This is the case for me as well, and I don’t remember when it developed. I have a timeline that starts with the present day on the right, and goes left and slightly up. It gets blurry around 500 BC. I can somewhat zoom in and recenter it if I’m thinking about individual historical periods. I can roughly place some historical events in the correct spots on the timeline, but since I have never needed to formally memorize many historical dates, this is very rough.
You might be interested in reading about experiences in the broad category of synesthesia, and of the really fascinating history of “memory palace” techniques. Also in the linguistic details of how different languages spatially talk about the past and future (e.g. in English the past is behind/future is ahead; in Chinese, past is above/future is below).
That’s really interesting! Did you ever use Anki or a spaced-repetition app? I wonder if the feeling happens because the brain gets rewarded for having a certain representation? Or did it just appear out of nowhere?
This is the case for me as well, and I don’t remember when it developed. I have a timeline that starts with the present day on the right, and goes left and slightly up. It gets blurry around 500 BC. I can somewhat zoom in and recenter it if I’m thinking about individual historical periods. I can roughly place some historical events in the correct spots on the timeline, but since I have never needed to formally memorize many historical dates, this is very rough.
You might be interested in reading about experiences in the broad category of synesthesia, and of the really fascinating history of “memory palace” techniques. Also in the linguistic details of how different languages spatially talk about the past and future (e.g. in English the past is behind/future is ahead; in Chinese, past is above/future is below).
That’s really interesting! Did you ever use Anki or a spaced-repetition app? I wonder if the feeling happens because the brain gets rewarded for having a certain representation? Or did it just appear out of nowhere?