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how do you represent 'time' in your head?

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nudone:
i'm thinking of doing a diagram representing my 'life'. maybe like a tree with the 'key' events represented along the branches. it will probably look more like a series of arrows rather than a tree.

this reminded me of something i've sometimes pondered about but never really asked anyone - how do you represent time in your own head? so, that's your past, present and future?

do you see images of events, are they staggered across a timeline, is the timeline a single line. more, how do you think of the days of the week, months of the year, what about a big chunk of time like a year.

perhaps it's beyond explanation how you perceive it all. perhaps computers have provided a visual language to represent it so now we think in terms of software calendar layouts with moving images, etc.

mouser:
ps1.
just to add a thought to this thread.. as someone whose academic background is AI and brain theory, i'd say the #1 fundamental unsolved issue in understanding how the brain works is understanding the temporal issues in representation and cognition.  it's simply something we have very little grasp on how it's done and it seems to be central to planning and reasoning.

ps2.
if you want to have your mind blown, go read up on einstein's theory of relativity and other more modern thinking on the nature of time.  our intuitions seem to fail us when it comes down to the basis of time and space.  the world does not really work the way you "feel" it does..

Ampa:
I once read a book of translated Japanese sci-fi stories, from pre WWII (ie before Western sci-fi idea had entered the Japanese consciousness).

It was remarkable how different the style was from the mainstream ideas of sci-fi that we now have: the stories were very gentle, and almost rural in their simplicity.

One that has always stuck with me told of a planet, on which there lived a worm, who grew not in physical dimensions, but in time. Its mind was free to travel along its body, to review any moment of time during which it lived. A favourite moment was a time when a small space capsule landed on the surface of the planet, and two men stepped out. A period somewhere in its middle encompassed a great war, which it hated, so never allowed its mind to stop there. Often it would move its mind to the very tip of its head, to discover what new things had happened.

Then one day, it tried to move its mind back towards its tail, to revisit the men landing, and discovered that it couldn't get that far back any more. The worm knew that it was dying, and that one day its tail would catch up with its head, at which point it would cease to be.

I found the story very moving, and just thought I'd share it with you.

Lashiec:
That sounds like a interesting book. Would you happen to recall the title?

As for nudone question, I'm more a guy of events in a slideshow, like your usual PowerPoint presentation. The events more or less situate themselves in time, so no need for the timeline, as I can easily know the exact moment in time with the visual information.

app103:
This probably wouldn't help you design a diagram at all, and I am not sure if this is what you meant, but this is how I see it...and some of it is probably pretty weird...

Thinking of hours, minutes, seconds...I am kind of classic, with an old analog style clock in my head that runs on 12hr time. The color changes between white (midnight - noon) & black (noon-midnight). A day is 2 circles that overlap each other.

Weeks are pretty much a straight line, like a typical wall calendar...as are months. When I think of a day in relation to a week or a month, they are pretty much like marking it on a calendar page. They are no longer circles.

A year is circular, moving counter-clockwise, with January at the top, and August at the bottom. (Yes, I know that this is a bit disproportionate but that's how I see it)

The progression of years...

It is a line...moving from left (past) to right (present/future). The time of my birth is at the center, straight in front of me (or slightly to the left of that point). Putting my arms straight out in front of me, the present is in line with my right hand...the future, transparent and off beyond my right hand. The year 1900 sits at my left hand. Everything before that is beyond my left hand.

Each year is a disk on that line, with them overlapping in blocks to represent decades, or centuries, depending on what I am thinking about.

Sometimes I perceive this with color, if it helps to keep things in perspective and separate blocks of time from others.

Visualizing actual events (either from memory or just imagination of the past from before my life)...Everything from 1970 to present is in color...things between 1900 - 1970 are in black & white. Going back in time, everything from about the middle ages to 1900 are in sepia tones...anything before that is in color again. The future is translucent and ghosty.

Do the images in my head move, like video? Only things during my lifetime...everything else is like old photos or paintings.

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