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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: 3, Interesting) by jdavidb on Monday December 12 2016, @06:02PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @06:21PM
I've met smart developers who were what I call "symbolic thinkers" rather than visual thinkers. As a visual thinker myself, I had a hard time communicating certain ideas with them; it was often like trying to communicate with an alien. I cannot even describe what a "symbolic thinker" thinks like since I am not one.
It's not "bad", just different. Perhaps symbolic thinkers can "describe a mental model of a calendar", but it wouldn't make much sense to a visual thinker, or at least not be very useful to one.
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Monday December 12 2016, @06:36PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Tuesday December 13 2016, @02:53AM
My problem is i'm a scattered thinker: i'm interested in so many different things, and find it hard to concentrate on any one thing (kind of like i have a hard time seeing an individual tree for all the forest.
I couldn't find a career to focus on because i couldn't decide what "I wanted to be when i grew up". I wanted to be everything, as well as an astronaut, a lawyer, football player, chef, programmer....
...so i delve into everything: jack-ass of all trades, master-bator of none, lol.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 13 2016, @01:09PM
I've got to admit that I don't understand the question. Or the point of the question.
A calendar is a bunch of arbitrary rules that, when put together, form our method of timekeeping. Why would I need a mental model of it?
I'm actually baffled that there have been several replies to this article by people saying they visualize a calendar as some variant of a circle.
Why? What's the point?
January is next month. Why would I need to visualize a circle for this?