from metafilter
Florentine graphic designer Camilla Torna is collecting hand-drawn personal visions of "time." It started as a personal collection from friends and students in the 1990s. In 2006 it was on-line with a submission form. Submissions are can be sorted by theme words, style or age of artist. Ages range from those in their first decade of life to those in their 70s.
Here's an example of the sort of thing.
To me, time is like a ribbon that swirls around me as a horizontal spiral at about waist-to-eye height. The present moment is slightly to the right of eyes-front, with past time spooling out to the left of that, and my birth year is just over my left shoulder, the second world war to my right, the first world war right in front of me (but farther out), 1066 more or less behind me, and so on round and round. Prehistory tails off to the left, with the origin of the universe way off to the far left of field. I can also zoom in on the current year which I see as a loop from my left shoulder (January) to my right shoulder (December).
I have some limited visual/tactile representations of numbers, letters etc, but for me these are fairly mutable and wishy-washy. My son who is INFP has much stronger synaesthetic sense, with a much more fixed image for each one, and he was telling me yesterday he organises thoughts and memories into a fixed spatial layout. This reminds me of the Palace of Memory of antiquity.