I've been facinated with people's spacial associations with time since I first realized they can vary from person to person. I like to ask people how they visua

I've been facinated with people's spacial associations with time since I first realized they can vary from person to person. I like to ask people how they visualize the arrangement of months in a year, because there doesn't appear to be any single standard way to do so. When I was in kindergarten, the teacher would lead the class to name off the months by pointing to a year calendar arranged on the wall in a horseshoe shape, starting with January in the bottom left, arcing through the summer months at the top and returing to December in the bottom right. Having been exposed to this particular arrangement so often at such an impressionable age, December and January are in my mind forever separated by gap, and it never fails to generate the feeling that those two months are more distant than any other adjacent months, and I'm sure it has an effect on my planning during that time. It makes me wonder how it might feel to have learned the months arranged in a circle, on a line, or in a grid. Or to have learned European-style Monday-Sunday weeks, lunar months, or something exotic like months of 7 or 8 4-day weeks, or 10 144-minute hours per day. And of course the hacker in me wants to figure out what the optimal arrangement.