It is a royal pain in the ass, and I certainly don't view it as some sort of adorable quirk. It hinders my social life and occasionally makes me feel completely incompetent. Getting lost when you're on your own is one thing, but getting lost with a date is a completely different level of embarrassment. I'm not sure where you got the idea that I think this is some sort of "fun aspect" of my personality, it's a patch of uselessness in my brain which I have to work around all the time. The reason I pointed out some positive characteristics was because this was a thread about neural irregularities, and a person who had poor spatial memory and sucked in other areas too would just be stupid, not that interesting at all. Maybe I could have just talked about my spatial memory problems, I guess, but I thought that detail seemed pertinent. It wasn't like I spent very long talking about my positives, only 27 words out of 154 dealt with the positive characteristics mentioned. While signalling influences what we do, not everything is signalling by necessity. For instance, I could say that here, and in your earlier reply, you are attempting to set yourself apart from the group as a contrarian, attempting to score yourself some sweet, sweet internet status as a free thinker. Also, just for fun, some of the methods I am using to "FIX THIS" and their relative success.
1: Practice getting lost, find way back to set points. I intentionally leave one of my paths (GPS in my car in case I fail), and drive off into side streets, making essentially random turns. Then, I try to get back to my path. So far, I have had incredibly limited success with this method. I usually end up having to arbitrarily choose turns until I pop back onto the main road, but often even when I make it back without GPS assistance, it is not because I knew where I was, but because I got lucky. I haven't seen any real improvement in this area.
2: Map study. I look at maps of the area, identify main roads, and then try to get places. It doesn't work. While it's better than going blind, I end up missing most of the visual cues needed to get anywhere. I've had to use this method mostly in live fire situations when I couldn't get my GPS, and four times out of five I've had to pull over and call for directions. When I have a map with me, I can get there, but I'll make several wrong turns and have to return to the correct path multiple times.
3: Avoiding the problem through assistance. My GPS is wonderful. I love it so much, and it loves me. I can get places, and it is able to help even after I've ignored its sage advice and made an incorrect turn due to operator error or traffic factors. A passenger who knows where they are going is around equivalent in terms of usefulness. However, these only help me when I'm with other people or in a car. In situations where I am on foot and alone, I give myself significant amounts of time to get to my destinations, because I will probably get lost (Planning fallacy means I am occasionally late anyway).
By all means, suggest how I can fix this issue. I don't mean that in a passive aggressive way (maybe a little, I'm a bit annoyed), it'd be nice to hear some alternative strategies. I want to be awesome, smart is better than stupid in all areas, and I want to be better. I have changed things about myself before, but this trait is annoying and persistent.
It is a royal pain in the ass, and I certainly don't view it as some sort of adorable quirk. It hinders my social life and occasionally makes me feel completely incompetent. Getting lost when you're on your own is one thing, but getting lost with a date is a completely different level of embarrassment. I'm not sure where you got the idea that I think this is some sort of "fun aspect" of my personality, it's a patch of uselessness in my brain which I have to work around all the time.
Well then you're probably not engaged in the sort of destructi...
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.