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 visualise numbers in a strange way. All people with whom I have talked about this (there weren't many) said to visualise numbers on a line or a circle. My image, on the other hand, has many sharp turns. I have put it here. The round turns in the picture aren't visualised as such; instead when thinking about numbers lying there, the whole picture turns around to maintain orientation while keeping the curved sections straight.
(Sorry if my English comes across as odd or bland; I'm tired and my feel for the language might be off.)
Here's a bit of a confession, because I feel like it.
I was diagnosed with encephalopathy of some kind when I was 19. Can't recall the specifics right now, but the gist of it is, I was born with brain damage. Due to that I've been suffering from a severe attention deficit, frequent emotional turbulence or periods of apathy, and rather unpleasant failures of willpower throughout my life, growing particularly troublesome around the last year of high school. I used to be rather disfunctional socially and emotionally, and found myself growing very nihilistic, neglectful and careless of myself and others.
I used to had a few good, true friends at school - despite being very introverted and getting tired of any company easily - but they all drifted away after graduation. Entering a state university and coping with most classes was trivially easy for me (my IQ is 135, and I simply enjoy reading up on a broad range of humanities on my own), but I flunked after my first year for three times in a row (due to hardly attending at all after the first month, neglecting to study for finals and f...
I'm not sure how common or rare this is, but the visual images I recall are stunningly lacking in detail. For example, in the case of people, even with someone I know very well, it is rare for me to be able to report so much as their hair color on the basis of the mental image I call up when I try to think of them. I don't seem to have any unusual difficulty recognizing people, or any tendency to confuse my various mental images with one another, and the mental images don't seem incomplete until I start thinking about questions like how to describe them. I'm sure I would be completely useless to a police sketch artist if I were ever a witness to a crime.
I have abnormally good memory in some respects. Dates, time-passed-since, and sources are hard to remember, but stories, phrases, quotes, noteworthy or unexpected events, and some portions of conversations are accessible word-for-word years later - an example would be telling an amusing story to a friend who'd been the original source of the story, and using the same words they did to describe it to me years ago, which more than a little unsettled them.
As far as I can tell I have no feeling of this kind of memory as opposed to any other; it all feels constantly available, there's no 'lookup' or 'let me think' feeling at all. Up until recently I have never had the 'tip of the tongue' phenomenon (it's either available or not and I automatically know which without question), but I've been practicing trying to remember things I think I can't, and I think I've had this feeling once or twice.
I have concluded professionally that I am far more effective when I repeat myself often in conversations: I get more evidence later that the information I was conveying actually gets across.
I have yet to decide whether it's because people mostly don't understand and/or forget what I've said, so repeating myself increases the odds of a particular message getting across, or because people understand repetition to be an indicator of importance, or for some other reason.
It frustrates me, but I try to do what works rather than what I think ought to work.
I don't know that I have much to say about it. It would be hard to name an aspect of vocal technique or musicianship that Beyoncé doesn't do better than Britney. Beyoncé has a naturally beautiful voice and is in near-total control of every sound that comes out of her mouth -- flawless pitch, lots of different colors and effects. She also is an excellent musician and has ideas about how to perform a given song in a way that's engaging and effective. She has what singers call good "diction," i.e. clear pronunciation of words. I wouldn't even be tempted to say any of those things about Britney.
You might enjoy reading this blog post. A classical voice teacher was given some examples of heavy metal singing to review (from the point of view of vocal technique) for a metal blog. In addition to being interesting reading, I think a lot of people appreciated the point that many of the kinds of skills needed for good singing are constant across wildly different genres.
If you wanted me to comment on something more specific, let me know.
A few things:
1) I seem to have a much better long-term memory than short-term memory. I always seem to be able to remember details of events long ago based on just small reminders. Yet in daily life I always find myself having to ask people to repeat an explanation or list becuase it just "vanishes" from my mind shortly after I hear it. I'm always having to stop and write stuff like that down.
2) I automatically try to "plug in" everything I learn into the rest of my understanding: see how it relates to other topics, what inconsistencies there might be, etc. This makes it easier for my to pass on understanding to others, as I just follow back the "inferential path" in my mind and then trace it out in the person I'm explaining it to.
It's led to frustration in that I've long assumed everyone else represents knowledge this way, so when they give bad explanations, it's because they're not even trying, but typically, it turns out they haven't connected the subject matter as deeply in their own mental representations. (Yes, I've talked about this before, didn't dig up the links.)
3) Whenever given some objective or criteria, I immediately think of how to ...
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 so...
I would say that I'm completely and utterly neuro-typical. I don't have anything interesting to talk about. I don't visualize months as colors, my memory doesn't seem remarkable in any respect, my visual and bodily sensations aren't particularly dull or vivid, etc.
I have experienced some pretty extreme social anxiety many times in my life, but it always totally vanishes when I spend any length of time interacting with people (e.g., because a job requires me to). In fact, I tend to have this sort of attitude about most things. It's not really a matter of be...
I am:
-- Amongst other things I am actually unable to "just allow" myself to feel things. If I lack a conscious avenue for expression of emotions, I find myself unable to do so: without a 'bridge' to cross from "in my head" to "the outside world", the sentiments or desires just don't have anywhere to go. Others have often given me advice targeted at getting me to "stop repressing my emotions", and these things have ...
I've been in the collegiate environment for a while now and spent a lot of time around various people in academics, but I have consistently noticed a striking difference in people gifted in mathematics. I find that people with serious mathematical talent have an extremely propensity for thinking about mathematics. It's the most striking example of the sort of thing you're mentioning that I have ever come across. It's frequently given me the impression that mathematical talent is the academic talent that is most like athletics or sportsmanship in terms of j...
An almost trivial but (to me) interesting one: I'd be a great proofreader, typos just jump out at me. This appears to be unusual; most people just mentally paper over any mispellings they encounter. (Random web page turned up by a Google search for affirmations of this principle.)
As a tiny test, did you immediately spot the (ETA: more subtle) typo I deliberately inserted in the above paragraph?
In one psychology experiment run by an acquaintance of mine, I was asked to dip a hand into ice water for an extended period and rate my discomfort level (the experiment also included groups which were lied to as to when they'd be told to remove their hand). I rated it as 2; days after the experiment, my acquaintance said that was abnormally low discomfort.
Similarly, in the hospital as I was recovering from peritonitis, the nurse was skeptical of my 1-10 pain rating of pi.
I guess it's just that I can remember how much things really hurt when they really hurt so my 10s are much closer to the real maximum pain than most peoples'. In that case it's not really my brain, but my mind?
A friend of mine in college had a story about a dislocated elbow. The conversation was early in the diagnostic process, possibly over the phone:
Friend: "I have a dislocated elbow."
Nurse: "On a scale of one to ten what's your pain?"
Friend: "Seven."
Nurse: "Then you don't have a dislocated elbow. Those are very painful and people say ten when it happens."
Friend: "Kidney stones are a nine. I'm saving ten for something worse than that."
Nurse: "Oh... [stops to think] Then I guess you probably do have a dislocated elbow."
Based on this, I assumed the pain scale was something like
0 = I was unaware that receiving oral sex is part of the evaluation process, but thank you, nurse.
2 = The mild irritation of needing but being unable to sneeze.
4 = This is actually just ennui.
6 = The stupidity of your diagnosis would cause me to facepalm if my hands were not so badly burned at the moment.
8 = I've recently been smashed in the face with a cast-iron frying pan. How do you think I feel?...
10 = ...and now my eyes are leaking pimples on to my face as well. Dammit!
I am unable to take naps or fall asleep by accident. I have to be explicitly trying to sleep, and it usually takes at least half an hour to fall asleep. This holds even when I haven't slept for over a day and I'm exhausted - I still have to give myself permission, and the process is still not fast.
Enjoyable shivers down the back of the spine
First I heard that it might not be universal was someone's comment here a few days ago. Not sure if it's a mental or physical difference though.
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...
Finnish actually has a word for this feeling - myötähäpeä (a literal translation would be something like "co-shame" or "shared shame"). Me and some people I know have occasionally wondered if Americans generally experience it less, because American TV shows seem to have a tendency to produce enough myötähäpeä to make them unwatchable more frequently than shows from other countries do.
I often have familiar music playing in my head. I know it continues to play even when I'm not aware of it, because of the following evidence: Sometimes I observe playback of song S1, followed by a period of not being aware of any music, then observing playback of the unrelated song S2. And in hindsight, there is a point in S1 that is a natural segue into S2.
I'm sometimes unaware of my emotions. I didn't know this was possible until kinda recently.
I'm most comfortable with non-verbal thinking. When I think verbally I'm more rational (as opposed to intuitive...
There's something about identifying syllables in the sounds of words that other people seem to automatically "get" which is a complete mystery to me. I normally cannot count syllables in words.
I have an absolutely atrocious memory for specifics when it comes to interpersonal interactions. I have a very difficult time saying what a person did or said even later that day. What makes this strange is that I have an excellent memory for a more abstract accounting of people's abilities and can predict people's reactions to different situations with a high degree of accuracy. I deal with utilizing people very often in my job (military officer) and I am known and respected for being very good at putting the right team together for a situation and splitt...
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 recogni...
I wouldn't claim the ability to produce the most inappropriate such message; simply a highly inappropriate one in response to that question, immediately and reflexively, whether I wanted to or not.
It is, however, superior to your suggestion for a number of reasons:
1) It's considerably more achievable to spell out a three simple-word message with no punctuation in recognisable swastikas on an easter egg than it is to spell out a five complex-word message with punctuation in recognisable heroin needles in the same medium.
2) Swastikas are an immediately recognisable and highly historically, socially and politically charged symbol in a way that needles simply are not. You'd have a hard time even getting people to recognise a pointy blob piped onto a piece of confectionery as a hypodermic needle, let alone conveying the idea that it was for the purpose of injecting heroin.
3) "Fuck the police" is also an existing politicised statement, primarily associated with black gangsta rap group N.W.A., but also a broad anarchist sentiment taken in isolation, while "Your Child's Leukemia Is Hilarious!" is simply a highly distasteful fabricated statement without any precedent im...
When I think about things, in addition to mental images and internal monlogue, I have very vivid tactile and kinesthetic sensations. For example, if you were to say "high-heeled shoes," I would only dimly picture a pair of heels, but I would immediately imagine how they would feel in my hand, how it would make the arch of my foot feel to wear them, and the emphatic stamping sensation of walking in them. It's the same even with abstract ideas; negative numbers feel a particular way in the pit of my stomach, and factoring feels like a physical process of disassembly.
When I was younger I had a great deal of trouble recognizing facial expressions. For example, it was hard for me to tell whether someone was smiling or barely managing to hold back tears. I could usually figure out which was which from context, at least when the emotions involved were so different. With nuances like the difference between a smirk and a grin, I was completely unable to tell the difference. Ditto for picking up emotional content from intonation and vocal tone.
As a teenager I trained myself to recognize specific small details that reliably di...
Sometimes I have a visual experience that is very hard to describe. It happens when a person is talking to me and I've been looking at them without interruption for several minutes. (Maybe they need to be looking at me too; I can't remember.)
What happens is that the person starts to seem very close to me and very small, as though I had my face pressed up to the window of a dollhouse and they were inside it. This is not exactly what it is like, but it's the closest I can come to putting it into words.
If I look away, the effect stops, but it easily starts...
I frequently experience emotions as physical sensations. I can even physically locate them in my body sometimes. For example, I feel tend to feel sadness and sleepiness in my eyes and anger in my forehead. Sometimes I end up unable to figure out what emotion my current sensations correspond to. On a possibly related note, if I pay attention to what any given part of my body is feeling, after a while I start to feel some low-level pain in that spot. I try not to pay attention to my body very much as a result.
I get lost in books and such very easily, ending ...
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 sti...
One of my hunches is that people differ much more than commonly thought on the accuracy and strength of face recognition, even outside of clinical prosopagnosia.
I'm very poor at this, tending both to not recognize people, but also to over-recognize; some days every stranger I cross makes me think of someone I know strongly enough that I almost break into a smile and start greeting them, and because of past embarrassing occasions I've developed compensations which now manifest as shyness.
I'm very bad at recognizing celebrities; I've often been out walking w...
I have difficulty recognizing emotions. I tend to categorize them as physical feelings, such as a certain tightness to the stomach, or between the ribs. I've come to associate these with commonly known emotions, since some of them correlate with thoughts making them easier to pinpoint, but sometimes I have specific feelings and I don't know if it is a known emotion or not.
It is pretty rare that I don't know what I'm feeling, but I have a record of the first time I felt intense jealousy/anger/stress, and I wrote about "hot skin, wide eyes, a burning feeling on my chest like a rash, and tightness between the shoulders" and my thoughts before I realized the name for what was happening.
I experience romantic longing as a warmth starting in my heart which radiates outwards depending on intensity. Normally it only gets to about my upper lungs, but sometimes it makes it through my torso and a little bit down the upper parts of my arms. It feels slightly pressurized, but is incredibly pleasant.
Connectedness feels similar to that, but cold and associated with blue, with weird sensations in which my head either feels floating, or my arms don't feel separate from the world. This is a very rare feeling to have much of, normally when it happens it only occupies a section of my heart.
I have an incredibly poor memory regarding spatial relations. I still have to look where the night stand is by my bed is to avoid hitting it, and it's been there for more than a year now. I get lost constantly, I can memorize routes from point A to point B, but I can't extrapolate routes between points based on location, because I have no general idea of location outside of specific routes and landmarks. Given that my verbal and visual memory are superb, and that I can absorb relatively large amounts of information in short amounts of time for most things,...
I sometimes (every few weeks) hear a pretty loud, high pitched sound. It eventually (within a minute) fades. No idea if that is normal or not, but it just occurred to me that it might not be.
I read at about 1100 WPM. I had no idea that people sounded out words in their heads until about two years ago, when I was speed reading an article about speed reading and realized I was speed reading. I am curious how much faster it is possible to go? Can anyone here go significantly faster? I want to know if it's worth training further.
My memory of faces might ...
high pitched sound
Sounds like tinnitus. (I have this, but less often than you, and I wouldn't describe it as loud. A friend of mine has it constantly since he went to a loud rock concert as a boy.)
I have VERY few memories of my life before I was 11.
Wow.
When I was 8 or so I thought it was strange that I didn't have any memories from before I was about 4. Based on that, my interest in science and space travel, and my general weirdness, I decided that I was probably a space alien changeling. (Note: I no longer think this.)
I'm not sure if this counts for what is asked: I have been told that when I speak I often repeat voicelessly the last bits of what I said (one or two words, perhaps) clearly enough to be lip-readable. I am completely unconscious of doing it.
I experience numbers as being on a line that runs left to right, swerves to the left at some number, continues upwards, and then returns to running from left to right. My experience of temperatures, people's ages, and the days of months is similar, but with different patterns of where the turns are. However, I think it may actually go right to left somewhere in the millions, though I'm not sure. Negative numbers run to the left forever, as far as I can tell. Calendar years are slightly different, in that they take more rounded turns and seem to be capable...
I used to go around saying, "I am the only person I know of who does not believe he is unique."
(Always loved deliberate irony like that.)
It's true, though. I do not believe it likely, or even statistically possible, that I have thought any thoughts not thought by someone else, and this seems to be an uncommon (but not unique) thought.
I've also been obsessed with meta, and I thought this was uncommon as well until I started reading Hofstadter.
Does any of that count?
I have a weirdly good memory for things I hear said in conversation.
More interestingly, it took me many years to understand that I did not experience hunger in the same way as other people. I feel no physical sensations associated with it (nothing like a "hollow" feeling in the stomach, or rumblings, which are apparently more common symptoms). When I haven't eaten, I just find that my thoughts just keep turning towards food items. I have recurring thoughts of fruit, or something like that. When I was a kid, my parents didn't understand the way I ...
I think the most different part in my mind is how I value sensory inputs very lowly compared to most people. I do enjoy (some) food, but I don't care much about it as long as it's not something I really dislike. I prefer games which are more abstract (like pen&paper role-playing games) over more graphically shiny games. I do enjoy sex, but much less than other people seem to enjoy it, and I would definitely not do much efforts just for sex (relationship is a different issue, but it's not the sex I value in it). I prefer, by far, to read books rather th...
I'm fascinated by kinesthesia. I've put in some 30 years getting moved into my body. It would probably be more exact to say that I'm improving the connection between my conscious mind and my kinesthetic information, but "getting moved in" is how I think about it.
I think of myself as having a very good associative memory-- you talk about something, and there's a reasonable chance I can remember a magazine article I read 20 years ago that's related to it. However, when I've mentioned this, a fair number of people say they have it too.
My ear-mouth c...
My visualization for aversions is that they emanate waves of pushiness.
I don't feel like they are pushing me away (unless they're active), but it looks like an invisible field which would push me should I try to interact with it.
Strength varies, probably with aversion strength.
I'm close to the mean in most respects, except that I seem to enjoy abstract thinking slightly more than average.
How wrong is it that I really want to append "...or maybe those were strangers. I'm not really sure." to this comment?
What about the converse phenomenon, in which you have a particular quirk you think very rare, and try to hide it, and then one day you realize lots of other people have the same quirk?
I suffer from a form of depression, which comes along with a symptom I call "brain-ache": it essentially consists of a sharp pain that feels as though it's internal to my brain (unlike headaches, which I also commonly get, which are focused in my skull).
Brain-ache is worsened by deliberate conscious thinking, and trying to focus on things, and it is generally accompanied by a "mental fog" which makes it hard for me to see my own thoughts, and therefore hard to think about anything complex.
I have a few other pecularities [photic sneeze r...
When I'm deep in thought, I will sometimes have a short, convulsive shiver for no particular reason. It's strong enough to be visible to people nearby, and unnerving to some of them. I don't know if that counts as my mind, but it is weird.
I am very interested in my dreams, and make a point of remembering interesting facts about them whenever possible. I have vivid dreams with a wider range of sensations than anyone else I know, including: color, sound, texture, proprioception, sense of falling, the sensation of having something disgusting touching me (does...
When I listen to music without words, I still feel as if the melody expresses some sort of grammatical structure. Though, I am unable to introspect any particular meaning from this grammar.
how are you a beautiful and unique snowflake?
200 comments
An invitation to talk about myself? Yay!
First of all: complex machinery is universal.
As for me? I'm smart, curious, I get math, I'm good at teaching, and I try to reconcile all my knowledge with itself. These are probably normal for non-impaired, non-darkside people.
I can't think of anything transnormal.
Mild prosopagnosia -- I know it's not total, but it can be hard to tell where the line is because with people I know well, I have an abundance of other cues for determining their identity. Watching a film or TV show, I can keep the characters differentiated just fine, but it's hard to recognize actors across different performances (with a few exceptions).
I have very strong empathy if you go by the impact of others' emotions on me, and my ability to detect them; it's actually quite overwhelming. I've learned a few tricks for displaying it socially, but th...
Nothing too exciting.
The easiest one is: sexually attracted to the two most popular genders. (Possibly to others as well; I don't know.)
In my twenties, I was involved in some lexical priming studies in which I seemed to be a radical outlier in terms of how long secondary meanings of words stayed activated as I processed a sentence... I was several sigmas out on the right-side tail of the results I saw. There's a pretty obvious just-so story to be told about the relationship between that and the ability to notice alternative interpretations of an utterance,...
This isn't really what the post asked about per se, but I'm just curious how common this is.... I occasionally have dreams that are not from my own perspective. I don't mean simply that I'm in some other place or time, but that I'm clearly not me in the dream, to the extent of sometimes being a different age or, occasionally, female. I've had dreams where the 1st-person perspective actually switches mid-dream. This even includessome occasions when this occurs because the first me (or not-me) has been killed.
Anybody else have that?
I think in far mode more than average.
I probably share this with many people, it's just that I haven't come into direct contact with anyone who shares this. I'm extremely right-brained. I'm an actor. I'm slightly introverted, but I do pretty well with people, I struggle in math and science.
Yet I want to be a scientist. Which is a fairly left-brained aspiration, I think. Especially the heavier sciences, like physics. I don't know if that's a realistic goal.
And that isn't really unusual, my mind is higly regular. It's just that I'm using my brain for things it's not as capable of as other people... This is beginning to sound like a disadvantage. But being right-brained isn't all bad. Coming up with creative ideas is nice and fun. :]
I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for, because it is a developed bias as opposed to something congenital in my cognitive architecture, but...
When I was a child, I used to receive a lot of hand-me-down clothing from from a relative. Their family was better off than mine, but the age difference was just enough that their fairly-expensive clothing was suffiiciently out of style and a source of teasing for me through much of my childhood. Consequently, I have a bias against used goods. For example, I'd much rather buy a new Honda or Ford than a ...
I experience something that may be perfectly normal, but I've often wondered if anyone else has it. When I imagine myself or someone else getting hurt, for example when reading about some accident, I often feel a strange, tingling sensation in my skin, especially the insides of my legs, usually starting at the thighs and going down farther if the sensation is stronger.
I do not know whether this is atypical. At the very least, I have never encountered anyone talking about it. However, my visual experience is almost always similar to, but less vibrant than, a monitor being degaussed.
I always assumed (and still do this) that people do all sorts of things on purpose, having thought about what they do and why they do it. So I'm kinda paranoid. May be a mind projection fallacy, may be not.
I experience ASMR, but it's only ever been triggered by listening to, or rarely by thinking about, certain songs. None of the ASMR inducing videos people put on Youtube worked for me even remotely. I do feel a somewhat pleasant numb feeling in my throat sometimes though, which seems to get triggered by the same things that trigger most people's ASMR, like soft voices. Never heard of anyone else who experiences that one.
I also sometimes can feel a weird feeling on the bottom of my foot if I rub the bottom of the opposite foot against a hard surface, like the corner of my subwoofer.
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.