# I discovered I have number form synesthesia **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [May 4, 2020, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-discovered-i-have-number-form-synesthesia/853128 "2020-05-04T16:32:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![CairoCarol](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cairocarol/32/3825_2.png) [@CairoCarol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CairoCarol)\ **Post date:** [May 6, 2020, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-discovered-i-have-number-form-synesthesia/853128/21 "2020-05-06T19:52:46Z")
> [@RaftPeople](#): > > I see days of the month horizontally left to right within a kind of box/border around it that is the month being focused on, with other months on left and right. > > …Prev Month | Current Focus Month with Dates but not all of them (just a small number of the ones I’m focused on) | Next Month… Completely different from me. I see a sort of a … road … with a big demarcation at year’s start and end, and lesser demarcations between the months. There’s also an approximate seasonal change; the summer months in particular sort of dip down. These things are incredibly difficult to describe well. Maybe they use parts of our brain that are pretty separate from language. I’m tempted to think that they might give us a little insight into how animals conceive of the world, but then again maybe not because the ideas of numbers and measurement are still very human and it’s necessary to have language to understand them in the first place. ---
**Author:** ![sisu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/df705f/32.png) [@sisu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sisu)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2020, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-discovered-i-have-number-form-synesthesia/853128/22 "2020-05-07T01:02:14Z")
> [@wolfman](#): > > I’m not sure 4 steps of adding and 4 of counting(technically I guess there is one multiplication in there as well) is all that much more impressive that one step of subtracting. Yeah agree to a point, I just see the answer though. That is probably from years working at the markets when I was a kid? ---
**Author:** ![RaftPeople](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/6f9a4e/32.png) [@RaftPeople](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RaftPeople)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2020, 3:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-discovered-i-have-number-form-synesthesia/853128/23 "2020-05-07T03:34:33Z")
> [@CairoCarol](#): > > Completely different from me. I see a sort of a … road … with a big demarcation at year’s start and end, and lesser demarcations between the months. There’s also an approximate seasonal change; the summer months in particular sort of dip down. > > These things are incredibly difficult to describe well. Maybe they use parts of our brain that are pretty separate from language. I’m tempted to think that they might give us a little insight into how animals conceive of the world, but then again maybe not because the ideas of numbers and measurement are still very human and it’s necessary to have language to understand them in the first place. It’s fun hearing how other people represent this stuff like your dips in the road. It is pretty challenging to describe because some of it seems to be more of a background impression that is linked to the more visual pieces. Like there are projections of imagery for subsets of the overall related set of ideas that you are aware of, but some of the thoughts are either lurking in the background, or maybe they are a larger structural impression that doesn’t have a very describable concrete representation. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [May 7, 2020, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-discovered-i-have-number-form-synesthesia/853128/24 "2020-05-07T13:46:38Z")
> [@CairoCarol](#): > > I’m tempted to think that they might give us a little insight into how animals conceive of the world, but then again maybe not because the ideas of numbers and measurement are still very human and it’s necessary to have language to understand them in the first place. Other animals presumably don’t have human ideas of mathematics, but there’s getting to be a good deal of evidence that they do have some idea of numbers. > **[Can Animals Count?](https://www.livescience.com/61084-can-animals-count.html)** > > Humans aren't the only animals that can count. [https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/counting-wildlife-numbers-honeybees/](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/2020/03/counting-wildlife-numbers-honeybees/) > **[More Animals Seem to Have Some Ability to Count](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-animals-have-the-ability-to-count/)** > > Counting may be innate in many species [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/i-discovered-i-have-number-form-synesthesia/853128.md?page=1)