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by shiven 2965 days ago
I am not sure what to make of this. My spatial sense is immaculate - I can sense direction/orientation extremely well - I have near-perfect recall of "way to destination" - so much so that after having visited any previously unknown location once, I can navigate back to it years later without much effort.

Time, on the other hand, is a complete mystery to me - I can not tell if a few minutes have passed or hours. I am totally dependent on my clock and calendar to be a functional adult. Similarly, I have no sense of rhythm, beats etc. Nada, zilch, zero.

2 comments

I can think of loads of reasons that both what the article says and your experience can be true. For instance, maybe your neurons are better at handling spatial information? Nowhere in their findings do they imply that the quality of the space and time tracking has to be the same.
Do your special skills work as well with your eyes closed? It may be that you’re very good at integrating external waypoints and references, and simply lack those for time.
Vision is an important part of my navigational ability, but I can (very rarely) sense location with eyes closed - eg. with eyes closed on a train/airplane being able to guess where I am on the journey (hard to explain, sorry).