Until recently, I thought everyone imagined the year as a colourful racetrack

Until recently, I thought everyone imagined the year as a colourful racetrack
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Until recently, I thought everyone imagined the year as a colourful racetrack
Author: Amy Matthews
Published: Feb, 09 2025 16:00

If I asked you to imagine an apple, what would you see?. Some of you would probably picture a fruit in 3D and colour, so realistic you could almost touch it. Others may only visualise a 2D line-drawing or be unable to picture anything in your mind’s eye at all – these people just understand an apple in the abstract. The good news though is that, while we are all guilty of assuming everybody sees the world and processes information in the same way we do, there’s no one ‘right’ way to see things.

 [Amy Matthews: Synesthesia]
Image Credit: Metro [Amy Matthews: Synesthesia]

I, for one, have been aware for a long time that people visualise differently. For example, in my mind’s eye November is purple and one of the wider months of the calendar year, while the number three is orange. I’m aware that will sound like complete nonsense to most people, but I have something called spatial sequence synesthesia – a condition that means my brain processes units of time and numerical values as having an inherent colour and form.

 [Amy Matthews: Synesthesia]
Image Credit: Metro [Amy Matthews: Synesthesia]

Throughout my life I’ve had people ask me, ‘when did you know you had this?’. But honestly, I don’t have an answer – or at least not one where I can clearly pinpoint the moment I realised this wasn’t ‘typical’. It’s like asking: ‘When did you know you could see colour?’ or ‘When did you know you could dream?’ If you always have, you always have and this is genuinely just how my brain has always worked.

Image Credit: Metro

I didn’t realise it was unusual until I picked up clues that my way of visualising the year is bizarre to so many people. When I picture the calendar year, I have always seen a floating racetrack – a bit like the Rainbow Road course on Mario Kart. To me, the year is divided up into sections, and each month has its own unique colour and shape. August, for example, is orange, quite long and evenly shaped, while September is light blue and bends round in a stumpier curve. On the other hand, October is jet black and medium sized, and November is, as previously mentioned, royal purple and very wide.

 [Amy Matthews: Synesthesia]
Image Credit: Metro [Amy Matthews: Synesthesia]

As far back as I can remember I’ve always been able to visualise my year like this. It means that, at any given month of the year I can physically picture that space of time coming up on the floating track – a bit like when a train approaches a bend and you can see the front carriages ahead on the tracks from your window. At the time of writing it’s January and I can see myself standing on its deep red block, stretching out, tapering in front of me. The earthy burgundy of February is just ahead, and the bulbus navy corner of December swings around behind me.

 [Amy Matthews: Synesthesia]
Image Credit: Metro [Amy Matthews: Synesthesia]

But it’s not just the calendar year that I can see as colours and shapes – this phenomenon also applies to numbers. Both three and nine are feminine, but the former is orange while the latter is red. However 15 is racing-car green and masculine. There are no indicators of their gender, colour or shape characteristics – they just intrinsically are. That’s part of the weird thing about synesthesia – it defies logic.

 [Composition, by Vassily Kandinsky, oil on canvas]
Image Credit: Metro [Composition, by Vassily Kandinsky, oil on canvas]

But seeing numbers like this means I have a pretty good memory for key codes to doors I’ve not been to for years and birthdays as I can visualise the colours as opposed to recall the number sequence. And although this has never interfered too much with my ability to function day to day, it does mean I may irrationally consider some dates or some room numbers ‘ugly’ or unsettling. The year 2002 for example was an unpleasant baby blue and when I was designated a hotel room number of 547 one time, I shuddered at its clashy blues, greens and oranges.

I know it all sounds very Sherlockian and trust me, I’ve grown used to the choruses of ‘I don’t get it’ when I’ve mentioned the way I see numbers and time over the years. But it doesn’t stop it from being true. For a long time I assumed this was just a quirk of my brain that no one else had. And for the most part I felt like it was a personal oddity that wasn’t worth dwelling on. Then a couple of years ago I decided to do some research.

I couldn’t sleep one night, and amid the imagined arguments with people I’ll never meet, and random thoughts like ‘why did we stop putting gargoyles on buildings’, another thought popped into my head: ‘Why does time feel like it has a geography to me?’. So, I typed into Google’s search bar: ‘When I imagine the year it’s the shape of a track’. To my utter surprise thousands of results came back, including a handful of images, which made my jaw drop.

Some people had been able to draw almost exactly the same thing I pictured. Granted, they’re all slightly different shapes and colours, but in essence there it was! There were others like me and what I experienced had a name. It was strangely validating and comforting – and exciting. I’d heard of synesthesia – which is when two or more senses are conflated – before, and even knew of a few high profile examples.

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