It's interesting reading all these different ways people have to picture a year.

I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it. If I had to think of an image the first thing that would come to my mind is a boring old paper calendar, but that's not something I would naturally think of.

I'm amazed by all this too. I don't have any visualization of a calendar. It always seemed quite arbitrary to me as Kings and Popes down the line have added months, removed weeks, etc.

>I simply don't visualize it, I think of it as an abstract concept and don't try to put a picture on it.

Right. When I'm asked "what happened in January", I just think back to January. There's no mental picture or anything; I just select for January. Typically I'll use some significant event markers and a sort of relativistic system to remember when things happened (e.g. x happened before y but after z, and I know y was in February and z was early January). No imagery ever comes in to play.

This is really tripping me out that so many people think so differently.

>I just select for January.

So, you have a time-series database model? Because that's pretty cool. Especially if you're running mentalSQL queries.

SELECT '*' from MEMORIES where MONTH = 'January';

I mean, yeah, that's what I feel like is going on. I think it's more like when somebody says the word "January", I pick up that it's a tag in many contexts, one being time, and start picking information associated with that tag. If the "active context" is time, then I'd start thinking about what happened around that time, what's coming up next January, etc.

The same happens, for instance, if somebody says "the park"; I don't get a mental image of the park, I just start thinking about things associated with it (typically things that happened there).

I can do the whole "visual memory" thing, but it's a conscious process that I have to focus on, rather than something that comes automatically. That's not to say my visual memory is bad, just not default.

I always figured this was how nearly everyone thought, but after reading this thread I'm questioning it now.

EDIT: also there's some kind of search tree balancing going on, I think. Because sometimes you may ask me what happened in January, I feel like I sort of mentally go over everything and do a quicksort type of process? But only if there's a lot of past events that aren't already associated with the January tag? I don't know it's hard to explain.

I guess I never thought that there is a thing like "picturing a year". A year is a year to me, you have calendars to keep track of appointments and events, but that's pretty much all I see.

>Isn't this mental model of time fairly common? If you don't picture the year as a circle or donut, what do you think of when considering the year?

Why would it be a "circle of doghnut"? The year doesn't roll back in itself, January 2017 does not approach December 2016.

Rather a year is just a particular segment on an (endless) line...

The fix is to visualize years as loops in a spiral. One loop per year.

Spiral visually implies years getting bigger or shorter which they don't.

I get that some people want to show the periodicity of years but there's no such thing.

What's actually periodical and wraps around is only the names we give to certain lengths of time -- not time itself, be it years, centuries or what have you.

> What's actually periodical and wraps around is only the names we give to certain lengths of time

Seasons are somewhat cyclic, to be fair. Centuries are pretty arbitrary though.

> Spiral visually implies years getting bigger or shorter which they don't.

Proper spirals imply a size change, but I suspect GP meant the shape more properly called "helix".

I have an idea of a time-line when considering the long term (years to thousands of years) because there are events and periods in the past that I have a reason to locate and recall.

On a sub-year basis there's so little structure in modern life (other than, in some climates, pronounced seasons) the year doesn't seem like a concrete idea but a bookkeeping abstraction. Actually the idea of significant cyclical structure in life evokes a kind of new-agey mysticism.

A line.