkurz 3y ago

plorkyeran 3y ago
I can’t say that it has ever occurred to me to visualize the year as anything at all, and very surprised to learn that it’s apparently a very common (or near universal?) thing to do. I don’t really understand the concept.
- rplnt 3y ago
  It's not something that should occur to you. It's just how your brain works. Not everyone has that visual aid. And year (or time) is not the only thing where it's applied. I have different mental visuals for all kinds of concepts. It's called visuospatial synthesis I believe. I find it weird and a bit arrogant that the author didn't open with some explanation.
- julian_t 3y ago
  Same here - I'd never heard of people having a visual image of a year. I certainly don't. And if you do have such a visual image, do you use it for anything or does it just sit there like a piece of art?
Tuckerism 3y ago
I love this question-- my "normal" view is a circle with December on the right (3 o'clock), and the year going counter-clockwise. I have some vague memory of a calendar laid out in this way, and it's colored my mental image ever since. Another cool thing I've noticed is that my visual perspective of the year shifts with the year. During the first quarter, I view the circle from outside the Q1 portion of the ring with the distinct understanding that I'm viewing it "upside down". And as the months go by, so does my position in the circle and my perspective on the rest of the year.
kzrdude 3y ago
Vaguely sinusoidal (high in summer, low in winter, continuing to the next year). The actual siusoidal ribbon is a calendar of a kind I've seen many times. This is kind of how I visualize future dates sometimes, I see them on this calendar.
danybittel 3y ago
Related, there are people who visualize the past in front of them and the future behind. Because, you already know the past, so you can see it and the future you don't know, so you can't see it. As for the year, I'm imagining a circle, but with January / December at the bottom. It may have something to do with how the plants are "in the ground". Really fascinating how we differ.
zephrx1111 3y ago
In my head, I think the year as ladder, not clock.
- gonzo41 3y ago
  I think of it as a sideway sliding set of weeks. Like something you can look down till the end!
surrTurr 3y ago
A circle? What? I always thought of the year as a sloppy ellipsis, with a positive gradient from 01-10 and a negative gradient from 11-12. The connection to the next year isn't a solid line but a dotted one. Also, in my imagination there is a third dimension, which means that the ellipsis doesn't connect to its starting point, but spirals upwards.
riffraff 3y ago
Odd, I just realized for me it's sorta-linear left to right but not so much. Jan-june is sloping down, july-august is flat (and about 1/3 of the length), september-december slope up. Next year and past year connect symmetrically in a darker shade beyond the year boundaries, I see next January and past December but not further than that. I had never realized this was so complex in my mind.
ivanche 3y ago
Line 7%. I assumed this would be in the 90+% territory. Either I am crazy or the world is.
Snoddas 3y ago
I chuckled a bit when he used Richard Feynman as an example of someone 'not crazy'. I read somewhere from one of his collegues (parafrased) "Of course he's crazy, but not in the bad way" I suppose 'eccentric vs crazy' is a on a subjective sliding scale
extragood 3y ago
I'm surprised that there weren't any sinusoidal representations mentioned. Scandinavians traditionally celebrate both the summer and winter solstices, and the change in light over the course of the year is dramatic at that latitude. To me, that would best be illustrated with a sine wave.
tobr 3y ago
> If the year is a circle – where’s March and December in your mind? The question together with the visualizations of the answers assume that the circle is still, and upright. In my mind the circle is flat on the ground, and I’m moving around it counter-clockwise. There’s no “up”. I’m always on whatever the current month is, facing inwards, seeing the past six months on my left and the next six months on my right.
alex_smart 3y ago
Am I the only one who visualises the year not as a line or circle but pages on a calendar?
tonnydourado 3y ago
What is wrong* with all these folks putting December at the top? Clearly it should be January at the top, then clockwise. * I know.
- plg94 3y ago
  Mapping the months to numbers, January is 1 and December is 12, and a real clock puts 12/0 on top, not 1.
  - hiccuphippo 3y ago
    The year starts a January, but the day starts at 12. I think December should be 11 and January 12. It makes more sense if you count both from zero. 12 is 0, January is 0.
pupileater 3y ago
I often think about how one can visualize these abstract things. I imagine a year going like this: JAN → FEB → MAR ↩ (new row) APR → MAY → JUN → JUL → AUG ↓ SEPT ↓ OCT ↓ NOV → DEC ...
- hiccuphippo 3y ago
  I saw some of the drawings also used a line and made a turn on August, may I ask why the turn?
  - pupileater 3y ago
    I think because there is a sharp change in weather at the end of August and it might be just a simple separation between Summer and Fall.
shever73 3y ago
For me the year is like a ribbon...almost like a an old film reel. It's an interesting study, though. It reminds me of Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month: > I have long enjoyed asking candidate programmers, "Where is next November?" If the question is too cryptic, then, "Tell me about your mental model of the calendar." The really good programmers have strong spatial senses; they usually have geometric models of time; and they quite often understand the first question without elaboration. They have highly individualistic models.
robga 3y ago
I see it as a 3d object ala the Menologium Rusticum Colotianum. This way you get the cycle, the split into 4 quarters, and a sequence view per month. You can see an image at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIL_VI_2305_-_Menologium_Rusticum_Colotianum_05_Iul-Sep_Oct-Dec.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIL_VI_2305_-_Menolo...
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Oh, so is that the famed Time Cube?
WA 3y ago
I didn't know I do actually imagine a year as a circle, but the illustration is so weird to me. Upon inspection, I imagine the year counter-clockwise with January starting at 5pm. Also, all months have colors (and these colors don't change in my mind – I knew that before).
koliber 3y ago
Mine looks like an annual calendar. A grid 3 wide and 4 down. Each box is a month. January is top-left, and December bottom-right. Each row is a quarter and starts with January, April, July, and October, respectively. If I had to pick a shape, it would be a zig-zag. No doubt that this is influenced by wall calendars.
mattlondon 3y ago
Fascinating. It has always just been a straight line for me, left to right, Jan to Dec with year n+1 just following on. I assumed everyone thought like this! Circular years just seems super strange to me.
ror_shubham 3y ago
Kya backchodi kar rahe ho bhai
xwdv 3y ago
A year is a 4D object at least.
lucideer 3y ago
This is a nice enough study but those commenting here surprised so many people see the year as a circle didn't read the article carefully enough: > I asked our readers: "If the year is a circle – where’s March and December in your mind?" The purpose of this study wasn't to find out if people see the year circularly or linearly - the circle was built in as a prior assumption. I have zero data but I'd be shocked if most people don't view the year linearly.
- mhandley 3y ago
  Yes, his question assumes an answer. Sure, I can force the year onto a circle, but that's not how I think of it. He really should not have assumed a circle in the first place if he wanted to know what people really think.
- serallak 3y ago
  The author talk about this: > ‘The year is an even circle’ is sufficient for 70 % of us. > But 28 % have entered free text. And there is a further breakdown of the other answers like ellipse, line, square, etc. So, at least in this survey, very few people view the year linearly, just 7%. Myself, I visualize the year as an ellipse.
gverrilla 3y ago
I don't get this. What is this thing about visualizing a concept? Do these people take hallucinogens to do this exercise? Or are they only reaching for the images of the past when they learned the concept? Is this an american thing? I don't see any image whatsoever when I think about a year. Same with democracy, time, justice or whatever. When I ask my friends, they also don't experience seeing images.
- NoboruWataya 3y ago
  > Is this an american thing? It's a post by a Norwegian author based mainly on data received from other Norwegians, so...
  - gverrilla 3y ago
    It's in English, and HN is an American website. Also Norwegian and American culture are not so distant. I'm just trying to understand because it seems like some kind of cultural phenomena, but I may be wrong. I can't visualize an year even if I take acid, visualizing concepts is just not the way my mind works. Perhaps this is some kind of art-game or something? Or are these people actually saying they see these images when they think about and use the concept of a year???
    - lucideer 3y ago
      > visualizing concepts is just not the way my mind works > are these people actually saying they see these images when they think about and use the concept of a year I do (not a circle but definitely a visualisation I see in my head). I don't know how reliable the data is, nor how well understood the topic is, but most studies I've seen on this do show the majority of people visually visualise concepts in their head; not universally, there's always people who don't visualise at all, but primary differences discussed in these type of results tend to be whether people's visualisations are vivid or vague or something different.
- ergl 3y ago
  You might have aphantasia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
ergonaught 3y ago
Still undecided whether I consider aphantasia crippling, but reading these depictions and recognizing now that they aren't "metaphorical" does generate a certain sadness.
the_gipsy 3y ago
The core is that we always represent time as space. In our mind, the past, present, and future are 3d or 2d relations. The week, a month, your lifespan all have some spatial "shape", or order at the least. I'm no expert, but I am pretty sure this is not Synesthesia like the article implies. "My" inner year is a counter-clockwise circle. But my week is a strip, even though week loops like years. My life is a downwards strip, I guess because I'll die someday. History itself is an upward strip, because time itself will never end (presumably).
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
DiggyJohnson 3y ago
This is such a great question. I’ve come to realize that my internal “year” is a very funky circle, stretched and melted in some places. It’s flat on the bottom, and rotates clockwise. Anticlockwise is bananas to me, but fair enough, it is the positive direction on a graph. I like these questions of internal representation. Like “what color is Wednesday?” Yellow, obviously, but I suspect disagreement.
ElevenLathe 3y ago
This is interesting. I never anticipated so many people would think of it as a circle. I mentally picture a calendar we had in my kindergarten classroom. It was a regular (USian, with the start of the week on Sunday) wall calendar, but all the pages had been cut out and hung in a line with January at the ceiling and December just above the floor. Relatedly, I've recently put a line in my .bashrc to display the ISO week number (date +%V) in addition to the traditional date. Knowing that we're in week 42 of the year somehow helps me get a better sense time passing than knowing it is the third Wednesday in October. In general I think the world lives in weeks rather than months and it's a little unfortunate that our date system obscures this.
- c22 3y ago
  I started tracking the weeks like that a long time ago when I was working a job that paid weekly. It's kind of like a super power for making accurate time estimates, I've found.
- mzi 3y ago
  I've discussed this with numerous different friends and colleagues over the years, and then most see time as linear if not quantified but very different when you start asking of periods. So many see years as cyclical, and understandably hours as well. Weeks are often tabular as your year is. One of the more interesting visualizations of the year was a colleague who saw it as a coil, so cyclic but also with a forward motion. Seasons are also interesting: my seasons are wedges of the cyclic year, but som I've discussed this with have the seasons removed from their representation of the year and have seasons tabular instead.
- thomasahle 3y ago
  > In general I think the world lives in weeks rather than months and it's a little unfortunate that our date system obscures this. In Denmark using week numbers is very normal. People will know what week's are vacation weeks, and ask you what your plans are for week 40 etc. I wonder if this is common in other countries too?
  - sk0g 3y ago
c22 3y ago
Man, I've never even considered imagining the year as a circle. It's always been linear for me (with future and past years connected to it on either end). I do imagine cycles over the linear model, but these appear more like overlapping sine waves than circles.
- eru 3y ago
  It the same relationship for me between the integers and finite fields.
- meling 3y ago
  My reaction was the same. Honestly I hadn’t even thought about it until I started reading the article… I too would say it is linear for me. The circle I can get, but some of the weirder ones, I wonder if people answering this survey were just making it up for the fun of it.
- layer8 3y ago
  Yeah, it's more like a sine wave for me. Winters are the hills and summers the valleys.
  - Gare 3y ago
    Interesting, it's the opposite for me. The sun is high and days are long in the summer, so that's where peak is.
    - layer8 3y ago
      For me it’s like a nice slide into the warmer months, and a less pleasant climb into the colder months. And you see the next year after the peak, the turn of the year bringing a new perspective of sorts.
- skerit 3y ago
  Back in my school days, when I was around 7 years old, one of the most vivid memories that stick with me is of a vertical timeline displayed across the entire width of our classroom's back wall. It started with September on the left, and it ended with August on the right. To this day, whenever I think of a year, I picture it like that timeline.
gumby 3y ago
I thought the author asked how you would visualize it as a circle. For me it’s an oblique rectangle. The integers up to a few thousand (and the big multiples like thousand, million, lakh etc) have a definite shape to me. I remember trying to draw it as a kid (rather unsuccessfully). But when doing simple arithmetic (including simple rationals) I simply look up the answer. My college roommate was interested and observed that I literally flick my eyes around to find the answer. Learning the times tables always seemed like a weird idea — I just answered the questions when asked. I assume a lot of people do the same.
eszed 3y ago
I'd never thought to visualize a year! I have a weak - not non-existent, but weak - ability to generate mental images, so it takes focus and concentration to do so. Whatever image I might create would be contaminated by these examples, so I'm not going to try it now. I will try to remember to attempt it in a few months, just out of curiosity. I will say that long years spent in, or associated with, academia means that the start of a year is irrevocably associated with September or so. January is 'meh', but autumn is alive with fresh possibility.
pohl 3y ago
In my head December is at 6 o’clock and the year, a circle, progresses counterclockwise. I had no idea it wasn’t this way for everyone.
- xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
  I am mostly the same, though I have never considered my own representation seriously until reading the article. I can't picture it any other way, though. Clockwise???
m463 3y ago
weird. my year is linear, left to right. It goes off into the distance. the past is back to the left.
- TheRoque 3y ago
  Same. The circular model seems harder for me to find distance between 2 dates
karmakaze 3y ago
I don't know if I had a layout in mind beforehand, but upon thinking about it for a bit can settle on one that I like. I would generally prefer to have spring/summer/fall being more prominent than winter. This is historically accurate as we didn't even have timekeeping or month names for winter until later. Despite the calendar beginning in Jan, my natural year mentally begins in spring. I debated clockwise/anticlockwise as one follows a clock and the other geometry. In the end I like this best flows left->right from spring to fall (like sunrise to sunset) and has summer up top (like high noon) and winter bottom (with lowest temps). Summer Spring Fall Winter Now I didn't put month names here, but being in the northern hemisphere is easy to place.
karmakaze 3y ago
The google form phrasing has a bias by using clock references which implicitly has 0/beginning at the top. It could have used a compass which is then perhaps biased east->west anticlockwise as the sun travels. It should simply have said top, bottom, top/left, etc. I also would have preferred if it asked people to place summer, winter, spring, fall which doesn't have the calendar zero of Dec/Jan.
clement_b 3y ago
Incredible! On my end I see a year as: - Jan to June on one row - July, August September in a column under June - October to December on one row, which is on the same row or next year's Jan. All that left to right. Have I just described a (weird) wall calendar?
waingake 3y ago
I've got the year on a clock face here https://clock.mohiohio.com https://clock.mohiohio.com. I chose summer solstice for 12pm and winter solstice for 12am. I built this so that I would stop expecting winter to end soon after winter solstice, no my friend, the night is just getting started. ( I'm in the southern hemisphere btw if you are seeing am instead of pm that'll be why )
OmarShehata 3y ago
Highly encourage you to pose this question to friends, alongside "what do numbers look like in your head" I keep learning new spatial relationships every time I ask! I drew mine here: https://omarshehata.me/notebook/my_number_forms https://omarshehata.me/notebook/my_number_forms
Toutouxc 3y ago
If someone told me to visualize a year on a circle, I’d probably go with the default watch format, but the thing is, I don’t see the year as anything. Lots of interesting responses from people who see it as a circle, oval, flattened or on a mountainside, I just don’t see “a year” at all. I’m a person with vivid 3D imagination and good spatial reasoning, but I haven’t developed a spatial model of a year at all. For me, when comparing or estimating timescales, months are numbers in a range, and I mean numbers, not points on a line. When deciding whether to do something in February or June or October, there are significant memories, colors, smells and pictures associated with each, but again, no spatial model.
- atoav 3y ago
  Maybe you live closer to the equator than the Norwegians in that post? The farther north you live the more the year will become a thing on it's own, because the months feel very different due to the length of the days changing. I am not saying that this necessarily must lead to geometric metaphors, but if you are somewhere where "a day" looks more or less the same independent of the season it makes more sense to tie to your own experience
  - audunw 3y ago
    Norwegian here, and I feel the same as Toutouxc. I can imagine the year as a circle, since we’ve had circles like that in school. But there’s not generally any figure that pops into my head when I think about it. I can relate to the complicated pictures some have though. It feels like different parts of the year have different sizes and angles to them, so could probably draw a shape that feels right to me
- LoganDark 3y ago
  Same here, I think? Months to me are just numbers. Even remembering the order of them was hard. I think I'm just barely starting to get the hang of it now

121 points by nkurz 3y ago

I can’t say that it has ever occurred to me to visualize the year as anything at all, and very surprised to learn that it’s apparently a very common (or near universal?) thing to do. I don’t really understand the concept.

rplnt 3y ago
It's not something that should occur to you. It's just how your brain works. Not everyone has that visual aid. And year (or time) is not the only thing where it's applied. I have different mental visuals for all kinds of concepts. It's called visuospatial synthesis I believe. I find it weird and a bit arrogant that the author didn't open with some explanation.
julian_t 3y ago
Same here - I'd never heard of people having a visual image of a year. I certainly don't. And if you do have such a visual image, do you use it for anything or does it just sit there like a piece of art?

Tuckerism 3y ago

I love this question-- my "normal" view is a circle with December on the right (3 o'clock), and the year going counter-clockwise. I have some vague memory of a calendar laid out in this way, and it's colored my mental image ever since. Another cool thing I've noticed is that my visual perspective of the year shifts with the year. During the first quarter, I view the circle from outside the Q1 portion of the ring with the distinct understanding that I'm viewing it "upside down". And as the months go by, so does my position in the circle and my perspective on the rest of the year.

kzrdude 3y ago

Vaguely sinusoidal (high in summer, low in winter, continuing to the next year). The actual siusoidal ribbon is a calendar of a kind I've seen many times. This is kind of how I visualize future dates sometimes, I see them on this calendar.

danybittel 3y ago

Related, there are people who visualize the past in front of them and the future behind. Because, you already know the past, so you can see it and the future you don't know, so you can't see it. As for the year, I'm imagining a circle, but with January / December at the bottom. It may have something to do with how the plants are "in the ground". Really fascinating how we differ.

zephrx1111 3y ago

In my head, I think the year as ladder, not clock.

gonzo41 3y ago
I think of it as a sideway sliding set of weeks. Like something you can look down till the end!

surrTurr 3y ago

A circle? What? I always thought of the year as a sloppy ellipsis, with a positive gradient from 01-10 and a negative gradient from 11-12. The connection to the next year isn't a solid line but a dotted one. Also, in my imagination there is a third dimension, which means that the ellipsis doesn't connect to its starting point, but spirals upwards.

riffraff 3y ago

Odd, I just realized for me it's sorta-linear left to right but not so much. Jan-june is sloping down, july-august is flat (and about 1/3 of the length), september-december slope up. Next year and past year connect symmetrically in a darker shade beyond the year boundaries, I see next January and past December but not further than that. I had never realized this was so complex in my mind.

ivanche 3y ago

Line 7%. I assumed this would be in the 90+% territory. Either I am crazy or the world is.

Snoddas 3y ago

I chuckled a bit when he used Richard Feynman as an example of someone 'not crazy'. I read somewhere from one of his collegues (parafrased) "Of course he's crazy, but not in the bad way" I suppose 'eccentric vs crazy' is a on a subjective sliding scale

extragood 3y ago

I'm surprised that there weren't any sinusoidal representations mentioned. Scandinavians traditionally celebrate both the summer and winter solstices, and the change in light over the course of the year is dramatic at that latitude. To me, that would best be illustrated with a sine wave.

tobr 3y ago

> If the year is a circle – where’s March and December in your mind? The question together with the visualizations of the answers assume that the circle is still, and upright. In my mind the circle is flat on the ground, and I’m moving around it counter-clockwise. There’s no “up”. I’m always on whatever the current month is, facing inwards, seeing the past six months on my left and the next six months on my right.

alex_smart 3y ago

Am I the only one who visualises the year not as a line or circle but pages on a calendar?

tonnydourado 3y ago

What is wrong* with all these folks putting December at the top? Clearly it should be January at the top, then clockwise. * I know.

plg94 3y ago
Mapping the months to numbers, January is 1 and December is 12, and a real clock puts 12/0 on top, not 1.
- hiccuphippo 3y ago
  The year starts a January, but the day starts at 12. I think December should be 11 and January 12. It makes more sense if you count both from zero. 12 is 0, January is 0.

pupileater 3y ago

I often think about how one can visualize these abstract things. I imagine a year going like this: JAN → FEB → MAR ↩ (new row) APR → MAY → JUN → JUL → AUG ↓ SEPT ↓ OCT ↓ NOV → DEC ...

hiccuphippo 3y ago
I saw some of the drawings also used a line and made a turn on August, may I ask why the turn?
- pupileater 3y ago
  I think because there is a sharp change in weather at the end of August and it might be just a simple separation between Summer and Fall.

shever73 3y ago

For me the year is like a ribbon...almost like a an old film reel. It's an interesting study, though. It reminds me of Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man Month: > I have long enjoyed asking candidate programmers, "Where is next November?" If the question is too cryptic, then, "Tell me about your mental model of the calendar." The really good programmers have strong spatial senses; they usually have geometric models of time; and they quite often understand the first question without elaboration. They have highly individualistic models.

robga 3y ago

I see it as a 3d object ala the Menologium Rusticum Colotianum. This way you get the cycle, the split into 4 quarters, and a sequence view per month. You can see an image at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIL_VI_2305_-_Menologium_Rusticum_Colotianum_05_Iul-Sep_Oct-Dec.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CIL_VI_2305_-_Menolo...

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Oh, so is that the famed Time Cube?

WA 3y ago

I didn't know I do actually imagine a year as a circle, but the illustration is so weird to me. Upon inspection, I imagine the year counter-clockwise with January starting at 5pm. Also, all months have colors (and these colors don't change in my mind – I knew that before).

koliber 3y ago

Mine looks like an annual calendar. A grid 3 wide and 4 down. Each box is a month. January is top-left, and December bottom-right. Each row is a quarter and starts with January, April, July, and October, respectively. If I had to pick a shape, it would be a zig-zag. No doubt that this is influenced by wall calendars.

mattlondon 3y ago

Fascinating. It has always just been a straight line for me, left to right, Jan to Dec with year n+1 just following on. I assumed everyone thought like this! Circular years just seems super strange to me.

ror_shubham 3y ago

Kya backchodi kar rahe ho bhai

xwdv 3y ago

A year is a 4D object at least.

lucideer 3y ago

This is a nice enough study but those commenting here surprised so many people see the year as a circle didn't read the article carefully enough: > I asked our readers: "If the year is a circle – where’s March and December in your mind?" The purpose of this study wasn't to find out if people see the year circularly or linearly - the circle was built in as a prior assumption. I have zero data but I'd be shocked if most people don't view the year linearly.

mhandley 3y ago
Yes, his question assumes an answer. Sure, I can force the year onto a circle, but that's not how I think of it. He really should not have assumed a circle in the first place if he wanted to know what people really think.
serallak 3y ago
The author talk about this: > ‘The year is an even circle’ is sufficient for 70 % of us. > But 28 % have entered free text. And there is a further breakdown of the other answers like ellipse, line, square, etc. So, at least in this survey, very few people view the year linearly, just 7%. Myself, I visualize the year as an ellipse.

gverrilla 3y ago

I don't get this. What is this thing about visualizing a concept? Do these people take hallucinogens to do this exercise? Or are they only reaching for the images of the past when they learned the concept? Is this an american thing? I don't see any image whatsoever when I think about a year. Same with democracy, time, justice or whatever. When I ask my friends, they also don't experience seeing images.

NoboruWataya 3y ago
> Is this an american thing? It's a post by a Norwegian author based mainly on data received from other Norwegians, so...
- gverrilla 3y ago
  It's in English, and HN is an American website. Also Norwegian and American culture are not so distant. I'm just trying to understand because it seems like some kind of cultural phenomena, but I may be wrong. I can't visualize an year even if I take acid, visualizing concepts is just not the way my mind works. Perhaps this is some kind of art-game or something? Or are these people actually saying they see these images when they think about and use the concept of a year???
  - lucideer 3y ago
    > visualizing concepts is just not the way my mind works > are these people actually saying they see these images when they think about and use the concept of a year I do (not a circle but definitely a visualisation I see in my head). I don't know how reliable the data is, nor how well understood the topic is, but most studies I've seen on this do show the majority of people visually visualise concepts in their head; not universally, there's always people who don't visualise at all, but primary differences discussed in these type of results tend to be whether people's visualisations are vivid or vague or something different.
ergl 3y ago
You might have aphantasia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

ergonaught 3y ago

Still undecided whether I consider aphantasia crippling, but reading these depictions and recognizing now that they aren't "metaphorical" does generate a certain sadness.

the_gipsy 3y ago

The core is that we always represent time as space. In our mind, the past, present, and future are 3d or 2d relations. The week, a month, your lifespan all have some spatial "shape", or order at the least. I'm no expert, but I am pretty sure this is not Synesthesia like the article implies. "My" inner year is a counter-clockwise circle. But my week is a strip, even though week loops like years. My life is a downwards strip, I guess because I'll die someday. History itself is an upward strip, because time itself will never end (presumably).

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

DiggyJohnson 3y ago

This is such a great question. I’ve come to realize that my internal “year” is a very funky circle, stretched and melted in some places. It’s flat on the bottom, and rotates clockwise. Anticlockwise is bananas to me, but fair enough, it is the positive direction on a graph. I like these questions of internal representation. Like “what color is Wednesday?” Yellow, obviously, but I suspect disagreement.

ElevenLathe 3y ago

This is interesting. I never anticipated so many people would think of it as a circle. I mentally picture a calendar we had in my kindergarten classroom. It was a regular (USian, with the start of the week on Sunday) wall calendar, but all the pages had been cut out and hung in a line with January at the ceiling and December just above the floor. Relatedly, I've recently put a line in my .bashrc to display the ISO week number (date +%V) in addition to the traditional date. Knowing that we're in week 42 of the year somehow helps me get a better sense time passing than knowing it is the third Wednesday in October. In general I think the world lives in weeks rather than months and it's a little unfortunate that our date system obscures this.

c22 3y ago
I started tracking the weeks like that a long time ago when I was working a job that paid weekly. It's kind of like a super power for making accurate time estimates, I've found.
mzi 3y ago
I've discussed this with numerous different friends and colleagues over the years, and then most see time as linear if not quantified but very different when you start asking of periods. So many see years as cyclical, and understandably hours as well. Weeks are often tabular as your year is. One of the more interesting visualizations of the year was a colleague who saw it as a coil, so cyclic but also with a forward motion. Seasons are also interesting: my seasons are wedges of the cyclic year, but som I've discussed this with have the seasons removed from their representation of the year and have seasons tabular instead.
thomasahle 3y ago
> In general I think the world lives in weeks rather than months and it's a little unfortunate that our date system obscures this. In Denmark using week numbers is very normal. People will know what week's are vacation weeks, and ask you what your plans are for week 40 etc. I wonder if this is common in other countries too?
- sk0g 3y ago

c22 3y ago

Man, I've never even considered imagining the year as a circle. It's always been linear for me (with future and past years connected to it on either end). I do imagine cycles over the linear model, but these appear more like overlapping sine waves than circles.

eru 3y ago
It the same relationship for me between the integers and finite fields.
meling 3y ago
My reaction was the same. Honestly I hadn’t even thought about it until I started reading the article… I too would say it is linear for me. The circle I can get, but some of the weirder ones, I wonder if people answering this survey were just making it up for the fun of it.
layer8 3y ago
Yeah, it's more like a sine wave for me. Winters are the hills and summers the valleys.
- Gare 3y ago
  Interesting, it's the opposite for me. The sun is high and days are long in the summer, so that's where peak is.
  - layer8 3y ago
    For me it’s like a nice slide into the warmer months, and a less pleasant climb into the colder months. And you see the next year after the peak, the turn of the year bringing a new perspective of sorts.
skerit 3y ago
Back in my school days, when I was around 7 years old, one of the most vivid memories that stick with me is of a vertical timeline displayed across the entire width of our classroom's back wall. It started with September on the left, and it ended with August on the right. To this day, whenever I think of a year, I picture it like that timeline.

gumby 3y ago

I thought the author asked how you would visualize it as a circle. For me it’s an oblique rectangle. The integers up to a few thousand (and the big multiples like thousand, million, lakh etc) have a definite shape to me. I remember trying to draw it as a kid (rather unsuccessfully). But when doing simple arithmetic (including simple rationals) I simply look up the answer. My college roommate was interested and observed that I literally flick my eyes around to find the answer. Learning the times tables always seemed like a weird idea — I just answered the questions when asked. I assume a lot of people do the same.

eszed 3y ago

I'd never thought to visualize a year! I have a weak - not non-existent, but weak - ability to generate mental images, so it takes focus and concentration to do so. Whatever image I might create would be contaminated by these examples, so I'm not going to try it now. I will try to remember to attempt it in a few months, just out of curiosity. I will say that long years spent in, or associated with, academia means that the start of a year is irrevocably associated with September or so. January is 'meh', but autumn is alive with fresh possibility.

pohl 3y ago

In my head December is at 6 o’clock and the year, a circle, progresses counterclockwise. I had no idea it wasn’t this way for everyone.

xyzzy_plugh 3y ago
I am mostly the same, though I have never considered my own representation seriously until reading the article. I can't picture it any other way, though. Clockwise???

m463 3y ago

weird. my year is linear, left to right. It goes off into the distance. the past is back to the left.

TheRoque 3y ago
Same. The circular model seems harder for me to find distance between 2 dates

karmakaze 3y ago

I don't know if I had a layout in mind beforehand, but upon thinking about it for a bit can settle on one that I like. I would generally prefer to have spring/summer/fall being more prominent than winter. This is historically accurate as we didn't even have timekeeping or month names for winter until later. Despite the calendar beginning in Jan, my natural year mentally begins in spring. I debated clockwise/anticlockwise as one follows a clock and the other geometry. In the end I like this best flows left->right from spring to fall (like sunrise to sunset) and has summer up top (like high noon) and winter bottom (with lowest temps). Summer Spring Fall Winter Now I didn't put month names here, but being in the northern hemisphere is easy to place.

karmakaze 3y ago

The google form phrasing has a bias by using clock references which implicitly has 0/beginning at the top. It could have used a compass which is then perhaps biased east->west anticlockwise as the sun travels. It should simply have said top, bottom, top/left, etc. I also would have preferred if it asked people to place summer, winter, spring, fall which doesn't have the calendar zero of Dec/Jan.

clement_b 3y ago

Incredible! On my end I see a year as: - Jan to June on one row - July, August September in a column under June - October to December on one row, which is on the same row or next year's Jan. All that left to right. Have I just described a (weird) wall calendar?

waingake 3y ago

I've got the year on a clock face here https://clock.mohiohio.com https://clock.mohiohio.com. I chose summer solstice for 12pm and winter solstice for 12am. I built this so that I would stop expecting winter to end soon after winter solstice, no my friend, the night is just getting started. ( I'm in the southern hemisphere btw if you are seeing am instead of pm that'll be why )

OmarShehata 3y ago

Highly encourage you to pose this question to friends, alongside "what do numbers look like in your head" I keep learning new spatial relationships every time I ask! I drew mine here: https://omarshehata.me/notebook/my_number_forms https://omarshehata.me/notebook/my_number_forms

Toutouxc 3y ago

If someone told me to visualize a year on a circle, I’d probably go with the default watch format, but the thing is, I don’t see the year as anything. Lots of interesting responses from people who see it as a circle, oval, flattened or on a mountainside, I just don’t see “a year” at all. I’m a person with vivid 3D imagination and good spatial reasoning, but I haven’t developed a spatial model of a year at all. For me, when comparing or estimating timescales, months are numbers in a range, and I mean numbers, not points on a line. When deciding whether to do something in February or June or October, there are significant memories, colors, smells and pictures associated with each, but again, no spatial model.

atoav 3y ago
Maybe you live closer to the equator than the Norwegians in that post? The farther north you live the more the year will become a thing on it's own, because the months feel very different due to the length of the days changing. I am not saying that this necessarily must lead to geometric metaphors, but if you are somewhere where "a day" looks more or less the same independent of the season it makes more sense to tie to your own experience
- audunw 3y ago
  Norwegian here, and I feel the same as Toutouxc. I can imagine the year as a circle, since we’ve had circles like that in school. But there’s not generally any figure that pops into my head when I think about it. I can relate to the complicated pictures some have though. It feels like different parts of the year have different sizes and angles to them, so could probably draw a shape that feels right to me
LoganDark 3y ago
Same here, I think? Months to me are just numbers. Even remembering the order of them was hard. I think I'm just barely starting to get the hang of it now