For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a very specific way of imagining the week. The weekdays are arranged on an ellipse, with an inclination of ~30°, starting with Monday in the bottom-right, progressing along the lower edge to Friday in the top-left, then the weekend days go above the ellipse and the cycle “collapses” back to Monday.
Actually, calling it “ellipse” is not quite right because in my mind’s eye it feels like Saturday and Sunday are almost at the same height, Sunday just barely lower than Saturday.
I have a similar ellipse for the year, this one oriented bottom-left to top-right:
This one also feels wrong because “in my head” each of the following is true:
Each month takes the same amount of space (/measure?).
There are fewer months along the lower side of the cycle.
I strongly feel that “this should be a mathematically proper ellipse”. (Non-Euclidean geometry?)
The main interesting commonalities I see between them:
The initial elements (Monday and January) start in the lower corner of the cycle.
The “free” elements of the cycle (weekend and summer vacation) are along the top edge of the cycle.
The segment between the last “free” element and the initial element is stretched so as to make it ellipse-like?
Clockwise direction.
I don’t remember exactly when I became meta-aware of this in the sense of knowing that this way of imagining the most basic temporal cycles is probably rather peculiar to me. It certainly was between learning about associative synesthesia (of which I think this is an example?), which was at my first year of university at the latest (~8 years ago), and when I first described this to somebody, maybe about 2 or 3 years ago, their reaction being approximately “WTF”.
I’ve spoken about it to a few people so far (~10?), and nobody reported having anything like this.
I just met someone recently who has this! They said they have always visualized the months of the year as on a slanted treadmill, unevenly distributed. They described it as a form of synesthesia, which is conceptually consistent with how I experience grapheme-color associative synesthesia.
This is very similar to how l perceive time! what I find interesting is that while I’ve heard people talk about the way they conceptualize time before I’ve never heard anyone else mention the bizarre geometry aspect. The sole exceptions to this were my Dad and Grandfather, who brought this phenomenon to my attention when I was young.
I have similar thing for week days, but somehow with a weird shape? in general, it’s a similar cycle, but flipped horizontally, going left to right: on top it’s: sun, sat on the bottom: mon, tue, wed, thu, fri the shape connecting days goes downwards from sun to mon, tue, wed, then upwards to thu, then down to fri, then up to sat, sun, closing the loop.
Has it always been with you? Any ideas what might be the reason for the bump at Thursday? Was Thursday in some sense “special” for you when you were a kid?
For as long as I can remember, I have always placed dates on an imaginary timeline, that “placing” involving stuff like fuzzy mental imagery of events attached to the date-labelled point on the timeline. It’s probably much less crisp than yours because so far I haven’t tried to learn history that intensely systematically via spaced repetition (though your example makes me want to do that), but otherwise sounds quite familiar.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a very specific way of imagining the week. The weekdays are arranged on an ellipse, with an inclination of ~30°, starting with Monday in the bottom-right, progressing along the lower edge to Friday in the top-left, then the weekend days go above the ellipse and the cycle “collapses” back to Monday.
Actually, calling it “ellipse” is not quite right because in my mind’s eye it feels like Saturday and Sunday are almost at the same height, Sunday just barely lower than Saturday.
I have a similar ellipse for the year, this one oriented bottom-left to top-right:
This one also feels wrong because “in my head” each of the following is true:
Each month takes the same amount of space (/measure?).
There are fewer months along the lower side of the cycle.
I strongly feel that “this should be a mathematically proper ellipse”. (Non-Euclidean geometry?)
The main interesting commonalities I see between them:
The initial elements (Monday and January) start in the lower corner of the cycle.
The “free” elements of the cycle (weekend and summer vacation) are along the top edge of the cycle.
The segment between the last “free” element and the initial element is stretched so as to make it ellipse-like?
Clockwise direction.
I don’t remember exactly when I became meta-aware of this in the sense of knowing that this way of imagining the most basic temporal cycles is probably rather peculiar to me. It certainly was between learning about associative synesthesia (of which I think this is an example?), which was at my first year of university at the latest (~8 years ago), and when I first described this to somebody, maybe about 2 or 3 years ago, their reaction being approximately “WTF”.
I’ve spoken about it to a few people so far (~10?), and nobody reported having anything like this.
Hmm I just imagine Saturday and Sunday on top with the other days in a lower row.
I just met someone recently who has this! They said they have always visualized the months of the year as on a slanted treadmill, unevenly distributed. They described it as a form of synesthesia, which is conceptually consistent with how I experience grapheme-color associative synesthesia.
That’s a nice, concise handle!
This is very similar to how l perceive time! what I find interesting is that while I’ve heard people talk about the way they conceptualize time before I’ve never heard anyone else mention the bizarre geometry aspect. The sole exceptions to this were my Dad and Grandfather, who brought this phenomenon to my attention when I was young.
I have similar thing for week days, but somehow with a weird shape?
in general, it’s a similar cycle, but flipped horizontally, going left to right:
on top it’s: sun, sat
on the bottom: mon, tue, wed, thu, fri
the shape connecting days goes downwards from sun to mon, tue, wed, then upwards to thu, then down to fri, then up to sat, sun, closing the loop.
not sure is this makes any sense )
I think I understand.
Has it always been with you? Any ideas what might be the reason for the bump at Thursday? Was Thursday in some sense “special” for you when you were a kid?
Ha, thinking back to childhood I get it now, it’s the influence of the layot of the school daily journal in USSR/Ukraine, like https://cn1.nevsedoma.com.ua/images/2011/33/7/10000000.jpg
I have something like this for years: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j8WMRgKSCxqxxKMnj/what-i-think-about-when-i-think-about-history
For as long as I can remember, I have always placed dates on an imaginary timeline, that “placing” involving stuff like fuzzy mental imagery of events attached to the date-labelled point on the timeline. It’s probably much less crisp than yours because so far I haven’t tried to learn history that intensely systematically via spaced repetition (though your example makes me want to do that), but otherwise sounds quite familiar.