Moonbear said:
I found it interesting to actually see illustrations of what they see. In the story, they showed some young women who were developing a virtual reality version of how they see dates spatially to help others understand what they perceive.
Seeing dates spatially is synethesia? I do this! I think of a big circular path of months, made up of a winding path of weeks, and each month is colored with its own sort of images associated with seasons and events. I suppose New Year's is around "12 o'clock," on this path, but I actually feel like the solstices are more fixed and "weighted," for a number of reasons. 1) Christmas near the winter solstice and my birthday near the summer solstice 2) the natural changes in the length of a day 3) the changing angles of the light from the sun, and 4) having off of school! So this circle is tilted on an axis that goes through the solstices.
I find number 3 the most beautiful. The sun shines more from the south in the winter and more directly overhead in summer. Throughout my life, I have had really amazing dreams where nothing is out of the ordinary except the sun shining from the south in the summer. That's the quintessentially "dreamy feeling" for me, light from the south when it's warm and summery. It's one of the most beautiful experiences I can think of. The thought that it's not possible is really kind of depressing.

But, every now and then there might be a morning in the winter that isn't too cold, with no snow or wind, and no leaves on the trees, so that I can feel a little bit of warmth while watching the sun make long shadows of all the trees and their branches pointing northward. It's so beautiful! I've always felt bad that no one else seems to think so.
I see ages spatially too, like a number line that bends through youth and then starts wrapping around in tens after the onset of the twenties.
I also see a wrapping number line when I do mental arithmetic on numbers larger than 10. The digit in the tens place tells me how many lines to move "up" and the ones spot tell me how many to move "around" or "through."
I never talk about these things, so I don't know if they're unusual. Are these kinds of things synesthetic? I don't hear colors or anything like that, so I never thought that this applied to me, but I definitely see numbers in a space. Even whole numbers alone are like spaces, filled with fractions and real numbers that go onwards until they meet with the next whole number and continue on into the infinite number space.
The way mathematicians use the word "number space" drives me absolutely bananas, because I want to think that they're talking about what I see, but I don't see how they could be. And the way they use the word "ring," ... I find it so deeply wrong, even offensive, like a totally unacceptable kind of sloppiness, their using spatial vocabulary for numbers so carelessly. I get upset just thinking about it!
the only one that didn't strike me as particularly unusual was the one who described blue cheese as "pointy." I would describe it as sharp, as would most other cheese eaters. What's the difference between sharp and pointy? That actually got me to wondering if it's just an extreme of something all of us already do to some extent when we try to relate our sensory experiences to others. How is it that we understand what a "sharp" taste is? And it seems interesting that the synaesthete chose a property that was similar in "texture." We describe tastes as sharp and smooth all the time. Likewise, one might describe a musical tone as rounded. To some extent, it seems we all use terminology that crosses sensory "boundaries," so where did we get this terminology from? Does the synaesthete just take it to a more extreme degree than the rest of us do in our every day description of things we sense?
I think it may have something to do with the role of degree in perception, and how the brain tries to make sense of the world by relating perceptual events to one another by relating their degrees. When you think about it, "sharpness" can be a wave pattern applicable to a number of different sensory phenomena. High frequency (energy) short duration perceptual events, like a very quick tap on a high piano key, a very quick taste of densely flavored concentrate, a short flash of light, might all be considered sharp sensory phenomena, related to the high pain quick duration of a pin prick through this seemingly common wave pattern.