I wish it were a hoax, because then I could cachinnate without guilt. As it is, I still laugh, but with trouble in the belly. I am sorry about the gullibility in the world.

I learned about it from Cari Romm’s piece in New York Magazine. The title grabbed me: “There’s a Form of Synesthesia Where People Literally See Time in Front of Them.” I thought: That’s quite something, seeing time! I imagined some kind of visual perception of a non-spatial continuum of events. Some sort of visible yet invisible flow.

Instead, the “calendar synaesthete”–one subject in a study with eight controls–could picture the months of the year in geometrical arrangement. For this subject, they took a V shape;  for a subject of a previous experiment, the shape of a hula-hoop.

The authors call their paper (published in Neurocase) the first “clear unambiguous proof for the veracity and true perceptual nature” of calendar synaesthesia. Really? This got published in Neurocase and reported in New Scientist and New York Magazine?

Synaesthesia (also spelled “synesthesia”) is the name for what happens when an event that stimulates an experience in one sensory or cognitive pathway also stimulates it in a second (and unexpected) one. For instance, some synaesthetes see sounds, associate letters of the alphabet with specific colors, or smell numbers. The phenomenon exists. But does this particular study tell us anything about it?

This is one of several experiments that led to their “clear unambiguous proof” (the quote below is from the New Scientist article):

Next they asked ML and eight non-synaesthetes to name the months of the year backwards, skipping one or two months each time – a task most people find challenging. They figured that ML should be able to complete the task quicker than the others as she could read it from her calendar. Indeed, ML was much quicker at the task: when reciting every three months backwards, she took 1.88 seconds per month compared with 4.48 seconds in non-synaesthetes.

First of all, what does any of this have to do with visualizing time? From what I can tell, it’s about recalling and manipulating the sequence of months. There may or may not be a visual component in such calculation; either way, this experiment shows no synaesthesia per se. Second, who takes 4.48 seconds to recite every third month backwards? I can do it in under 2 seconds per month, without seeing any V shape, donut, hula-hoop, or Moebius strip.

Here’s what the paper says:

In control subjects, the average RT for reciting all of the months backward (n = 8) was 1.46 s/month. For skipping 1 or 2 months – the average was 2.54 and 4.48 s/month respectively. For ML, the average RT for the same 3 tasks were (A) 0.58 s/month, (B) 1.63 s/month, and (C) 1.88 s/month (see legends in Figure 2).

There were eight controls and one subject. Yes, just one. (Nor does the study explain how the subject and controls were selected.) Their study of  a second subject, HP, was incomplete: “We then studied the second subject – HP – but for practical reasons – were only able to conduct a subset of the experiments that we had performed on ML.” (She was able to recite the months as quickly as ML, though.)

To supplement the findings, perhaps, they mention EA, a subject from a previous study:

Indeed, on a previous occasion, we had informally tested a synesthete EA, who might have qualified as a higher calendar synesthete. Her calendar form was shaped like a hula-hoop (the most common manifestation of calendar forms) in the transverse plane in front of her chest. Unlike ML, though, when EA turned her head rightward or leftward, the calendar remained stuck to the body, suggesting that it was being computed in body-centered, rather than head (and eye) centered coordinates. The variation across calendar synesthetes, in this regard, reminds us that even in neurotypical brains there are probably multiple parallel representations of body in space that can be independently accessed depending on immediate task demands.

How did they get from the hula-hoop to “multiple parallel representations of body in space”–and from any of this to “clear unambiguous proof” of the existence of calendar synaesthesia?

I do not doubt that people can picture calendars; people can picture all sorts of things, and calendars are already visual representations of a model of time. I see no synaesthesia in the ability to picture something that is already a picture.

I recognize that this is the authors’ very point: that for this subject, the calendar  is something more than a strong mental picture. Yet the experiments do not prove this.

Note: I made some revisions and additions to this piece after posting it–and deleted one sentence that in retrospect seemed excessively sarcastic. Also see Shravan Vasishth’s comment and my response. I may have been too caustic overall–but I hold to my view that the researchers went too far in declaring “proof.” See my followup post.