How people imagine a calendar year

How the brain processes a calendar year

When most of us picture a calendar year, we have a foggy image in our minds of the months, in rough, calendar-like grids. But for some folks, that picture is a whole lot more clear. Around 1 percent of the population has a strange ability known as "calendar synaesthesia," which means they're able to visualize in crisp detail an elaborate calendar of the months of the year. Learn how it works here.

The world's different calendars, explained

The calendar we use to mark the days, months, and year can feel set in stone, but the history of calendars shows these organization systems can and do change. Parse the fascinating, complex details of the Gregorian, Julian, Chinese, Hebrew, and many more calendars in this comprehensive, well-executed explainer video.

Visualize a model of all of time, where our lives span less than the width of a human hair

The massive model was built across a Mojave Desert lake bed using 800 lights spaced just 10 meters apart. Within the model, the entirety of human civilization appears only in the final centimeter.

Some people really cannot imagine. Literally.

There are many people who are astonished to discover that their complete lack of ability to picture visual imagery is different from the norm.

Earth’s tilt and orbit cause the sun to create a figure-eight pattern

The shape—called an analemma—can be obtained by photographing the sun from the same location and time daily for a year. The Earth's eccentricity created the analemma's width, and its tilt shifts the sun's height in the sky over the seasons.

Meteorological v. astronomical seasons, explained

Meteorologists and climatologists define seasons differently from “regular” or astronomical spring, summer, fall, and winter. Traditional seasons reflect the movement of celestial objects, known as the astronomical seasons; meteorologists mark seasonal change based on temperature averages.

Visualizing the history of Saturn and its rings

Every 13 to 16 years, Saturn's rings become far less visible because its plane becomes exactly even with Earth's. This visual-rich essay explores the history of humanity's perception of Saturn, from Galileo's first sighting (and dubbing the rings "ears") to the idea that the rings won't last more than a few hundred millions years more. Explore this fascinating planet here.

Common mistakes we make about the world map

Maps have long loosely approximated what the world actually looks like. Here's a few common errors that persist due to outdated conceptions of the world.

Visualizing how we dream via Google search trends

When dreams perplex us, we often want to understand them—and in the age of Google, millions go to its search engine to find answers. Now, researchers have compiled a decade's worth of dream-related queries to glean dream trends across seven languages. See what dream was most commonly searched in Arabic in 2015, or what fears and hopes are specific to one culture and time alone with this unique visual essay.

Humans experience the world subjectively. What does that mean for scientific research?

When you close your eyes, do you see static or colorful patterns or an "intrinsic grey" known as Eigengrau in German? This variation of our internal experiences is just the tip of the iceberg, one that scientists are increasingly studying and...

A life measured on the backs of coffee receipts

Years ago, a storyteller doodled on the back of a receipt. Hundreds of doodles later, Odding Wang has created a digital diary with a tactile feel. Click through the project's website to peruse the portals into Wang's life and mind. Hovering over a comic will reveal the receipt on the other side.

Objects moving relative to one another will not agree on the simultaneity of events

Space and time shift when switching from a nonmoving to a moving perspective, causing events that seem to occur simultaneously for one person not to appear that way for someone else. This also means one person's present could be another's future, ensuring all of time already exists.

The history of the New Year's misunderstanding in England

In the mid-18th century, the legal system in England operated under the understanding that the New Year began March 25. However, the widespread custom remained a Jan. 1 celebration as the public had been practicing for years. Read along to discover the practical issues this discrepancy caused and how the English legal system ended up yielding to public belief.

One model of the universe expresses all constants using only time

About seven base units, such as meters for length, have historically been used to describe everything in our physical reality. However, researchers have shown that, through relativistic space-time, clocks can serve as replacements for rulers, scales, and other instruments, allowing everything to be measured in terms of time.

Lunar New Year has a rich tradition of visual symbolism

Explore centuries of art related to the holiday—from the dragon robes worn by royalty to the calligraphy symbols thought to bring prosperity and fortune. Ancient artistic practices like woodblock printing, painting, and dance weave together to create the visual language of the Lunar New Year.

Visualizing how American men and women spend every hour of the day, by decade of life

Drawing on three years of Census time-use data, the tool tracks 12 activities—sleep, work, housework, caregiving, TV, and more—across age groups from the 20s through 70s. One persistent gap: women spend 45 more minutes per day on housework than men on average.

See how faces on magazine covers have changed over time

This piece examined an archive of Time magazine containing 3,389 issues ranging from 1923 to 2014, focusing on 327,322 faces from the archive. Read what the researchers learned.

Visualize the path of every solar eclipse from 1900 to 2099 and see what each looks like when observed from different locations on Earth.

Chronological versus biological age

Science has come to understand different types of aging. What we call age is simply the number of years since birth, or chronological age. At the cellular level, biological aging happens at different rates for different people, and explains why some seem to age more quickly (or slowly).

How metaphors shape the way we think

A metaphor is often viewed as a form of art, deployed only in special circumstances to help an audience grasp something complex or unique. But metaphors are far more fundamental than that, shaping much of how we think about our relationship to others and the world. This article explores how a focus on the metaphors we use can clarify and strengthen our thinking. Learn more here.

The AI that creates any picture you want and how it works

Since January 2021, advances in AI research produced a plethora of deep-learning models capable of generating original images from simple text prompts. Researchers at OpenAI, Google, Facebook, and others have developed yet to be released text-to-image tools, and similar models have proliferated online. This video is a primer on how we got here, how the technology works, and its implications.

See what it's like to live 'Constitutionally' for a year

In a 2023 interview on CBS Sunday Morning, author A.J. Jacobs discusses his attempt to live as closely as possible by the principles of the US Constitution for a whole year and the book that resulted from the experiment.

Explore an interactive map built from more than 100,000 survey responses on where people find joy in their lives

National Geographic's 2022 Photo of the Year

See all 10 of the top photographs and find out how perseverance—and a ton of patience—got Karthik Subramaniam the grand-prize-winning shot.

The Maya believed every person is born with a spirit companion

In Maya belief, each person is linked to a spirit or animal companion associated with one of the 20 sacred calendar day signs. Enter your birthday and discover your companion, which is believed to reflect your personality traits.

See the extraordinary and ephemeral installations from Burning Man 2025

Despite having to work in a muddy desert for just a few days, Burning Man attendees manage to create large, abstract, and visually incredible works of art.

This famous painting was hung upside-down for 77 years

According to a curator at a German museum, an abstract painting by Dutch artist Piet Mondrian has been displayed upside down for seventy-seven years at a number of museums.

Researchers believe the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, and plans for the future during dream states

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

Learn how your body is, scientifically, like a firework with its own slow, controlled burn.

After NASA's Voyager 1 captured Earth as a single pixel as it left the solar system in 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan used the image to reflect on humanity's fragility and the responsibility to protect 'the only world we've ever known.'

According to the physics of black holes, our 4D reality may be a hologram—a projection of information coded on a 2D surface on the edge of the universe.

Scientists can determine Earth's past climate conditions by analyzing air trapped in microscopic bubbles within ice cores—columns of compressed snow layers that build up over hundreds of thousands of years.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

All rainbows are 'raincircles' caused by water droplets separating white sunlight into a spectrum of colors, but Earth's surface blocks the bottom half of the circle from our line of sight.

While the sun's gravity keeps the planets in orbit, their gravity also pulls on the sun, causing it and everything else in the solar system to orbit around a mutual balance point called the barycenter—the true center of the solar system.

When you complete a CAPTCHA on a website to prove you are human, you may be unknowingly training algorithms for self-driving cars, whose systems require training data to help identify crosswalks, bicycles, and other outdoor objects.

Georgia O'Keeffe's flower paintings are often assumed to be sexual, though the artist claimed she was simply interested in highlighting the beauty of flowers that most people neglect

Graffiti dates back to at least ancient Pompeii, where citizens scrawled messages to one another on public walls

Most of the observable universe's volume consists of voids and supervoids—enormous regions of space with little to no galaxies, stars, or light.

Trace how the Bill of Rights, inspired by centuries of political theory, took shape between 1774 and 1789.

Objects can be 3D printed with light by projecting 2D computerized tomography (CT) scans onto rotating cylinders of resin, which solidify upon exposure.

Poison ivy can cause rashes year-round since all parts of the plant contain urushiol, the oil that triggers our allergic response.

Take a 3D tour of the Hajj, Islam's annual pilgrimage to Mecca, undertaken by over 1.5 million Muslims.

A 2019 Facebook event called on attendees to "Storm Area 51, They Can't Stop All of Us," resulting in countless memes, the creation of a music festival, and eventually the arrests of those who did try to approach the area.

The term 'algorithm' originated from the Latinized name of al-Khwārizmī, a 9th-century mathematician whose works introduced Arabic numerals and the decimal-based numeral system to Europe and whose treatise 'Al-Jabr' gave algebra its name.

Sears sold DIY house kits starting at $600 in its famous catalog from 1908 through the 1940s, resulting in roughly 10,000 'Sears and Roebuck houses' being built.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace