Time-Space Synesthesia

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I'm actually interested in how many people out there experience this phenomenon. Please be truthful! Time-Space Synesthesia is the experiencing of days of the week, weeks of the month, and months of the year visually like in a circle or oval, or like a map. I'm pleased to have finally run across an actual concept for what I've been trying to describe for years. Now, I want to know how common this is.

No, I see it as a distorted ellipse with the narrow end in the winter months. I have great difficulty with doing math involving time. "Four days later" is very difficult to conceive. I definitely don't have Time-Space Synesthesia, although the days and months themselves are still subject to typical synesthesia.

Are you good at that sort of math?

Well, I have no trouble conceiving of four days from now, or four days earlier, as it's a matter of moving ahead or behind on the visualized circle. I don't know if that answers your question or not.

i have a little black and white spinny wheel for days of the week, and for months of the year, and whatever is current is on top. it seems to move in real time, so now it is 5:50 a.m. where i am and it is monday (rotated through a bit of the way) even though i have not gone to sleep. something like a little analog clock but the whole week, and another for the year.

i don't know if this exactly qualifies .. it is not in color and not as "fixed" as related calendars i've read of people having, and it's more or less two dimensional rather than residing in a space outside of me. i can't rely on it to tell me what time or day it is - i need to already know. for the record, i don't see numbers or letters in color (which is the most common type of synesthesia) but i do experience some weird sound / physical sensation mingling.

i don't know why you have this in "other psychological conditions" as synesthesia is generally associated with autism spectrum conditions. you might get more responses if you ask a mod to move it to general discussion.

Yes! Oh my God this has been driving me crazy for years. Thankyou for confirming the name and that this exists in others after-all

I'm not sure if this is the same, but I envision my months in an oval, and my days of the week in a line of squares, bigger ones for mid-week and weekend.

Not the best example, the real thing in my head is more 3D and has glowing pale-yellow clouds in the background. This doesn't replicate half of what it really looks like, but this is the idea.

[img][800:1023]http://i1090.photobucket.com/albums/i372/Simonono_Rogers/timespacesynthesia-1.png[/img]

now that you post that, i have to say that i have something like a strip of paper with the decade on it and if i want to think about the past i have to move to the left (almost actually move my head) to get to it .. and it gets harder and harder the further into the past, as if it's a tightly wound bit of something that is easier to manipulate where it's still unwound and open. if i were to look at it from above myself, it would be a circle where counterclockwise rewinds you into the past. the future is really transparent, like not quite there.

i feel like a total loony talking about this but we're definitely not the first to experience this sort of thing.

Simonono, what happens to your years if you think about, say, World War II? can you get them to quit dropping off the edge?

I think of the past as falling behind me, the present as though I'm standing on a moving floor, the future ascending before me, so I suppose it's like being on the apex of a moving wheel. But I'm much more aware of sideways in time, the sense that if I step just the right way and twist I'll be somewhen and somewhere else. I've always had that "sideways." But I don't know if this is what you're talking about in the OP. It's just the way I see things with my bizarre mind. I always assume that people see the present and the past exactly as I do. I know that very few people feel the sideways in time though.

Simonono:

Thanks for posting the illustration. Yea, that's similar to what's going on in my own mind. Days of the week are an oval, however, and my decade chart is horizontal until the year 2000 where the decades start to become vertical which indicates the turn of the century. My decades fade prior to the year 1900.

I have this-I have the year in a circle with Jan being around 2. It goes counter clockwise. I don't know where I got this from but I have always seen it this way. There are also pronounced ponts for the ends of the quarters, the solstices and I also see pronounced points for birthdays of my family members. I don't see the days of the week or the months very pronounced though.

a helix...

Time seems to me like a spiral, always rising upwards, but 'looping over' itself.. You could have spirals within spirals if you want, smaller spirals for the week all along a bigger spiral for the year.. months don't seem like they should spiral over each other to me..

I've never actually visualized it as such but I'm not very visual mentally.. that is a fun idea though... The spiral floats in a starfield, the other stars are other spirals, some spirals overlap, it's an infinite dimensional space so everything spirals over and through and into everything else, enjoy

I think in a peaks and valleys. Ever seen a wave of audio, kind of like that. Monday up, Tuesday down, Wednesday up, etc. It's all wavy like an audio wavelength.

Hi ebot,

Do you mean any sense sensation that causes disruption of smooth "time flow" (akinestopsia motion), or causes simultaneous pairing to a characteristic time unit also characteristic of a recurring cycle (such as a particular smell giving sensations of being in a particular season, a season that might or might not be present)? Or vice-versa???

Most of such phenomena is a learned sensation, as most time units are social constructs, with no solid relationship to a natural phenomena. The book "The Seven Day Circle" examines the total absence in nature of any natural phenomena related to a seven day week. Many people are so use to the Gregorian Calendar that the idea of Lunar months (and Leap months) are taken as very awkward, yet such months relate to natural phenomena much better.

Since I have clusters of seizures close to every 29.5 days over a long average (that doesn't stay in sync with the Moon), the typical time-travel deja vu with the aura of epileptic seizures give me strong polymodal limbic sensations to cyclic periods of 29.5 days. Dr. Cytowic's definitions of synesthesia tend to exclude much related to epilepsy (even my feeling smells as "touch" during my "blase" seizure aura), and by my understanding, most all similar phenomena that is a result of conditioning should also be excluded from satisfying a strict definition of synesthesia (i.e., why would a base-10 number give a "colour" sensation when the same number in base-2 doesn't, other than as a conditioned response, voiding satisfaction of a strict definition of synesthesia?). Dr. Cytowic's definition then becomes very wide involving conditioned responses that are so frequent as to be erroneously and easily assumed to be independent from a culture.

Using classical and operant conditioning, pseudo-synesthesias are very easy to learn (I used the smell of particular books to ace university exams with mnemonic tricks). I think Dr. Cytowic leaves off the "pseudo-" and uses the phrases "synesthetic configurations" and "eidetics" instead, which are easily more confusing.

Intellectually, I've studied enough differential geometry with general relativity theory, that the space-time warped conical slices always comes foremost in thoughts, but to me this is definitely pseudo-synesthesia, while my Limbic "multi-sense" sensations during epileptic aura associates time across location across emotions and across every basic sense (even temperature), and this seems much closer to be a genuine experience of time-space synesthesia.

Some astrophysicists go so far as to discount time as the fundamental variable, and to take temperature as the main variable to develop thermodynamic models of the universe, so is that time-space-temperature synesthesia???

Tadzio

My roommate in college, who had very severe ADHD and OCD, did this. She was an art major and managed to describe it to me well. She drew what she saw once too.