I have time-space synesthesia, so I actually picture some times as being literally farther away than others.
I visualize the months of the year in a disc slanted away from me, kind of like a clock with New Years being at 6pm, and visualize years on a number line.
What do days of a week feel like, or hours in a day, or minutes in an hour? What about the years in your life? What about centuries of history? Geological timespans? (the last I don’t know almost at all, and so you may not either; which may mean you can’t picture them).
You may be reading too much into my label. For most of those they don’t feel like anything to me.
The main thing I feel when it comes to times is, as I said, times throughout a year feeling like they have a spatial location or direction. So e.g. August feels like it is up-and-to-the-left in front of me. (Holidays and seasons and other events like friend’s birthdays also have this directional spatial feel to them, i.e. I locate where approximately they are on the disk without thinking about it.) This isn’t some memory palace technique I came up with to help me remember dates; it’s just something I realize I always imagine unconsciously after I learned about synesthesias that not everyone does. (In describing it to others I have found that some other people who have basically this same representation of time throughout the year. IIRC one person I talked to once said they visualize a spiral with the months in different years at different levels.)
When I think of different years I do visualize them on a number line streching back a few centuries to the left. This is easier to explain by saying that time is often depicted on a number line timeline.
I have time-space synesthesia, so I actually picture some times as being literally farther away than others.
I visualize the months of the year in a disc slanted away from me, kind of like a clock with New Years being at 6pm, and visualize years on a number line.
I did not know this was a kind of synesthesia!
What do days of a week feel like, or hours in a day, or minutes in an hour? What about the years in your life? What about centuries of history? Geological timespans? (the last I don’t know almost at all, and so you may not either; which may mean you can’t picture them).
You may be reading too much into my label. For most of those they don’t feel like anything to me.
The main thing I feel when it comes to times is, as I said, times throughout a year feeling like they have a spatial location or direction. So e.g. August feels like it is up-and-to-the-left in front of me. (Holidays and seasons and other events like friend’s birthdays also have this directional spatial feel to them, i.e. I locate where approximately they are on the disk without thinking about it.) This isn’t some memory palace technique I came up with to help me remember dates; it’s just something I realize I always imagine unconsciously after I learned about synesthesias that not everyone does. (In describing it to others I have found that some other people who have basically this same representation of time throughout the year. IIRC one person I talked to once said they visualize a spiral with the months in different years at different levels.)
When I think of different years I do visualize them on a number line streching back a few centuries to the left. This is easier to explain by saying that time is often depicted on a number line timeline.