A few relatively unusual things that come to mind:
People often make claims that even atheists have "God-shaped holes" that they need to fill. I have never felt this way, and I have no visceral understanding of what others mean when they say that they do feel such a thing. This also applies to related concepts, e.g. a search for "universal meaning," a religion-inspiring feeling that "there must be something greater out there," etc.
I'm somewhere in the middle of the introversion-extroversion scale. I enjoy socializing, but I still need time to myself in order to recharge mentally. Extroverts tend to see me as "one of them" at first, and then they become confused when I don't always want to go out and party.
I never went through the (seemingly typical) stage in childhood where one has a general dislike of/aversion to the other gender. I was friends with both boys and girls, more or less equally, since preschool if not earlier. (I myself am a straight male, to contextualize this for those curious.)
There was an interesting survey several years ago on Cosmic Variance about our mental images of time. I'll quote my response:
My main physical conceptions of time are in terms of years or weeks. Both involve spirals, although oriented differently.
For years, I think of them as a clockwise spiral going upwards, such that any two years make a complete circle when seen from “above.” For example, if I picture this year and then next year, it’s a circle where the bottom is January 2009, the left middle is Summer 2009, the top is Winter 2009-2010, the right middle is Summer 2010, etc. There’s definite seasonal imagery connected to this view. To try to demonstrate this, a diagram is -(:)-, where the -’s are summers and the .’s are winters. I often picture myself as being “on” a certain part of the spiral/circle, e.g. right now I’m coming up to the “top” of the 2009-2010 circle.
For weeks, I think of them as a spiral going to the right, so that if you look at it from the side, “days” are in the front and “nights” are in the back. I picture a week like this: |S|M|T|W|R|F|S| (often without the days labeled, but I put that there for clarity), where each day goes off to night and then loops around behind to connect to the next day in the morning.
I imagine any other timescale as just a long line going left to right.
There seems to be quite a range of mental images of time among people.
People often make claims that even atheists have "God-shaped holes" that they need to fill. I have never felt this way, and I have no visceral understanding of what others mean when they say that they do feel such a thing
From the other side of the spectrum: I pray to a god I know doesn't exist, just because I feel a compulsion. Many atheists do not understand what the need to worship feels like. It's not about being scared of life and wanting a sky-daddy to comfort you. It's not about trying to outsource critical thinking. For some people, worshiping a god is just something you've got to do. Like taking a stretch after being cramped in an airplane.
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.