Page last updated at 10:00 GMT, Friday, 11 September 2009 11:00 UK

What is it like to see time?

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Holly Branigan has time-space synaesthesia, a condition which causes her to see time in space.

Here she describes what she experiences when she thinks about time.

Holly discovered she was a "synaesthete" when she attended a lecture given by Dr Julia Simner, a psychologist at the UK's University of Edinburgh, who studies the phenomenon.

Dr Simner thinks that this could be one of the most common forms of synaesthesia, although it has only been properly described, by scientists, within the last few years.

More familiar variants of synaesthesia cause people to experience particular colours when they hear sounds or experience tastes that they associate with certain words.

In their most recent experiments, Dr Simner and her colleagues have discovered that this visual concept of time gives people an advantage when it comes to recalling dates and events from their lives.

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