I'm a very visual person. When I read books, my mind creates mental images and associates emotions with those images. If it's a really good book, the experience is very similar to dreaming. My conscious self is utterly submerged, and I live vicariously through the character. Six hours later (I'm a fast reader), the dream ends and I set the book down, and become myself again, and find I have visual slideshow of the entire book. I have never noticed a typo in a book. I remember virtually every fact about every book I've ever read, so long as it has some sort of narrative I can use to construct these images. So for example, I can read a history book once and never forget. I can look at a map, and navigate to anywhere on that map. I have an excellent sense of direction. I can close my eyes, and imagine myself anywhere I've been. I know it sounds like I have a photographic memory, but not really. If you gave me those tests where they show you a picture with a bunch of things, then ask you to repeat them back, I'd do pretty normally. My memory is average for details, excellent at the big picture.
I like to daydream. I have a bunch of different daydreams, and they function sort of like a screen saver for my brain. If I'm not doing anything mentally taxing, I turn on one and tune the world out. I can still remember as a child imagining all my stuffed animals as a council, sitting in a circle and doing something. Most involve a faceless, nameless protagonist who has some sort of magical powers. There are almost never meaningful relationships, and never names, in these daydreams. It's kinda creeps me out, what this fact says about me. These daydreams are very similar to what I experience when reading a book, in form if not content. These stories always involve some sort of enemy that needs defeating. Most run several years, until I get bored of them. I use them to help fall asleep. If anyone is interested, I could post one here.
I also have a really strong reaction to music. I can sit and listen to the same song on repeat for an hour, and I might as well be high, given how differently I think.
I mentioned earlier that books swallow me up, and spit me out later. I'm not capable of analysing anything I read critically the first time through. I have to go back and read it again, as an outside observer.
I have a bad habit of getting into emotional feedback loops. The need to control my emotions was what led to my current interest in rationality, and eventually here to Less Wrong. I would be a very different person if I hadn't needed to master my emotions at such a young age.
...I like to daydream. I have a bunch of different daydreams, and they function sort of like a screen saver for my brain. If I'm not doing anything mentally taxing, I turn on one and tune the world out. I can still remember as a child imagining all my stuffed animals as a council, sitting in a circle and doing something. Most involve a faceless, nameless protagonist who has some sort of magical powers. There are almost never meaningful relationships, and never names, in these daydreams. It's kinda creeps me out, what this fact says about me. These daydreams
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.