#time-space synesthesia

Lauren: We are being a bit end-of- year, just-after-first-anniversary reflective here, but we think it's relevant all year round.

Gretchen: Yeah! And, you know, one of the big things is that we're on a big ball of rocks and water and we have this sun in the sky, and so languages have words for day and night, and mark the passage of time with days and with years, because those are things that all different human societies have observed. And we have a moon, which gives us things like months. And there are roughly twelve of them in a year, so twelve is this important number for different measurements of time.

Lauren: I didn't really think about how important twelve was for time until we started listing places where it crops up! So it crops up, obviously – we talk about twelve-hour cycles in the day, and we have 24 hours, so that's two sets of twelve there.

Gretchen: We have things like twelve signs of the zodiac, or twelve months in a given year. And we also have other types of time-related things that are divided up into twelves, like the minutes and the hours on a clock get divided. So an hour gets divided into sixty parts, which is, you know, divisible by twelve. And then a minute gets divided into sixty parts, and so I looked up – because I was thinking, you know, why is it that a second is called the same as, you know, the "first, second, third, fourth"? And that's not actually –

Lauren: Is it a coincidence? I had always assumed it was.

Gretchen: No! No! It's not a coincidence! I kind of vaguely assumed it was a coincidence. But actually, in medieval Latin – and this is according to Etymonline, which is great – they divided the hours into various kinds of small parts. And the first part of the hour was called the "pars minuta prima", or the first small part. And "minuta" there is related to, like, "minute" or "miniature."

Lauren: Right, yeah.

Gretchen: But it just means small. And so that's where a minute comes from. And that's the first small part. And then the pars minuta secunda –

Lauren: Ahh, I see where this is going!

Gretchen: – is the second small part! And that's the second.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: Which is another sixtieth. And there actually used to be a term for a sixtieth of a second –

Lauren: Right...

Gretchen: – what we would now use a millisecond for, which was called a tierce, or a third, which is the third small part, which is yet another sixtieth of a second.

Lauren: Ahh. Like, seconds are so simple and salient to me, having grown up with them, that a tierce, like a third, just sounds so weird? But a millisecond is completely fine. You can see the modern decimal system of influence –

Gretchen: Modern decimal system kind of encroaching on the second! Yeah!

Lauren: Wow, imagine if we still measured things in thir... thirds?

Gretchen: Thirds!

Lauren: Thirds.

Gretchen: Or tierces, if you want to be Latin-y about it.

Lauren: Tierces! Yeah.

Gretchen: But, I mean, we could have ended up – you know, we have milliseconds now. The French Revolution, which was one of the things that introduced the metric system, also tried to introduce a ten-day week instead of a seven-day week.

Lauren: Ah, yeah, I heard about this. There's a great Twitter account that just tweets out whatever day it is in the old French revolutionary calendar.

Gretchen: Oh, that's great. Yeah, they named them all after, like, agrarian things, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So, there have been attempts to do that, but for some reason the seven-day week and – I guess the nice thing is is that if you divide a 28-day month, which is kind of a lunar month, into four parts, you get this seven-day week, even though there's no other reason to use seven because it's this weird prime number.

Lauren: And a ten-day week, it's a long time to the weekend.

Gretchen: But if you have a three-day weekend, maybe?

Lauren: Like, you're never gonna win people over. I would rather get a two-day weekend after five days than a three-day weekend after seven.

Gretchen: I don't remember exactly how they gave the days off, maybe they had one halfway through? So it would be like three and then one and then three and then... how do you do math? What's left? Two more?

Lauren: I'm not a French revolutionary, I'm sorry.

Gretchen: Well...

Lauren: We'll have a link in the show notes page.

Gretchen: So, there's all these different ways of slicing and dicing time and yet we've also ended up with this very weird calendar system that has all of these artefacts in it, like the fact that September, which has "sept" in it, which means seven, is actually not the seventh month, it's the ninth month. And October, which has "oct", meaning eighth, and it is actually the tenth month, and so on and so forth, because January, February didn't really use to be a thing, and so if you started counting at March, they work out. But yeah, there's lots of weird things about weird artefacts that get snuck into our time-counting systems. The other really cool thing about time – so, this is a study about children called "Learning the Language of Time: Children's acquisition of duration words."

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: And it's by Katharine Tillman and David Barner, and they noticed, or people have noticed, that kids start using time-related words around the age of two or three, even though they have no idea how clocks work for like several more years.

Lauren: I would say definitely several more years, yep.

Gretchen: Until like eight or nine.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So what do they mean if they're saying the word minute, or if they're saying the word hour, if they don't actually know what a clock means?

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: And so they got dozens of three- and six-year-olds in the lab and they asked them to compare several different pairs of durations. So their example was, "Farmer Brown jumped for a minute, Captain Blue jumped for an hour. Who jumped more?"

Lauren: Uh-huh.

Gretchen: And they also use seconds, days, weeks, months, and years. And by age four, the children tended to get more of these questions right than you'd expect if they were just guessing. And as they got older they got better and better at that.

Lauren: So they know an hour is longer. They may not be able to tell you exactly how long.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Hmm!

Gretchen: But then! They asked them things like, "Farmer Brown jumped for three minutes, Captain Blue jumped for two hours. Who jumped more?" And adults are like, yeah, this is still really obvious, and the kids were like, I don't... I don't know?

Lauren: Wow. Stumped them! That's like, oh, yeah, as an adult, you're like, this is so painfully obvious, how can you not get this.

Gretchen: Like, why are you asking this? But this is why we have science, right, so you're not just like, this is so obvious. But yeah, so kids get thrown by this: well, it's three minutes, but it's two hours, like what... what... what are you gonna do? Whereas we know that an hour is an order of magnitude larger than a minute, it doesn't matter if you just add one.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And kids also do this type of things for numbers and colours. They have these kinds of general concepts of them before they have a very good idea of the specific details. So a kid might be able to use a word like hundred or thousand, probably – this is me inferring from their study – but they're not actually counting all them, they just see a lot of cookies and be like, "Wow! There's a hundred cookies!" And there's actually twenty. But they have the sense that a hundred is a lot.

Lauren: I'd still be happy with twenty cookies.

Gretchen: You know, so would I. But, you know, counting is a thing.

Lauren: Yeah, and so we have the kind of general semantics. And it's that thing, like, we do it as adult speakers as well, right. Like, we say, you know, I'll often message you and I'll be like, "I'll be online in two minutes!" And you can expect me any time within the next one to ten minutes.

Gretchen: Yeah, oh yeah, and if you're ten minutes there I'm not like, oh, you're eight minutes behind, it's like, ah yeah, that was kind of in the order of magnitude.

Lauren: I've started the stopwatch!

Gretchen: Especially if you think about how parents or adults talk about time to kids, it's like, "Yes, yes, yes, I promise, we're gonna go in a minute!" And then like twenty minutes later the parent's like, "I guess we're going now!"

Lauren: Yeah, it is very confusing to learn to navigate this.

Gretchen: Yeah, "You can watch TV in a minute!" and it's actually like, you know... Or like, "In an hour!" and it's actually three hours or it's actually half an hour. I think parents know that kids don't really understand those those times, and they're often not very precise about them with kids because it's just easier to give a general impression. But I think the classic way that I remember counting time when I was a kid was with sleeps. So you would say things like, "Three more sleeps until we're gonna go visit your grandparents!" And that was three more days, but somehow it was easier to count sleeps.

Lauren: I think there are only like four or five sleeps until Christmas when this episode comes out?

Gretchen: There you go!

Lauren: Depending which time zone you're in.

Gretchen: Depending on when you listen to it. Maybe they're listening to it like a year from now.

Lauren: You can only listen to this episode on any given 21st of December.

Gretchen: So, yeah, there's like three more sleeps! French also has this word, but they don't use the normal word for sleep, they use a baby talk word, which is "dodo". So you can say, like, "Trois dodos!" And that means three more sleeps because you're using the baby talk register.

Lauren: That's cute! I mean, I guess sleep, A Sleep, is a weird... like, I think I only use it with children.

Gretchen: Yeah!

Lauren: Use sleep as a noun?

Gretchen: I mean, I think you can say like, "I slept the sleep of the just" or something if you want to be more formal.

Lauren: Yeah, but not to a three-year-old! The other thing I've always found really hard to get my head around with time is that different cultures obviously have different times that they celebrate the new year, that the concept of a new year and counting years is completely arbitrary. And in Nepal there are about five different ethnic groups that have five different dates that they measure New Year's on.

Gretchen: Oh, that's exciting.

Lauren: It's always so amazing! It's like this thing that you think is this really important thing, and then you discover that other people, for other people your new year means nothing and they've got their own thing going on.

Gretchen: Yeah, and it's interesting how the year itself is so universal, but the time when you when you pick it is so arbitrary. Whereas something like a day, like we all have the same kinds of dawns and sunsets, because that's built in, but for a new year, sometimes people go for a solstice or an equinox, sometimes people go for a lunar calendar, where the years don't actually quite match up because you're caring more about the months – you know, there's lots of different types of years.

Lauren: There's also a lot of cultural variation in how people conceptualise where they are in time and how time happens. And this is more or less a really elaborate culture-wide metaphor that different cultures can have. So when you hear "metaphor" you might think of, like, school comprehension classes where you've learnt that, like, "the sun is a big yellow balloon" is a metaphor and "the sun is like a big yellow balloon" is a simile and both of them are equating something with another property. And that is true and you can use them as a very specific literary device, and in those cases the more novel, the better. But we also have these metaphors that are really pervasive in how we see the world and our place in them.

Gretchen: And they're so ingrained that you don't even think about them as metaphors, they're just how things are.

Lauren: No, so we really have to think about ourselves as souls in meat-covered skeletons on a bowl of rocks hurtling through space. And this kind of area of semantic – it's really a kind of a property of semantics and cognitive linguistics – is probably best encapsulated, or kind of kicked off through a work by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. So a lot of the work in this area is inspired by them and their book "Metaphors We Live By," because they're so pervasive. So, for example, we have a lot of things like "last year is behind us," "we can move forward," "I can't wait until Christmas," like, "Christmas is coming up really quickly" are all –

Gretchen: So, time can move quickly in a way that's kind of weird. I think even just saying like, "Oh, I'm looking forward to when we're gonna do this," that's like, the future is ahead of us, the past is behind us. Or, like, "let's just put that behind us," meaning let's just forget about it.

Lauren: Yeah. So we have an orientation where the future is ahead and the past is behind us. And so we have two slightly different ways of thinking about this in English. We can say, like, "I just have to get to September and then I can go on holiday" and so we're moving through space towards September or the future or whatever is happening, and then –

Gretchen: Hmm, okay.

Lauren: But we have a slightly different one where like, "Christmas has come up so quickly!" where we're kind of stationary and time is flowing past us. But what's common to both of those is the future is –

Gretchen: Like, "I can't believe we've arrived at December already."

Lauren: Yep. But future, pretty safely anchored in front of us. Whereas there are other cultures, and the most famous one is Aymara, which is an Aymaran language of South America – so with Aymara, the future is behind us and the past is in front of us. And if you think about it, it makes a kind of sense, because we know what happened in the past. You know, I know what happened to me yesterday. I am not psychic and I don't know what's gonna happen to me tomorrow. So it makes sense that the future is in the part of your vision where you can't see and you don't know what's there, but you can look out over your life and where you've come from as you've travelled through. So it actually, like, it's a really robust logic and it's totally the opposite metaphor, but it's encoded in their language the way our way of talking about time is encoded. Another common one that's often talked about is, especially in various Chinese languages where you have a vertical orientation of time, where the past is above and the future is below. And that's partly the the writing system that motivates that, and we have, even though it's not in our speech, we often see in our gesture, not only do we have this forward- backward space orientation, but we have a left-to-right orientation. So if you think about plotting out everything you have to do in the next couple of days on a timeline, then you're more likely to put events earlier on the left and events later on the right.

Gretchen: Right, so, okay, I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna do that.

Lauren: Sometimes we have these metaphors that are so deep in our consciousness they don't even show up in our speech but they show up in the way that we orient ourselves.

Gretchen: But if we were using a right-to-left writing system like Arabic or Hebrew, we would probably plot out things on a timeline in the other direction?

Lauren: Yeah, there's been so little research that's really nailed a lot of this down. Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive psychologist who's done some work on Chinese and English monolinguals and bilinguals, and she's found that, especially with Mandarin speakers, you can get them thinking vertically or horizontally depending on how you prime them before you do the experiment, which is cool.

Gretchen: Interesting.

Lauren: So there's both long-term, like it's very hard for us to think about time forward and backward, but you can also prime people to think about these metaphors in more short-term ways as well.

Gretchen: And people often use, you know, even just an arrow going from left to right to indicate things about the future.

Lauren: Yeah, so Hillary Clinton's 2016 election campaign logo, which was very unpopular at the time, and I wrote about it and what the arrow was doing in the H as it pointed to the right. And also FedEx has that little optical illusion arrow in the logo.

Gretchen: Oh, yeah!

Lauren: And if you look at it, they would never have done that logo if the writing was such that it went from right to left, because that wouldn't be indicating kind of future-y dynamic forwardness.

Gretchen: Yeah. Oh that's kind of like – so email programs do this, right, if you have, like, the reply arrow has this kind of circle back pointing to the left, and the forward arrow has it going towards the right. And those are just arrows, like, your email contacts don't exist in time and space, but they're using those arrows to kind of transmit those ideas.

Lauren: Yep. So these metaphors are really pervasive in how we talk and think about time.

Gretchen: So FedEx doesn't want to make you think that they're gonna run off with your package and take it back to the factory.

Lauren: FedEx your package, just comes back to you every time.

Gretchen: And that's what would happen if they used the arrow in the other direction.

Lauren: Yeah, that would be... that would be a not-good... And, you know, it's – I've written some stuff about emoji direction. So, they're oriented so they make sense in terms of Japanese word order.

Gretchen: Mm!

Lauren: But in terms of English word order it makes it look like people aren't moving forward from left to right and so they're not moving forward in time. And English speakers get really irritated by that. So the vehicles and the people walking all point from right to left. And we interpret that as like they're going backwards.

Gretchen: Oh, okay. Whereas if you spoke Japanese, because that language is subject- object-verb and then you want to put the verb at the end of the sentence so that you can be like, yeah, this refers back to the thing that was at the beginning.

Lauren: Yeah, so in that language it's pointing the right way, but for English speakers it doesn't gel with our sense of things moving forward. And so I love this way because you really, you know, time is so hard to get our hands on that we have to use whatever strategy we can and these metaphors are a really nice way to do that, but we really take them for granted. Sometimes you're just like oh, wow, yeah, that's how we... that's how we move through the world!

Gretchen: Yeah! Another thing that I take for granted a lot is that, you know, time is this abstract concept, but for some of us, and I'm one of them, we actually have this kind of intuitive way of visualising time. So there's a phenomenon known as synaesthesia, which is when you have kind of cross-sensory perception. So the classic example of synaesthesia is grapheme colour synaesthesia, which means that certain letters or numbers have particular colours associated with them, and I have that as well and we'll probably talk about that in some other episode, but in this particular context I want to talk about time- space synaesthesia a little bit, because this is actually one of these kind of – it's less talked about and it's a lot more common I think than people were realising, that a lot of people have instinctive visual metaphors, a kind of a mental image or an image in your mind's eye, of where different times of day are, where different days of the week are, where different months of the year are, hours in the day. So...

Lauren: Hmm! Yeah, I definitely haven't heard of that as much as I've heard of colour letter/grapheme synaesthesia.

Gretchen: Yeah, the grapheme one, I mean, it's easier to visualise because you could just put that stuff in different colours, whereas the – you know, I think I've looked at some of the diagrams that come with the studies and I'm like, "That looks really weird!" But also I know I have this thing, mine just looks different from that. So the classic example that you generally see in time-space synaesthesia studies is – so, I think most time-space synaesthetes visualise time as a circle. Which kind of makes sense, because all of our time things, like hours in the day, months of the year, they repeat and they're cyclic around each other.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And the classic one that you see in the visualisations is that someone will be standing in the centre of this big ring. And in the ring are the different months of the year, in order, and the one that's in front of the person will be the current month. So let's say you're looking at December and you're like, this is the month that we're in right now, and then beside it will be January 'cause you're flipping over to the next year, and you'll just keep going around. And it'll kind of move in front of you as time progresses.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: And some people have it in kind of a bit of an elliptical shape, like it's not just generally a perfect circle, it's not like a hula hoop.

Lauren: Hmm!

Gretchen: It's this kind of elliptical shape, and sometimes it's tilted a bit, sometimes there are colours involved... This is this kind of thing that people have. For me, I have it as a loop, but I have it as a up-down loop that circles around in the back.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: So rather than like the hula hoop thing –

Lauren: So you're not standing in the middle of it.

Gretchen: I'm not standing in the middle of it, I'm looking at it. It's kind of like if I was going to take my watch off and hold it in front of me so I could see the face of it, then that would loop behind itself as well.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: Except it's bigger than that. And it doesn't have a watch, it doesn't have a clock face on it. And I have the same mental loop for both hours of the day and months of the year. So midnight is where January is.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: And it goes through. And noon is around where June is, and it goes through – like, midnight and January are at the top and then it kind of loops in the back very quickly and it just kind of goes around there. So, I was trying to look for this visualisation that I'd seen before of the months around the person, and I ended up on this article that was trying to describe this. And it was saying that, oh, people who have time-space synaesthesia, they're like Time Lords! And they have all these...! And I just... you know, I don't have magical powers here, people.

Lauren: Do you use it mentally when – if you're like, okay, I have to do this thing in September, so I have four months to do it, like, is...?

Gretchen: Yeah, I mean I use it in – like, I do use it to kind of keep track of where I am, going about my day, or knowing when something is, or "how soon is that," "how far is that." Like, "this feels far away," "this feels close by." I use it for that. And I did notice – so I was in Hawaii in March this year. And I left Montreal in the cold and then Hawaii has these beautiful, balmy temperatures, obviously. And I noticed that I was in the wrong spot in my mental calendar? And I felt like I was in July, because that's what the weather was like, even though I was in March? So I had a really hard time calculating times for several weeks afterwards, because I just – my body had decided that I was in July now. Like, my brain had somehow decided that I was in July now and I was really not. It's kind of like a macro version of – you know that thing where you have this sense that it's Tuesday but it's actually Thursday?

Lauren: Yup.

Gretchen: And you don't know why it feels like a Tuesday, but it feels like a Tuesday, and there's a way that Tuesday feels?

Lauren: That, for a year.

Gretchen: I had that for like several months, 'cause I got really thrown off.

Lauren: Oh, how disconcerting.

Gretchen: It was pretty bad. Now that it's getting cold here again, it's better, I'm like, it's definitely winter now. But it really messed me up, yeah! So, yeah, it's like, I'm not a Time Lord, my apartment is not bigger on the inside...

Lauren: How disappointing.

Gretchen: I know, I tried, but they don't sell TARDIS apartments.

Lauren: It'd be very convenient.

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: Do you find that you assume other people are kind of visualising time in this way as well, or do you find that it clashes with those other cultural metaphors about time?

Gretchen: Um, I just kind of take it for granted, like, I don't really think about it very often, it's just there? It's kind of like you don't think about how what your mother looks like, you just know. Or like –

Lauren: You don't think about the fact that you're a meat-puppet skeleton.

Gretchen: You don't think about the fact that you're a meat puppet in space! Sometimes I do see calendars that for some inexplicable reason will put their earlier times at the bottom. So there's this website that I've been visiting a lot lately which tells you when the sunset and sunrise times are for your location – because I'm really counting down the days to when we can start moving out of this darkness, and I'd like my sun to start rising again at, like, earlier than four o'clock – and for some inexplicable reason, this sunset website, it starts its midnight, 1:00 a.m., 2:00 a.m., at the bottom and its evening at the top.

Lauren: That is very confusing.

Gretchen: And that just throws me every single time, and I don't know why they're doing it! But yeah, that really messes me up. But I think that would mess most people up, because –

Lauren: That would definitely mess me up.

Gretchen: Because if you're using an agenda or something, all of our metaphors at, like, later in the day is at the bottom?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So I don't know what these people are – maybe they have synaesthesia and that's how their synaesthesia works! And they were like, "Finally! I could make this thing the way I like it!" That's my best guess. But I think one of the things when I think about being a ghost in a meat suit, meat skeleton, is that there's a certain amount of similarity that linguistics has to another hobby that I've been taking up in the recent couple years, which is stargazing.

Lauren: Yeah?

Gretchen: And before I started stargazing, you know, I would go outside at night and I'd look up at the stars and be like, wow, there's stars, that's nice!

Lauren: Yeah. They're there.

Gretchen: They're there! Look, pretty! Sometimes there's a moon! And, you know, I knew one or two constellations, but if I couldn't find those, if Orion wasn't up, then I was just like, oh, there's stars. And now that I've been stargazing for over a year and I know what most of the constellations are and how they move through the sky at different hours of the day and different times of the year, and I have names associated with them, I go outside and I look at the same sky and what I see there is different. Because all of the individual pieces have meaning now and have associations with them and have patterns that I can see. And obviously the sky hasn't changed, I've changed. But in many cases, language is kind of like all those stars. We're surrounded by it all the time, you hear it all the time, you see it, it's there, but being able to look at language like a linguist looks at language is... now you have words, and you have frameworks that you can put in, here's what all these sounds are. And they're not just a bath of sounds, they're constellations. So you have this way of making sense of all of this stuff that you're seeing and you're experiencing it and putting it into some sort of context. I think for me that's one of the things that's really magical about linguistics. And stargazing!

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Gretchen: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on iTunes, Google Play Music, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts, and you can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can also get IPA scarves and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com.

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