All of this gives credence to the pruning theory, which remains the most compelling explanation we have so far for synaesthesia. But just one thought. The association of letters and colours is the most common form of the condition – yes, sadly, I’m only a common synaesthete – but it appears to present something of a challenge to the strongest theory. For while newborn babies experience a great deal in their first months, they don’t see a lot of the alphabet.
MONTHS GO ROUND IN A CIRCLE
The specific form of synaesthesia relevant to time perception is the phenomenon of ‘seeing time in space’. As many as one in five of us perceive time in this way. If asked to explain what they mean by ‘seeing time in space’ people often resort to drawing a diagram. I can understand why, as this is a concept that is hard to describe in words. I will do my best, however, with a few diagrams to help out along the way. For the sake of clarity I will use the somewhat jargony term ‘spatial visualisation’. Before I go on, I should say that there has been debate among researchers about whether the spatial visualisation of time, although a genuine phenomenon, really counts as synaesthesia. I believe it does as it exhibits the two key features of the syndrome – the ability to describe perceptions in the same terms both automatically and consistently over many years. It is also the case, as I will show, that the way people visualise time spatially seems to develop during childhood.
In all the radio programmes I’ve made, I’ve never known a topic elicit such a big response from listeners as time-in-space synaesthesia. People seemed thrilled to learn that other people also visualise time spatially. Thrilled and liberated. One listener, Sara, told me that the discovery that her experiences were part of a recognised phenomenon was like having a switch turned on in her mind. She had tried hard to suppress her sense that she saw time in space, but now she could let go, ‘I suddenly saw the week spread out around me. It was a feeling of relief, of putting things back into place.’ Some people told me they were convinced that it was only through seeing time in space that they had any conception of time at all.
Again, I ask for patience for those of you who find all this talk deeply weird, because although it’s true that it is only a minority of people who visualise time spatially, the phenomenon can shed light on how mental images of time affect everyone’s thinking. Before reading the results of my analysis of the qualitative descriptions below, take a moment to think about how you might visualise time if you were forced to. Obviously time is not a visible concept, but if you had to draw a diagram of time how would you do it? Are the next few weeks laid out ahead of you? If you think about the two world wars do they occupy different places in your mind’s eye? Can you look back down the decades? Where is next Tuesday?
Of the 86 descriptions I analysed, the months of the year were the units of time that people were most likely to see laid out in front of them. But this ‘laying out’ took different forms. Two-thirds of participants who visualised the months in space described a circle, a loop or an oval, with a smaller minority seeing a wave or a spiral. It’s not surprising perhaps that some sense of circularity was a strong feature, when you consider the repeating nature of the months through the years of life. We all know the feeling – described by Flanders and Swann in one of their comic songs – of getting to the end of another year and thinking it’s ‘bloody January again’. The year has completed a full circle and is back where it started. By way of contrast, time/spacers are likely to see the non-repeating decades as consisting of jagged shapes or even zigzags – but more of that later.
Back with the circle of months: July and August were often seen as elongated in comparison with other months, perhaps reflecting the long school holidays experienced in their youth by this British sample. It is also common to report a gap between December and the following January, as though there is a natural break in the cycle at the turn of the year. The strong influence of traditional ways of organising time is apparent here. Only six people described the layout of the months in shapes involving straight lines, with either squares, ladders, rulers or parallel columns of months. One participant commented that she had feared she might lose her mental picture of time on retirement after a working life where time was ordered, but the image was so strong by then that in fact it remained.
The direction of the months in the circle also threw up some curious findings. You might expect the order of the months to mirror that of a clock. But almost four times as many people saw the months of the year going anti-clockwise rather than clockwise as you might expect. One person even mentioned that as a new teacher she had spent the weekend making her pupils a chart of the months of the year. She put January at 11 o’clock, February at 10, and so on, until November was at 1 o’clock and December at 12. The diagram below makes it clearer still.
She proudly put it up on the classroom wall, but by Monday lunchtime the head teacher had made her take it down saying the months were the ‘wrong’ way round. ‘Wrong’ in what sense? Because January is normally thought as of the first month perhaps, and November the eleventh? Or was it that this circular calendar went in the opposite direction from the clock on the wall? Or maybe the head teacher saw month-time as going clockwise rather than anti-clockwise. As ever, different people will ‘see’ it in different ways.
It is interesting that people’s images of time in space allow for the idea that time is infinite – with no beginning or end. They do not seem to view life quite like the eighteenth-century poet Dryden, who famously described it as ‘a crack of light between two eternities of darkness’. True, and unsurprisingly, their own lifetime stands out in bold, but it is not framed in black – or even framed at all. Rather the picture fades away at the edges – like an ink spot on blotting paper perhaps. The time close to before they were born is more distinct than early history where the picture gradually fades away.
This image seems to suggest that the individual perceiver is at the centre of time. But it is not as simple as that. For some people claim to zoom in and out of their time pictures as if on a Google Earth map, homing in on the detail of an individual day and zooming back out to see the span of the centuries. As the decades move on, people see their position on their mental map move with the times.
The pictures people describe really are extraordinary. How about a year represented by an oval with tentacles or by the distinct outline of the state of Zimbabwe? Remember, also, that we are talking about time in space. These ‘pictures’ are not necessarily – indeed almost never – flat or viewed head-on, as it were. They are not year planners on an office wall. They are not drawings on a flip chart or even PowerPoint slides. Nothing that simple. They are in 3D; they exist not just ‘in front’ of a person, but ‘around’ them. For example, people sometimes describe their picture of time in space as something that circles their bodies, like a sash around a beauty queen – a phenomenon that has also been observed by the psychologist Jamie Ward in his research in this field.
When it comes to how different people visualise the days of the week in space, there is more variety than with the months of the year. A small minority see flattened ovals; others see variations on a horseshoe shape, a semi-circle, or even a curve which Escher-like links back from Sunday round to Monday again. Others see a grid, a piano keyboard or steps; and several described dominoes, lined up one behind the other, a feature that appears with the decades too. One distinct element was that the weekends were sometimes delineated in a special way, raised up as steps breaking up a pathway or, like Clifford Pope at the start of this chapter, as dominoes turned sideways.
This is how Roger Rowland sees the days of the week. The weeks stretch away into the future and the weekends are enlarged rectangles.
Perhaps surprisingly, very few of the layouts look like diaries or calendars, but some do seem to resemble pictures people might have seen in books or on the walls in primary school classrooms. This is important. These ways of visualising time in space – which seem to be very important to us and useful too – seem to be for
med in childhood. I can remember a poetry book which featured a poem about the months of the year, set out on the page in an oval with appropriate illustrations for each month – lambs for May were skipping down on the left, while squirrels buried nuts in October up on the right. Over the years, the illustrations in my mind’s eye have probably changed a lot, but this way of laying out the months has remained the same. This one poem, recalled from childhood – and vaguely at that – might have shaped the way I visualise the year in space for the rest of my life.
One participant in my study recalls visualising the day in such a way that the mornings took up far less space than the afternoons. This mental picture did not reflect the layout of any diary or timetable, but rather his experience of short mornings at playschool where he enjoyed himself, followed by long afternoons where he was required to have a nap when he wasn’t tired. He was surprised to discover at the age of six that the afternoon in fact lasted no longer than the morning. In this case the spatial visualisation referenced personal experience rather than any external representation. And again, it was formed at a young age.
THE MILLENNIUM PROBLEM
Not so long ago, the millennium played havoc with my spatial visualisation of time. I had my own millennium bug and it seems I wasn’t alone.
I transport you back to 1999. I am sitting at my desk contemplating time. For me, the decades of the twentieth century went down a vertical line to 1900, at which point a right angle was turned and the units of time changed from decades to centuries. So after the turning point of 1900, I ‘saw’ the centuries stacked neatly behind each other – like books on a trestle table – with the decades hidden as if they were chapters unseen behind the book covers.
As I have already mentioned, psychologists who have studied this area are convinced that the ways in which time is visualised in space are constructed in childhood and remain relatively unchanged after that. This might explain why people like me who see time in space ‘illustrate’ the units of time such as decades and centuries with images gathered when we are very young. So for me, back at my desk in 1999, the decades of the twentieth century were variously illustrated in my mind by actual memories from my lifetime – the 1970s was childhood, the 1980s my teenage years – or by remembered images from TV or cinema – the 1940s, the War, the 1930s, the Depression. With the earlier centuries the differentiating images came from remembered illustrations from books or dramas – the nineteenth century was children up chimneys, the eighteenth Jane Austen dresses, the sixteenth century Henry VIII standing boldly hand on hip.
Now, in a sense, this way of seeing the past is very obvious – even those of you who don’t think you see time in space will have images that come to mind when you think of certain periods in history. It is also probably true that you have no such images for, say, the 2070s. But for me, in 1999, my millennium problem wasn’t to do with my inability to come up with a visual representation for the new century. Rather my whole way of neatly ordering time in space broke down at 2000. When years such as 2003 or 2009 were mentioned, a mere four years or a decade hence, in my mind they had no ‘place’ – they were grouped vaguely in a gauzy mush. In short, I couldn’t visualise them in space.
And this problem was very precisely centred on the year 2000. It was not just a matter of finding it difficult to visualise the future. In the 1970s I could ‘see’ the 1990s as a distinct decade in my mind, in a settled place on the twentieth-century line, even though of course I could not ‘illustrate’ it with images from my lifetime or anybody else’s. But the problem was much more profound when confronted with the imminent turn of the millennium.
I was influenced no doubt by the weighty significance the year 2000 was given in the countries that share our calendar. Even when I was a child the millennium was discussed as an important turning point. Then there was the issue of the spatial visualisation of numbers heavily influencing the spatial visualisation of time. In terms of numbers, 1999 turning into 2000 is a big deal. But this was not the whole explanation. My birth date is important here too. Born in the 1970s, I constructed my way of seeing time in space with the subsequent two decades neatly ordered in my mind. Looking back, there was a break at 1900 where my spatial visualisation of time broke into bigger units of whole centuries that were organised in a different way: my books on a trestle table. But looking forwards I didn’t go any further than the year 2000. This surely represented a similarly big break, except that the Noughties, the 2010s and hopefully a few decades more after that were going to be decades I lived through. It wasn’t appropriate therefore to ‘see’ all the time after 2000 as a single block, but there was nowhere left in my mental picture for the individual years or decades beyond 2000 to go. At some point, time after 2000 would get organised in my mind – as indeed has happened – but until the 2000s actually arrived I could not visualise how it would happen.
Writing this down I have to admit that it sounds very strange, but it wasn’t only me who suffered this disturbance in my spatial visualisation of time. The millennium disrupted many well ordered time maps, both among participants in my small study and people whom Jamie Ward has researched in his work at Sussex University.
Clifford Pope was one of many who had nowhere for the year 2000 ‘to go’:
‘The point marked by 2000 is curious. For a few years the period after 2000 looked like a short waving piece of string. It had no precise location on the wallpaper. Then in about 2005 it seemed to fix itself, and now very definitely makes another 90-degree turn and runs on to the right along the edge of the table. For some time I continued to view it receding away from me, but more recently I have noticed that I appear to have shifted my viewing position, and seem to be located on the end of this new line, looking straight back along the edge of the table. This is not yet permanent – quite frequently I revert to my old position, and see all the twenty-first century as the future.’
For me, Clifford’s description makes sense. And yet of course it is weird too. ‘Short waving piece of string’; ‘no precise location on the wallpaper’; ‘looking back along the edge of the table’. You might well ask what string, wallpaper or tables could have to do with the perception of time. And it is not only this disconcerting twenty-first century that brings out the curious. My vertical lines for the twentieth century are dull compared with the elaborate descriptions some people sent me. Centuries are depicted as undulating ribbons, rows of columns or coils; decades are seen as towers, bridges, conveyor belts, hawthorn hedges or even stretched elastic bands. The breaks between centuries and decades are pictured as dividing doors in corridors, hurdles on racetracks or sharp zigzags.
This is how Lisa Bingley sees the decades, although she stresses that you need to imagine it in 3D.
This compartmentalisation into decades is intriguing and appears to be a relatively modern phenomenon. Name a recent decade and the chances are you will be able to summon up an instant image which represents it (and which is commonly shared) – post-war austerity for the 1950s, free love for the ’60s and bankers drinking champagne in the ’80s. To re-use an obvious metaphor: the book of the twentieth century is written in our minds in neatly divided decade chapters with the two World Wars slightly disrupting the pattern. Yet these neat divides are not perceived as time ‘goes along’. Even with that momentous turning point the year 2000, what changed? From one second to midnight on millennium eve to the first second of the first day of the century – nothing at all really. Yet, even now, in the early 2010s, we are probably all beginning to make an ever clearer distinction in our minds between the 1990s and the Noughties, between the decade of growing optimism and prosperity following the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and a darker decade shaped by the events of 9/11.
We’ve become very attached to using decades as units for organising time. Yet according to the historian Dominic Sandbrook, in Britain, for example, in earlier centuries decades were barely mentioned as time was divided by the reigns of different monarchs. Of course, both the reign o
f Richard II and the decade of the 1920s are arbitrary units of time. And the further into the past they recede, the less utility they possess for helping us to organise time in our minds. I’d bet that for you Richard II (1367 to 1400) has been swallowed up into ‘the Middle Ages’. In the same way, the 1920s will for people of future centuries be lumped together into a general representation of the twentieth century. Just think: these people in their space suits will be no more likely to differentiate between an Edwardian gentleman and a Teddy Boy than we do between styles of armour in the 1310s and the 1350s. And they may well be confronting their own millennium problem – where to put the year 3000!
COLOURING-IN HISTORY
You’ll recall that, for me, Monday is red. For some people whole decades or centuries have their own colours and it needn’t be a solid block of a single colour. One person wrote to tell me that the even years are in the light and the odd numbers in shadow. For many, gaps in historical knowledge are often just left dark, and when there is colour or light it doesn’t necessarily correspond with the prevailing mood of that time in history. For one listener the First World War took place in a decade bathed in sunshine. For others the 1940s are purple and the Elizabethan period is midnight blue. I particularly like this description from Katherine Herepath, who tells me she loves history:
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