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I visualise numbers in a strange way. All people with whom I have talked about this (there weren't many) said to visualise numbers on a line or a circle. My image, on the other hand, has many sharp turns. I have put it here. The round turns in the picture aren't visualised as such; instead when thinking about numbers lying there, the whole picture turns around to maintain orientation while keeping the curved sections straight.
Whoa, that's awesome.
That also made me realize that I, too, have several visualizations for numbers, all of which are perceived in slightly different ways. The visualizations for generic numbers as well as years mostly resemble sort of horizontal lines, though with many "layers", which I can't fully describe. The ones for hours in the day and months in a year are circles. Temperatures are a vertical line, with differing colors above and below 0 degrees Celsius.
The year timeline is probably the most interesting, as it has several regions: the 1990s look different from the 1980s or 2000s, but it's hard to describe exactly how. The 1980s are pretty dark in color, with the 1990s much lighter. At 2001 there's a kind of an association to images of 9/11 and the day when I heard about it. 2005-2006 has pictures of my siviilipalvelus period. Late 1930s up to 1945 have pictures of Europe and Germany, and 1945-1949 or so have pictures of Roswell/Area 51 and generic US Air Force bases. The time around 0 AD has pictures of the Mediterranean and Rome, while "the time of the dinosaurs" has pictures of the Earth from space. The future is kind of a grey fog. There are a bunch of other years with their own images as well.
There is a differing resolution in the timeline depending on how well I happen to know the period: for the 1990s and the WW2 period I can see each year separately, and they're clearly marked, while e.g. the 1950-1980 period is much more indistinct.
At various points the timeline seems to head in different directions: the 1990s are left-to-right, the 1940s are right-to-left, and 0 AD is down-to-up. I don't actually see the timeline making any sharp turns, however: the regions just gradually fade into each other.
Same here. The months have colors, too:
Years, according to placement in decades:
Although the color matching is completely different from mine, it's interesting to know that this kind of trait is not totally uncommon. Any guess about what's originating it?
If you're like me, you played with cube blocks as a child with colored numbers on them. I wonder how we'd go about testing that hypothesis.
I honestly don't remember, but it's definitely a possibility. About testing this hypothesys... well we could create an army of baby clones and when they grow up we can still use them to conquer the world ;)
There are seasonal aspects -- the whitish grays and grayish whites of winter and the foliage red of October. And in 2009 I wore a lot of electric pink in my wardrobe. But these examples don't feel at all like robust evidence, so I guess my answer is no.
I also have colors associated to all kind of concepts: time periods, numbers, letters, tastes, music genres, even people.
E.g., my timeline is a ladder, where early universe era is dark blue, dinosaurs time is bright green, human prehistory is brown, 0 AD is yellow/orange and medieval times are light blue. Modern to contemporary era is detailed to a finer scale, e.g. the seventies are purple, the eighties are azure, nineties are yellow and 00s are white.
However, this is a very general thing: each time I recall some concept from my mind, my inner google also returns the color associated with it.
Does it fall under the category of synesthesia?
You're probably right! I wasn't aware this was a known and reported condition.
I find this amazing. I have no visualization for numbers at all. I do have weak color associations, though:
0-black
1-red
2-blue
3-yellow
4-orange
5-brown
6-green
7-silver-gray
8-teal
9-blue-gray
The associations are stronger for 1-6 than 7-9, and usually only noticeable when appearing as groups of consecutive digits, eg 34. I don't actually perceive the numbers as being those colors when I see them on a page, but they have the colors in my mental imagery.
I'm in an almost entirely similar place with number synaesthesia: absolutely no positional awareness for them, and colours for each digit. If I visualise a longer number I visualise the digits as being different colours.
Interestingly, I have the same colours as you for 1, 2 and 3, then:
4 - green 5 - pink 6 - light blue 7 - gold 8 - dark green 9 - dark orange 0 - grey/colourless.
Unlike you, all my colour associations are equally strong, and very usefully, even digits are cold colours, and odd digits warm colours.
I also have colour associations for some but not all letters (but English isn't my first language), and some but not all music notes. I suspect that these associations arose partly from the number colours, but I have no idea why "w" is the same green as "8", and "f" the colour for 5 and not 4.
It's interesting that you put history on there. I also have a history timeline that's separate from my generic number line, but I don't think I'd seen that mentioned before in what I'd read about spatial-sequence synesthesia (see my reply to jsalvatier).
At some point I realized I had a line like this for just about any sequence of things I've ever thought of. Besides the ones you've mentioned: days of the week, months of the year, grades in school, etc.
My sequence lines are not all totally unique though. For example, on the history timeline the years within a century just follow the pattern of the numbers from 1 to 100, and for me minutes/seconds and temperatures fall on the normal number line.
I have lines for weekdays and months, but they are trivial (the mont sequence turns 90 degrees right in the middle of June, on 1st September, just before Christmas and on 1st January, forming a rectangle. The weekday line turns right before and after the weekend, so two weeks together make a rectangle.
My lines can also have a fractal substructure - if looking in a detail on a particular region, further turns appear, usually inherited from the general number line or another relevant line or part of it. This may not be compatible with the overall structure: for example, from greater distance the stretch from 1910 to 1920 is a straight line, but in detail, any single year has the "closed rectangle" structure, beginning and ending in the same point.
To help understanding the interplay of cultural bias and synesthesia, this is the hopefully full list of turns in my history line when looked at in detail (the probable cause for the turn - a historical event or other thing - is in parentheses)
Yeah, mine have that substructure-available-on-zoom too. It seems pretty clear that our brains are doing the same thing here. Out of curiosity, do you feel that you read more quickly or more slowly than others? I'm a very slow reader -- my silent reading speed is about on par with my reading-aloud speed, and I've sometimes wondered if this is connected at all to my tendency to visualize things, or is completely unrelated.
On the other hand, I think having a detailed timeline helps me to remember when events took place. I've noticed on movie rounds at pub trivia that I'm often able to make more use than some of my teammates of the year a movie was released, if that information was given, to rule out possible answers -- not because I know the exact dates of when many movies came out, but because if I'm familiar with the film at all, then I have a general sense of where it should go on my timeline. (Disclaimer: it's quite possible that this is all just confirmation bias on my part.)
I have no idea how quickly others read. My silent reading is generally faster than reading aloud, but the speed depends on what I am reading and I am not sure how big the difference is.
One of the Seattle LessWrong meetup attenders described his mild synesthesia in the same way you've described and claimed he read a book about people having similar number lines (with cultural differences).
It was these essays (The Visions of Sane Persons and Visualised Numerals), linked from the number form wikipedia article.
I think the cultural differences thing was just my conjecture, because the recorded number forms (as well as my own) often had turns at twelve and then subsequently at the decades, which led me to believe that they were probably based on the cadence of counting in English (one, two, three... ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen... nineteen, twenty, twenty-one... twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, etc.). Whereas a Spanish speaker might be likely to develop a number form with a turn at 15 instead of 12, and a Chinese speaker to develop one with turns just at the decades.
Suppose that you don't remember what book it was?
I've asked him, and I'll post here when I hear back.
Thanks.