I frequently experience emotions as physical sensations. I can even physically locate them in my body sometimes. For example, I feel tend to feel sadness and sleepiness in my eyes and anger in my forehead. Sometimes I end up unable to figure out what emotion my current sensations correspond to. On a possibly related note, if I pay attention to what any given part of my body is feeling, after a while I start to feel some low-level pain in that spot. I try not to pay attention to my body very much as a result.
I get lost in books and such very easily, ending up almost totally oblivious to the world around me. I also read very quickly. And if I'm not keeping my brain occupied by something, I tend to either fall asleep or get very frustrated. It also causes me to be unaware of any pains or discomforts I'm feeling.
I often have trouble paying attention to what people are saying when they are talking to me and need to ask them to repeat what they are saying; my brain seems to interpret people's voices as background noise and I have trouble turning this off.
I often have a song of some kind playing in my head. I can play melodies by ear on the piano, but not harmonies, and I usually find that when I try to recall a memorized song I can only "hear" the singer and not any of the accompanying instruments.
Whenever I am in the process of inserting an earplug inside my right ear, it presses on a spot that causes me to feel an urge to cough. It happens every single time, and it doesn't have to be an earplug pressing the spot; an otoscope can also trigger the sensation.
I don't like the taste of most chocolate. I particularly dislike chocolate milk, chocolate ice cream, and chocolate cake.
I frequently experience emotions as physical sensations. I can even physically locate them in my body sometimes. For example, I feel tend to feel sadness and sleepiness in my eyes and anger in my forehead.
I get this too, and in fact have long speculated it to be the way that most people probably experience emotions. For example, I feel fear as a ripple through my chest with two distinct parameters. The larger the waves and the more they travel outward from the epicenter, the greater the perceived danger. And the further to the right or left of my chest ...
Partially to help reduce the typical mind fallacy and partially because I'm curious, I'm thinking about writing either an essay or a book with plenty of examples about ways by which human minds differ. From commonly known and ordinary, like differences in sexual orientation, to the rare and seemingly impossible, like motion blindness.
To do this, I need to start collecting examples. In what ways does your mind differ from what you think is the norm for most people?
I'm particularly interested in differences - small or large - that you didn't realize for a long time, automatically assuming that everyone was like you in that regard. It can even be something as trivial as always having conceptualized the passing of years as a visual timeline, and then finding out that not everyone does so. I'm also interested in links to blog posts where people talk about their own mental peculiarities, even if you didn't write them yourself. Also books and academic articles that you might think could be relevant.
Some of the content that I'm thinking about including are cultural differences in various things as recounted in the WEIRD article, differences in sexual and romantic orientation (such as mono/poly), differences in the ability to recover from setbacks, extroversion vs. introversion in terms of gaining/losing energy from social activity, differences in visualization ability, various cognitive differences ranging from autism to synesthesia to an inability to hear music in particular, differences in moral intuitions, differences in the way people think (visual vs. verbal vs. conceptual vs. something that I'm not aware of yet), differences in thinking styles (social/rational, reflectivity vs. impulsiveness) and various odd brain damage cases.
If you find this project interesting, consider spreading the link to this post or resharing my Google Plus update about it. Also, if you don't want to reply in public, feel free to send me a private message.