THIS IS SO STRANGE. I really never thought much about this, but this is totally how I view the year in my head. Except mine bends around the corner of August and September instead. CRAZY!!!
Important dates might stand out - birthdays, anniversaries. And you could scan a visible timeline - to check if you were available - whenever you made plans. No actual diary necessary.
According to Julia Simner, a psychologist from the University of Edinburgh, there is a reasonable chance you can. And that you may use the experience, unconsciously, every day.
Dr Simner studies synaesthesia - a condition caused by an unusually high number of connections between two areas of the brain’s sensory cortex, making two senses inseparable.
In the case of time-space synaesthesia, a very visual experience can be triggered by thinking about time.
“I thought everyone thought like I did, says Holly Branigan, also a scientist at Edinburgh University, and someone with time-space synaesthesia.
“I found out when I attended a talk in the department that Julia was giving. She said that some synaesthetes can see time. And I thought, ‘Oh my god, that means I’ve got synaesthesia’.”
So what exactly does she see?
“For me it’s a bit like a running track,” she says.
“The track is organised around the academic year. The short ends are the summer and Christmas holidays - the summer holiday is slightly longer.
“It’s as if I’m in the centre and I’m turning around slowly as the year goes by. If I think ahead to the future, my perspective will shift.”
There are at least 54 different variants of synaesthesia and Dr Simner thinks this might be one of the most common ones.
“If you ask all the people at your work, or in your family, you’re likely to find at least one person who has it,” Dr Simner says.
Stalking my interns online is fun enough, but it’s especially great when doing so inadvertently makes me realize I actually do experience some variation of a strange neurological syndrome I’ve actually been jealous of other people for having in the past. (And yes, as that sentence implies, this happens to me LIKE ALL THE TIME.) I don’t link numbers or letters with particular colors (or personalities) like the most commonly mentioned synaesthetes, but apparently the fact that I visually conceptualize time throws me in the ranks.
I don’t remember ever even questioning this tendency until well after I met Joe and was puzzling over his poor concept of time when I could just, seemingly, scan past and present weeks and months for a general idea of when something happened or was scheduled. The shape of my internal visual timeline is actually more of a spiral, though I’ve never tried to sketch it out. Looking at this one is actually pretty disorienting—I almost feel carsick, trying to mesh that one up with my own, perhaps because I’ve always felt it was myself moving within the circle of the timeline, rather than the it revolving around me. And also perhaps because of that color combination. So maybe I’m happy with just my time-space synaesthesia—it doesn’t run the risk of any unpleasant aesthetic issues.
