jsalvatier comments on How is your mind different from everyone else's? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (266)
One that I realized quite quickly, I have an uncomfortably strong level of empathy. Or more accurately, a strong discomfort towards emotional disharmony in others. The strongest is in strong arguments or social awkwardness. I can barely stand to watch those intentionally awkward scenes in sitcoms and movies.
I have a preternatural ability to see what others are trying to say. This comes out in two ways. One, if someone is talking to me, and they make an error, my brain will autotranslate. So if they said brother and meant father, I will hear what they meant. Sometimes I don't notice this translation until they point out an error they made. And then I'll be able to recall specifically what they said. The other way it comes out is I can spot miscommunication very easily. If two people are having a "who's on first" moment, I'll see exactly where the confusion is, and what needs to be said to fix it. It's awesome and weird.
Both of the previous items cause me to have a natural urge to resolve any conflict going on, trying to act as mediator.
Like some here, I think I have mild number synethesia. Mental math sometimes has a visual component, with numbers splitting and merging. Additionally, numbers...um....look a certain way. So the number 15 looks really 3-ish and really 5-ish. It's also a very sturdy, compact number (because it fits into 60 so well.) The lower numbers also have an aesthetic, usually based on how divisible they are or how common a divisor they are. So, 2,3,4,12,60 are all pretty but 31 or 57 are ugly. Higher numbers blur a bit for me. This may be a heuristic for how easily my mind manipulates those numbers.
Also, and with the main population I feel like an oddity for this, I derive significant pleasure from completing math problems. I imagine many others here do too.
Your first three paragraphs describe me to a bizarrely high degree of accuracy.
Do the the dimples on the side of your face approximate the big dipper? We are a part of a cloning project run secretly by the government in the late 80's.
More seriously, are you an INTP? Does one of your parents have a severe mental illness? Is the other an electric engineer?
INTP, yes. I think-- been a while since I took one of those tests, the P might be iffy. The rest doesn't match, although there is mental illness in the family tree-- just not that close to me. Unless you count religion, anyway.
Ok, just curious. One friend of mine is very similar in many regards and those were three of the biggest parallels in our lives. Technically he was INTJ, iffy on the J too.
Additionally, you would have been freaking out if all 3 had matched.