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The Atlantic has an article about people with a type of synesthesia which causes them to see time around them.
The English polymath Francis Galton first described calendar forms in 1880, and the phenomenon has been rarely studied since. But Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego who has been studying synesthesia for a long time, has been slowly amassing and studying people with this odd perceptual quirk.
He met one such person, a 25-year-old woman named Emma, a year ago. Her calendar is a hula hoop, which stretches horizontally in front of her and touches her chest at one point—always December 31st, no matter the actual time of year. Emma uses her calendar to organize her life, attaching events to the various months and zooming around the hoop to access them.
The hoop is anchored to her body; it doesn't move if she tilts or rotates her head. "Obviously, this is a construct in her head, not a real hula hoop stuck to her chest," says Ramachandran. But if she turns her head to the right, the left side of the calendar became fuzzier, as it would be if it was an actual physical object. More bizarrely, the memories that she had appended to those months also became indistinct and harder to recall.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday December 12 2016, @03:15PM
I've always visualised the calendar as a kind of loop shape perpendicular to the ground, but mine is not perfectly round. It has straight edges and angles corresponding to the school terms and holidays that I grew up with (obviously that is less relevant now, but the shape stuck.)
I don't consider myself particularly synesthetic apart from that (Well, I never considered my calendar to be synesthesia before).
However I have noticed my memory is VERY location-centric. I might not remember exactly when I said something, or quite what inspired an idea, or the details of a conversation but (assuming I haven't forgotten the event completely) I can usually tell you exactly where I was on the planet when I did something or when a given thought entered my head. Driving down a stretch of road I haven't been down in months or years will often bring back the train of thought I was running last time I drove it, or even the music I was listening to. Also, I am one of those people who can usually tell you what time it is to within a few minutes without consulting a timepiece.