I am new to this forum. I recently discover that the way I see numbers, dates, letters and calendars is called Synesthesia. I have had these patterns my whole life. I’ve tried to explain this to other people and drew napkin sketches, but they always looked at me like I had two heads. I was recently visiting with someone who also has Synesthesia and she explained that it what my patterns are called. I drew her a couple of my patterns in CAD. Keep in mind, I see these all three dimensionally, but every number has it’s own spot.
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I’m not sure if I posted this in the forum already, but this PDF is interesting. It suggests that non-straight number lines might be the natural way people visualize numbers when they aren’t taught math with number lines:
https://doi.org/10.1093/teamat/5.1.1
Here’s the relevant part:
It might be an interesting experiment to teach a school full of kids math using number lines with different shapes (and even colors) and then see how they visualize numbers later in life.
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For as long as I can remember, I have always thought of the sequence of numbers, whether whole or decimals, as having a specific two-dimensional path and which I can imagine in a vertical plane or in a horizontal plane, but always two-dimensional. And there is also a clear repetition of this path in the different magnitudes of numbers. For example, if I think of the sequence 0-100, the path that I imagine is identical to the path that I imagine when I think of the sequence 100-200 or the sequence 1,000-100,000. And it is also the same path I imagine when I think of the sequence of decimal numbers 0.0-1.0. Negative numbers don’t have such a clear path for me, though - sometimes they take on a path identical to that of positive numbers, but inverted, and sometimes they take on a vertical line.
Example of the big picture, although I imagine this exact path for each decimal sequence within a unit, and for each hundred, and for each thousand, and for each million, etc.:
