I've previously discussed "the beat" on here. Varying degrees of musicality seems to be a pretty pervasive theme in other comments and similar discussions.
Ooh. Here's one. I seem to have a faculty for formulating highly inappropriate or subversive responses to things. When asked "what's the most inappropriate personalised message to put on an easter egg?" I immediately come up with "lots of tiny swastikas spelling out 'fuck the police'". This is useful for comedic, literary and poetic purposes, and I can generally recognise other people who have the same faculty if I talk to them for a little while or appraise their work in any detail.
Staying on the subject of poetry, I also have an utterly fastidious and unrelenting need for perfect scansion in poetic verse. When I read or listen to the work of a poet or songwriter, I can generally tell if they have that same need. Over 160 years after his death, for example, I can tell that Edgar Allan Poe was driven to distraction by stray metric feet in the same way I am. If he wasn't, his work wouldn't be the way it is.
I'm reminded of a scene in the novel Contact in which a character from Soviet Russia expresses his fondness for a button that reads "Pray for Sex". As he explains to the American main character: "In your county it is offensive in only one way, but in mine it is offensive in two different ways."
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.