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I'M SO SORRY, THIS IS SO LONG. I HAVE BEEN WRITING THIS FOR DAYS. Why hello there, friends. I have a few questions for you. Lately I have become super curious about how myself and other people think. I am super eager to learn more about this, so if anyone has any advice or insights (on what I can do with this, and how common my experiences are), please tell me. My interest in types of thinking was sparked for the first time about a year ago, while I was smoking some weed in the bath. It was the morning after a small local EDM festival and I was super tired. I had just finished off a joint and lay my head on the edge of the tub to nap in the hot water. The fan was on and I felt myself absorbed in the white noise. As I was lying there, I began to experience the most incredible, complex, and vivid audio hallucinations. I was absolutely blown away. It was like I was back at the festival again, except the music was different. It was music I had never heard. It was music I was making up. I no longer have any memory of the audio experience itself, only my intense reaction to it (awe and disbelief, yet a strange and easy acceptance). I am not talking about random blips here, or simple noise, or the 'rhyhtm' one sometimes feels when surrounded by various kinds of white noise. I am talking about crystal clear, complex, composed electronic music that played in my head, apropos of nothing, for anywhere up to two hours. I experienced the same thing not long after, with the dehumidifier on, again a few months later, and from then on frequently enough (when I have a source of white noise) that I am relatively confident I can induce it virtually any time I smoke and have recently listened to some complex music. I am also relatively sure if I could find some way to reproduce the sounds I could make some pretty wild tunes. It sounds so cheesy but it's like...the vibration, or the soul of the music, stays inside me and plays on as something new and incredible inside my head. Sometimes it feels like it's coming from between my ears, other times like it's surrounding me. I've had simple audio hallucinations while smoking before, like the sound of people talking (usually nonsense) or simpler, more distant music (country for some reason) that I've only just now remembered and very quickly dismissed at the time. Ever since I had that experience, I've been a little more attuned to how other people think and experience. I also have a partner who may be on the autism spectrum, and so I am interested in how they think and feel as well. I only started actively questioning friends and family a few weeks ago, but I find what I've discovered extremely interesting. A little bit because it makes me feel kind of special, a little bit because it's made me realize that we're all very special. Apparently audio hallucinations are not the only slightly strange thing happening in my head. While I was doing some research on the autism spectrum, I found this video of one of Temple Grandin's Ted talks. The first time I watched it, I was thinking primarily of my partner. While I was fascinated and could relate to Ms. Grandin in a lot of ways, it never really crossed my mind that I might be more than a little bit like her. The second time I watched, it struck me as quite strange. Temple begins describing her autistic experience as being different from non-spectrum people in that she thinks primarily in pictures - not simple pictures, but essentially photographic memories of things she has seen in her life. So, for instance, when you say 'church' to Temple Grandin, she does not imagine one metaphorically, or conjure a simple 'sketch' of that concept in her mind. Her mind's eye presents her with a clear photograph of a specific church. So does mine. I have no idea how I have managed to go my entire life without noticing this, but I think almost completely in pictures. Since I've started asking around, I've found other people who think this way as well. Funny enough (and unsurprisingly) two of the closest people to me (my brother and my best friend) think almost exactly like this as well. Most of my thinking consists of what appear to be photographic images presented in my mind's eye. I think this way with my eyes open or closed. Many of these images are photographic memories, many of them are clearly things I have imagined on the spot. I can see literally anything in my mind's eye as a crystal clear, perfect photograph of what is described to me (or that I describe for myself), with typically no effort whatsoever. Right now I'm eating ice cream so I'm picturing what appears to be a marker drawing of a cartoon of melting a unicorn in the shape of a soft serve ice cream cone. The unicorn is crying and dripping rainbow from his half melted horn. He's white with a slightly blue tint in the shadows of his body, has a pink mane streaked with magenta, and is deeply suffering. Actually, the pink doesn't look very good with the blue, so I've changed him to pink mane and tint, or alternatively blue mane and tint. Maybe he's saying 'please help me' or 'oh god it hurts'. Poor guy. If I want to, I can instantly change the colours of the image to anything I want, change it from a cartoon to a photo-realistic image, or imagine literally anything else. With any amount of prompting, I could also remember this exact picture in my head basically forever. Pictures, full films (If I watched a movie often enough I could probably play the entire thing in my head somewhat easily) I have never had any reason to believe that other people could not do this up to now. I would never have imagined that my friends do not see what I do. Or that my partner cannot relate to it in any way. Here are some responses from friends and family that I've asked about this. My brother and my best friend think almost exactly like I do. My brother has ADHD and is also one of the most technically talented jugglers in the country (Canada...so there's not many of us anyway, ha). Him and I are so alike that it is uncanny. If I discover anything about myself, I am 100% sure my brother experiences the same thing. Here are some of his responses to questions I asked him online. Apologies for any poor formatting, this is gonna be a long post. "I rarely think in words in my head It's too slow I can't do mental math without visualizing the numbers in my head" Unlike him, I often catch myself thinking in words, especially if I am actively talking to myself - guiding my thoughts and thinking reasonably and critically. Often I can clearly hear my own voice in my head or see a movie of myself writing down what I am saying in front of me. Sometimes the writing appears as a cartoon, often it's just a photo or film of me watching my hands write on paper. I also 'see' mental math as an equation written in front of me, and it makes it very hard to do math. I imagine if I tried harder at math (I hate it) I would get over much of the difficulty and become skilled at it in my own way with practice. On the way he 'sees' his juggling patterns and other movements: "Everything kind of beaks down in to dimensional planes for me. I've never really been able to explain it to anyone. Like I imagine different lines and shapes. It comes from my juggling I think. It's how I do a lot of my creative movement. Connecting one plane to another to another while three others are occurring at once on another axis to five or seven axis (I'm not sure what the plural of axis is). I'm always considering movement possibilities and probabilities in my head. And sometimes it doesn't really have to do with juggling? It kind of applies to everything somehow? Or even moving necessarily. I use my feet most commonly as my frame of reference for the visual thing I was just explaining. I feel my directions based on one foots direction to the other and judge all movements visually from the root of my foot to the rest of my body. I have to visualize my whole body positioning all the time when I juggle and my feet are my base , so I look through my feet." He, like another one of my friends, says that he uses this to remember strings of numbers and other important information. "Like when I was a kid. I rember a math skill taking test for a contest that was on a little slip of papery plastic out of a chip bag when I was 7. 72×4+32÷8-16" I can only remember a few long strings of numbers (my SIN number, my bank card number, maybe some other simple things, and one answer to a math question I was asked in the second grade, which was 34 and appears in my head in a faded ice blue font over a photograph of the hall leading my classroom). My friend, S, who is another talented and pretty high-achieving but somewhat troubled person, claims that she what she calls an eidetic memory and synesthesia. Here's a message she sent to me on facebook. "I see things clearly. I have an eidetic memory. It's weakened since my last few concussions but it's still kicking. I can see things really clearly in my head. When I was in my undergrad instead of studying I would just leaf through the text book and take mental snap shots of things. Then when writing my exam I just read off the page in my head. I can zoom in and out on certain parts of the page and see them in more detail. I can slow down images that are happening before me. Almost cinematic style which is why I'm half decent at coaching .. I slow down their movements so I can pick on their technique. So yeah it's pretty legit. It's slowly coming back. I'm guessing it'll take another year for me to get back up to speed. My final year of my undergrad I was hit in the head 4 times in the span of 6 months. Last one I couldn't even remember my name. I'm technically still not "cleared" to do anything .. And that happened in 2013. So it been a process trying to get things back. Particularly emotional processing. I can't see sounds or anything but I have a version of synestasia (or however the gently caress you spell it) where I can taste words. So that's legit. I can edit pretty well because things taste differently if they're grammatically incorrect or if the flow isn't there". Unlike S, my photographs have not usually been this useful. I could easily remember a text book and zoom in on details of it, but I don't think I could take a real, lasting photograph of multiple pages. I'd see it clearly, but upon zooming in, the words will change to something else or turn into nonsense. My brain often changes things in an extremely convincing way, so that if asked, I would be completely certain of my memory (because I'm seeing what I think is a crystal clear photo of it. For example, I watched the video Birdgang by Lucki Eck$, lost the link, and then spent forever trying to find a video of the guy in dusty blue shorts, a matching tee, and a cap of the same colour. I have a perfect photo of it in my mind. Yet I found the video and the only part of his outfit which is blue is the cap. It's like my brain changes things around to make them more memorable for me, or fills in the blanks so there are no gaps. I have, since discovering this 'skill', started to take pictures of small things people have asked me to remember, such as passwords, and have had success. On the other hand, I read voraciously but remember almost nothing of what I read - as long as it's fiction. Reading is bliss for me. I become fully immersed in the universe - likely because I see it playing as a movie in my head. One thing I can't stand about seeing a movie before I read the book is that the characters have the actors' faces. I usually leave character's faces blank. I have no idea why. Anyway, I remember almost nothing of what I read without significant prompting. I've read hundreds of classics and I'll be damned if I could tell you the endings of any of the books, names of most characters, who those characters were, and what they did or what the major plot points are. What I can tell you is how much I enjoyed them and why. I look forward to reading the entire Harry Potter series for the zillionth time in about a year or so and remembering basically nothing except for amazing feeling I get while reading it. I've always been this way - long before I started smoking pot or using any other substances. I will, however, remember anything that really, really strikes me. I can't read horror books or watch horror movies. I will be stuck with a picture of the violence or suffering happening in my head at random basically forever and I will never get rid of it. I have two memories of horrible things I was allowed to watch as a child before the age of five, as well as snapshots of about five or six terrifying nightmares from around the same age. Thinking about these things still makes me very uncomfortable. I decided to test some of my friends to see how they think, and their answers were extremely varied incredibly and surprising. According to C, she sees absolutely nothing in her mind's eye. She does not have pictures of anything and became extremely confused when I asked her to visualize something in her mind. When I told her that I was looking at a short clip of a red barn in the rain at dusk, she was baffled. How could I see that, she said, with my eyes open? That blew me away. J, who was in the room at the time, claims that he also hears music in his head and laments that he often struggles to get it out (he is an actual musician, his room is literally just a bed and shelves upon shelves of musical equipment) but he can't really see anything either. When I asked him to picture a wine bottle and asked him what he saw, he told me that all he could see (with significant effort) was a vague silhouette of something wine bottle shaped. No colours, details, feelings, nothing. And he conjured this image with great effort. This also blew me away. I re-confirmed this with C and J over sushi today. I tried to ask both of them to picture basic things and they could not do it. We talked about this for about another hour and a half at home and we've come to the conclusion that C, with incredible effort and closed eyes, can picture what she describes as "ink blobs" or "fading impressions". J says he can look at something, turn away, close his eyes and "see" it - he can describe it, it's there, he claims, in his mind's eye but "there's no, like, colour, or details or anything." I honestly can't even understand what he means by that. He was also surprised to notice that I do not have to close my eyes or look away to picture something. We did some experiments, and we discovered that his visual imagination does not seem to "move" like mine. For example, if I prompt him to picture me walking in the forest, he has a very brief flash of a colourless, impressional image of me walking through a forest in the outfit I'm currently wearing. That's it. If I picture him in a forest, I get a full colour, photorealistic image of him in the forest, complete with details and added features. For some reason, I put sunglasses and a different outfit on him. He was sitting under a tree, then he touched the tree, grabbed it, climbed it, and started acting ridiculous (he is a ridiculous person) in the tree. There is no prompting from me that causes that to happen. My imagination just takes the cue and runs away with it. I could sit and imagine that and I don't have a clue where it would go but I can tell you it would likely be very weird. Both of them also have vivid, photorealistic dreams and are musically talented. J2 sees things, as far as I can tell, similarly to me. He has two severely autistic brothers, one of whom is non-verbal. I questioned him about a few things and he had no problem whatever conjuring images or imagining things, but apparently he does not do this as automatically as I do. He says that he 'sees' books as movies in his head just like I do, but he does not necessarily have visual imagery running through his mind at all times, such as during conversation or, as we discovered yesterday, when telling a joke. He also says that when he closes his eyes (to daydream, for example) he sees a lot of random colours, shapes, blobs, etc. I don't experience that as much. My closed-eye visuals are much more powerful than my open eye ones. He says that letters and numbers do not have fixed colours for him, but some names do. My name, for example, is blue. His girlfriend's name is purple. I have blue hair and his girlfriend has purple hair. So who knows, maybe it's something that changes. E, my best friend, sees exactly as I do but her husband is different from us. We asked him to picture himself eating breakfast, or any other typical scene, and he could conjure a photo-esque image of such a thing with some effort. We subsequently asked him to picture himself eating breakfast inside a live volcano while on fire - he definitely could not do that. His explanation was that that had never happened, and the brain only reproduces things we have seen before, so there's no way he could do that. I asked a friend from school some questions and got a similar response. She is a big nerd and an English/History/Library Studies person so compiling info is right up her alley. When I asked her to picture a barn she could do it with some effort, but what she says is that she was "camera rolling" through her memory, looking at memories of barns she had seen in her life, although one of the first things she saw was what she describes as a crayola crayon drawing of a barn. I sometimes see things in a similar way, my brain will show me images which are varying sorts of cartoons - a pencil drawing, crayon, marker, CGI, whatever. When I asked her to imagine something new, that she could never have seen before, she could not do that. My partner's response was the most shocking, interesting, and frankly upsetting for me. It was very unsettling for me to discover that we do not think in the same way at all. We were lying in bed the other night listening to the Miles Davis album In a Silent Way, and I was visualizing the song as a series of dark blue dashes traveling up and down a black background, as if they were following the notes. I have no experience with music, music theory, or technical music knowledge of any kind. I love it, but I don't make it (apparently unless I am hallucinating in the bath...). This kind of visualization usually happens to me when I am absent-minded, daydreaming, or much more intensely and immersively when I am half-asleep, high on drugs of some kind, or both. I was pretty tired at the time, and we had just smoked a couple bowls. I asked him if he ever saw music as moving pictures in his head. He was completely confused by the question, and incredulous when I responded that I could and often did. He is one of the smartest people I have ever met in my life. I am one of the most accomplished students in my department and he has sat in on my honours seminars - on a subject in which he has virtually no expertise - caught the drift, and stolen the show. He is very, very bright. He insisted that he has absolutely under no circumstances ever experienced such a thing and told me that I have synesthesia. I am willing to believe that I am a little different or maybe a little more imaginative than some people, but I do not believe I have synesthesia. None of the tests I have looked at online say anything about thinking visually. Some peer-reviewed articles I have looked at say that visual thinking is not really associated with synesthesia - it's not the same thing. Synesthesia is much more rare. I also do (did) not associate numbers and letters with colours - until I got real high one night and immediately "remembered" that many letters do, in fact, have colours. For example... (TL;DR: letters have colours) a has no colour and is lower case, b is royal blue and upper case, c is bright yellow and typically uppercase, d is chocolate brown and upper case, e is forest green and upper case, f is bright yellow and lower case, g has no colour, h is chocolate brown and upper case, i is ice blue and lower case, j has no colour, k has no colour, l has no fixed colour, m is orange, n is bright yellow, o has no colour, I think p is purple and upper case, q has no colour, r is chocolate brown and upper case, S is fire engine red and upper case, T is royal blue and upper case, u has no colour, V is eggplant and upper case, w has no colour (right now it is appearing as white with a slightly whiter outline, x has no colour, y is bright yellow and lower case, and z is eggplant. I never had any active knowledge of this until I sat down and imagined it the other night, but now I doubt I will ever forget that. The days of the week are also coloured and appear in space in my mind. Whenever I need to remember days or skip ahead a few days or something, I see an image of all of the days of the week, in text, in my mind's eye, and I use that image to guide me. Saturday and Sunday are fire engine red and just to the right of my right eye. The first letters are capitalized. Friday is bright yellow and in front of my right eye, it's all lower case. Tuesday is ice blue with a white outline and all lower case in front of my nose. Wednesday is white with a white outline in front of my left eye, and monday is black and lovely and to the left of my left eye. What is bizarre, now that I look back on this, is that they are not at all in order. I have never noticed this before now. I have also forgotten Thursday - probably because its colour is weird and not fixed. it's a strange, mixed-up gravelly feeling shade, like a poorly rendered video game skin. So weird. Numbers, as of yet, have no colours, except that 9 is dark purple, intimidating, and always pictured next to the number 10. I also realized, while I was recalling this information, that most or all words have personalities or inspire a certain feeling in me. I am getting it a little bit right now because I am tired and thinking about this a lot. The word 'inspire' is a little bit like being on a rollercoaster, it's scary but exciting, it feels like an open space, I don't want to think about it much because it makes me a little uncomfortable and ungrounded. The word 'grounded', on the other hand, is great right now. Very settling. The word 'feeling' is important, must not be forgotten, it's yellow, makes me feel like I have to take responsibility for something. All of these words are getting colours right now but I doubt they will stick. Grounded is brown, something is red, forgetten is yellow, responsibility is brown and foreboding, feel has just turned green for a second, so on and so forth. Here are some messages that I sent to my partner the other night, since he has expressed intense interest in the way I think and believes that I am somehow special (the ratio of people who think visually to those who do not appear to tells me that I am not, I am pretty sure people just don't think much about the way they think, and so the many visual thinkers do not even know there are people who don't think that way. (TL;DR: words have feelings and colours and shapes) phrase is purple and like a sideways rectangle, it's also the word "phrase" layered over that rectangle, the word area is a picture of a field under a blue sky, the word student is three office type chairs with scratchy reddish/burgundy upholstery in a row in front of something like one of those long desks at school, sometimes it's just a picture of a chair, like a black stick figure one on a white background, ice is robin's egg blue, owl is brown, the word task is sharp, the word daily is a picture of a desk calendar, it's also for some reason a picture of a sunny day background filler on the weather app on my phone. Words also have feelings - the word challenge rules... the word distracted is like....a bunch of coloured shapes in a row, gradually drifting away from each other and kind of tilting and jerking around, I also for some reason want to organize it like this: dis tract ed. it comes apart, when I think about the word 'challenge'... I get like a funny excited feeling on opposite sides of my chest, and my arms kind of tingle. The word distracted is like...I want to roll it up and squeeze it??? hahahaha what. I've also noticed all of this stuff gets profoundly enhanced when I'm tired, like an hour ago I was kind of struggling to figure and feel things out but now it's extremely easy and I can feel how tired I am...the word figure is pointy and has hard edges, and the word feel is soft and smooth, pointy is a funny word, it looks silly, has feels reliable and safe, "my" makes me feel a little guilty, this is so weird. I listed a bunch more since all words had associated feelings, colours, or images at the time and it was happening automatically, but I won't include them all right now because it's a stupidly long list. I probably wouldn't have posted about this if not for my partner's very strong incredulity. It was surprisingly upsetting to discover that we do not think alike at all. We share so many moral and intellectual ideas, but the way we actually process information seems to be very different. I think I mentioned earlier that he might be on the autism spectrum. For example, he takes statements incredibly literally. So if I give him what appears to me to be the exact same information five different ways, those five different statements all mean completely different things to him. They are all separate in meaning based on small distinctions - and to him, those distinctions are very important. This is probably part of why we fight so much. We constantly misunderstand each other. He tried to explain how he processes information when people speak to him, as if one statement followed by the additional information from following statements builds (we'll come back to that) an impression for him, and changes and manipulates the information to mean something new or different. In retrospect, this sounds completely normal. That must be how we process things because we send and receive information in sequence, not all at once. But it is different for him. Small details can change the whole meaning of something in a way it doesn't for other people. And often I will say something obvious to him, and he will respond by saying something like "Oh, you mean this", or "from that I can infer this", but the relationship between what I've said and the impression I expect the other person to have is so incredibly obvious to me I often cannot understand why he is even bothering to clarify. Of course, x = y, what the hell else could it mean? But he has to confirm things for himself or he can't trust that he has the right idea. As a result, he is always gathering information about things. He is constantly asking questions, pointing out people's contradictions, etc. Most of the time, I love that, because I am also a curious person, but it annoys a looooot of people. For me, if someone slowly describes a scene to me, a picture of that scene is drawn in my head piece by piece as I receive the information. Tell me to picture an elephant, and I immediately see an African grey elephant standing in a field of tall grass under a blue sky, maybe next to a mudhole with a baby elephant or something. Next, tell me it's sunset, and it's instantly sunset. Then tell me the elephants are actually pink, and they turn pink. Here's the funny thing. If someone uses a metaphorical statement, such as to "build" an impression (like what my partner was trying to explain to me above about how he builds an impression using pieces of information)...it's not metaphorical for me. I mean, it is metaphorical, I understand that, but I get a literal visualization of it being built in my mind. So, for example, when he said that he builds the idea, I literally pictured it being built in the form of 3D graph or grid. I tried to explain this to him but he did not at all understand. His response was "Why would you bother doing that? Why would you go to the trouble to do that?" But it's not that I "bother" to do it, it's how I think. It's what happens automatically in my head. Everything is organized in pictures. It's not necessarily always useful. For example, my sense of direction is virtually non-existant. I can get lost anywhere. My partner builds a map of everything and never forgets it. I have no maps in my head, whether they be pictures or otherwise. What I have is snapshots of where I was at a given time. My spatial reasoning skills are garbage. On IQ tests, when asked to move around those block things...no way. They just all look the same to me. If I am reading, and the layout of something is being described, I'm at a loss. Like when I was reading The Life of Pi I had to go look up what such a boat would look like so I could read the book, because the author's description was so technical, I couldn't see it. It was unpleasant to read because I couldn't see the size of the boat, so I couldn't really tell how far or close Richard Parker was, or how tense things were. The 'movie reel' wasn't consistent. On the other hand, my reading comprehension is incredibly high and I can get a great deal of enjoyment, for example, out of a book like Finnegan's Wake. It's like watching The Animaniacs in my head. My boyfriend and I read Thus Spake Zarathustra together and he never had a clue what was going on, but I could understand the whole thing perfectly because I could see the pictures in my head. I do incredibly well with abstract ideas, impressions, etc. Poetry practically comes to life for me. I write professionally and I am very good at it. Unsurprisingly, I'm extremely bad at math. I can't even do long division. Now, I don't think that some people are just "bad at math", I think because it didn't come naturally to me like everything else, I rejected it and subsequently failed at it. On the topic of drugs, I take a lot of psychedelics (they are not responsible for this, I've only been doing them for about a year and I have thought this way my entire life), especially mushrooms, and I REALLY REALLY LIKE THEM. I get along extremely well with psilocybin. I have a lot of friends who take shrooms as well, including C, J, J2 and E (I would say all of them having taken way more shrooms than me and I've done a loooot). I asked them about the visual hallucinations they have and was shocked to find that none of them hallucinate the way I do either. 2 grams of mushrooms give me extremely powerful visual hallucinations. Everything comes to life, is extremely vivid, and cannot with any amount of effort be "unimagined" until the drugs wear off. For example, if I look at a piece of wood, it will immediately become distorted, grow, pulse, swim, swell, I will see incredible and unbelievable pictures in it - for example a god drat wizard or something will begin to form and then as my brain receives that information, I guess it fills it in, and I will be looking at a real, actual wizard's face made of wood, down to the wrinkles on his face and the pipe in his mouth. It's not an impression. It's not kind of sort of. It's there. The last time I did shrooms I was in my bedroom watching The Lego Movie with a friend (which I've probably watched about 20 times now, the entire movie was completely different for me on shrooms, the colours, shapes of things, movements, all dramatically impacted by it) and I got up to go to the bathroom. My friend was sitting on the bed staring at the floor when I came back, and she said "Your floor is moving!" I laughed and looked down at the floor, and of course it was pulsing. As I looked at the carpet (just a cheap grey piece of crap) a massive mandala almost the size of my room began to form in it. It had no colour, it was like it was made of water or a clear, solid gel, and as it began to form it rose up out of my floor and hovered about a couple inches off the ground. I stood there and watched, entranced, as it hovered there and then slowly began to drift left and right, as if somebody was gently spinning it in one direction and then the other. Anything fleshy becomes...flesh. I keep my senses very well on psychedelics (usually) and I find that other people take my lead and also stay mostly sensible. A former friend of mine had three awful trips in a row and then swore off mushrooms for life until she saw how much I enjoyed them. We took them four times together and she had an amazing experience every time, but she never had the visuals that I got. We were at the park once and decided to do barrel rolls down this grassy knoll, which was great fun until my friend decided to do some tumbles and hit her head. I could see from the bottom of the hill that there was a big, round mark on her forehead that was darkening red, so I ran up the hill to help her out. She asked me how it looked, and as I was examining the mark, it turned redder an redder and more blotchy until it started to seep blood. I didn't say much because I didn't want to freak her out, but I took my phone out and immediately started to dial 911...and then stopped. And realized I was on drugs. And the mark on her forehead was just a big pink, flesh coloured blotch where her make up had rubbed off on contact with the ground. She was completely fine. But I hallucinated a horrific wound on her forehead that took a great deal of effort for me to understand was not real. If there is one major difference between myself and a lot of other people I have noticed, I don't think it's that I'm synesthetic, I simply have an extremely active visual imagination. I remember everything in photographs, but I can also picture literally anything. I can make a photorealistic movie of anything I want in my head, and I think there must be other people out there who can do this too. I know at least a few of them! So please, tell me how you think. Think about some of the questions I asked my friends in this thread, ask your friends questions, come up with new ideas, and see what happens! I haven't been able to stop talking to people about this for ages now. What amazes me is how different everyone is, and yet how alike we all are. Myself and my friends all process information so completely differently, but we're so alike it's crazy. How do you think? Does your imagination run away on you? Can you imagine whatever you want? Do you remember your life in photographs, impressions, words, sounds, smells? Do you have a form of synesthesia? An eidetic memory? What are you good at? The only thing I would ask is that you try to use specific language and maybe try to say what you mean a few different ways if you're not sure that it's clear. I've noticed with all the people I talk to, I have to probe them for more information to get the right idea of what they mean. Someone may say they are "picturing something" but they're not really seeing a picture of it, they simply have the information, or an impression.
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Jun 22, 2016 19:34
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TL; DR There's a concurrent thread about a southern baptist seminary student. I predict you will have a lot in common with him.
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Jun 22, 2016 19:50
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photomikey posted:TL; DR Yeah it's stupidly long. I won't be surprised if few people are interested but I'm fascinated so there we are. Can you link me to the other thread? I'm a derp lord and can't seem to find it. e: Ah, I see, you're being an rear end in a top hat. I get it. I understand that this might come across as weird or self-absorbed, but I'm interested in this stuff. If it seems tedious or stupid, do you man. You don't have to think about it. But if you feel like telling me about some of your thought processes, that'd be cool. Am I a huge weirdo? Yes. Obviously. That's pretty clear. I believe the technical term is actually "drug-addled weirdo". There's a lot of us. I'd also be interested to know if you think I'm ridiculous because this topic is boring and states the obvious, or if you think I'm actually a crazy person and making this up. None of this is made up. None of it is exaggerated. You can very easily verify it by talking to your friends and asking them about how they think. I know having conversations is hard, but I really believe you can do it. You can do anything, photomikey, if you put your mind to it. Or take enough mushrooms. Also, give me a few minutes and I'll come back with some interesting peer-reviewed articles that you can look at if you need convincing that this is relevant and not just mad rambling. Or you can just go to sci-hub or libgen and search for "mind's eye" or "mental imagery". The Doctor fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Jun 22, 2016 |
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Jun 22, 2016 23:21
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I read the op for the pictures
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Jun 23, 2016 03:06
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That was a very long opening message. To answer, I cannot visualize at all, or imagine sounds or smells or anything else sensory. I also have no sensory memories. I can't visualize what my family members' faces look like. I don't even know what I look like. I can recognize people, though, which means that the visual images must be stored in my brain somewhere, I just can't access them directly. I think in words. My memories all consist of things that I know happened, but can't actually recall. So, the past means little to me.
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Jun 23, 2016 10:27
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photomikey posted:TL; DR
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Jun 23, 2016 11:18
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Orange Sunshine posted:That was a very long opening message. That is...really intense. Is this something that you have talked about with a doctor of some kind? Or something you've just...lived with? Do you have difficulty getting close to people? Are you happy?
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Jun 23, 2016 12:46
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The Doctor posted:I'd also be interested to know if you think I'm ridiculous because this topic is boring and states the obvious, or if you think I'm actually a crazy person and making this up. None of this is made up. None of it is exaggerated. You're ridiculous because you wrote 3-5 pages to ask if people think in pictures or words or etc. And yes, you DO have Synesthesia. I think in images in the form of a non-stop movie in my head, with both things that have happened and things I'm making up or wondering about. When asked to "picture" or "imagine" a thing, as you did with the champagne bottle, I first thought of the last time I saw one (on tv so I saw the whole scene), then the second last time I saw one (also on tv so another scene), then as usual my thoughts became the mental equivalent of Google Image Search and flashed through every version of a champagne bottle I could think of, each one in equal detail, some real, some cartoons. I draw for a living and always have, I never considered some people can't just see whatever they want in any form whenever they think of it. I rarely get lost because I remember all directions as a line map. A few weeks ago I drew a floorplan of the basement apartment my family lived in when I was 2 years old, based on the few memory flashes I have of it. My parents confirmed it was accurate except for the places my toddler self would never go like the laundry room and the shower. I can only understand time as sections of space on an analog clock, like a pie chart. When I see a digital time display I have to picture it on an analog time face.
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Jun 23, 2016 21:14
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jackyl posted:I read the op for the pictures I like this post. Good posting. Scudworth posted:You're ridiculous because you wrote 3-5 pages to ask if people think in pictures or words or etc. And yes, you DO have Synesthesia. I'm not sure why you're so certain that I have synesthesia. Honestly, it'd probably make me feel special and cool to believe I did, but I'd rather not convince myself that I am one thing or another just to make myself feel good. I'm more interested in learning more about how I and others think, rather than the names we use to describe those patterns. I never really noticed a lot of this stuff until I started thinking about it a lot. The cross-sensory traits that are associated with synesthesia kind of blend into all the other general weirdness I've uncovered about myself and the people around me. Would you be willing to post some of your art here? I'd be interested to see it. How does it make you feel to learn that there are a lot of people who can't picture things in their mind's eye? The Doctor fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Jun 23, 2016 |
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Jun 23, 2016 22:14
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Have you tried weed, OP?
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Jun 23, 2016 23:05
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SpaceAceJase posted:Have you tried weed, OP? Once. Never again.
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Jun 23, 2016 23:48
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The Doctor posted:Once. Never again. Why?
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Jun 24, 2016 07:57
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The Doctor posted:Once. Never again. The Doctor posted:I was pretty tired at the time, and we had just smoked a couple bowls. I don't really have content to add, but I've been interested in this thread because synesthesia has always been interesting to me (I am the complete opposite of this, I do not think in images/color or do any associations like that) Anyway, what you said does not really seem to compute. You say you tried weed once, but in your story you say you smoked a couple bowls, this doesn't really add up. A person smoking weed for the first time is not going to smoke a couple bowls (most likely), and if you didn't like it, it seems to me like you would have made a point to mention that in the story. You sound like someone that smokes often, or at least somewhat frequently.
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Jun 24, 2016 18:08
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The Doctor posted:That is...really intense. Is this something that you have talked about with a doctor of some kind? Or something you've just...lived with? Do you have difficulty getting close to people? Are you happy? What would be the point of talking to a doctor? People have a range of visualization ability, from being able to vividly imagine 3 dimensional moving scenes, to none at all, and everywhere in between. There's nothing a doctor can do about it one way or another. It's completely normal to me. The idea of seeing images in my mind seems bizarre to me, although I have no doubt that people can do it, as I see the evidence for it everywhere in the fact that there's visual art. I have no difficulty getting close to people, this isn't in any way related to visual processing.
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Jun 24, 2016 20:35
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MF_James posted:I don't really have content to add, but I've been interested in this thread because synesthesia has always been interesting to me (I am the complete opposite of this, I do not think in images/color or do any associations like that)  I'm kidding. Of course I smoke weed. And take a lot of other drugs.Orange Sunshine posted:What would be the point of talking to a doctor? People have a range of visualization ability, from being able to vividly imagine 3 dimensional moving scenes, to none at all, and everywhere in between. There's nothing a doctor can do about it one way or another. Funny, when you told me 'the past means little to me', that made me assume that it must be something serious that was very difficult for you to live with. For me the past is like one long point of reference from which I direct my life. All of the memories I can access (which I guess is a lot,) are pictures or movies in my head.
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Jun 24, 2016 23:05
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The Doctor posted:Would you be willing to post some of your art here? I'd be interested to see it. I don't mix business and SA, heh. I find the idea of lacking strong mental imagery to be confusing but it explains a lot, like people being lovely at making things (crafts, costumes, decorative things) since they wouldn't have a mental image to work towards. Orange Sunshine posted:It's completely normal to me. The idea of seeing images in my mind seems bizarre to me, although I have no doubt that people can do it, as I see the evidence for it everywhere in the fact that there's visual art. I have no difficulty getting close to people, this isn't in any way related to visual processing. If you're in a store and trying to determine on the fly if you need something or not, how do you determine that? When you're wondering if you need ketchup or paper towels, what does your brain give you? I'm presented with the last image in my memory of the ketchup in my fridge, and what level it's at. (Note this can be and is often completely wrong.)
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Jun 24, 2016 23:29
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The Doctor posted:
:sarcasm on the internets: Again, I feel the thread is an extremely interesting topic, the big problem is it's nigh impossible to validate any of this stuff. Even if someone says "I don't think in colors etc" they might just not be consciously aware of it, and how person A perceives something versus how person B perceives it can be wildly different.
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Jun 24, 2016 23:47
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gently caress you op
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Jun 25, 2016 00:38
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I'm sorty, what i meant to say was
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Jun 25, 2016 00:39
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I am a very visual person and think in words, pictures and sounds. I have sometimes fallen asleep to a full orchestra of original music playing in my head. I always wish I could somehow capture the tune. I've only had a true audio hallucination once. I was so certain that "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" was playing on loop somewhere in my house. I was very frustrated when I couldn't find the source and chalked it up to a hallucination. Never done drugs. When remembering a piece of text, I will visualize the page. I once memorized one of the long songs in Lord of the Rings by visualizing each line and mentally going down the pages. When remembering lists of things for an exam, I use a visualization technique of imagining all the items in the list as things inside your home. You take a mental tour of your home and see all the different things as you go through the rooms. It's worked quite well for me. When I was a kid, I had a couple of movies that I had memorized. On a long car ride, I could sit back and play the whole film in my head, shot for shot. Colour is very important to me, and though I don't have synesthesia, I do have a few colour associations with certain words. January is blue, August is red, Tuesday is orange, that sort of thing. I find it really strange to read about people that can't visualize things. It seems so bizarre to me.
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Jun 25, 2016 08:48
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Scudworth posted:I don't mix business and SA, heh. That's right. If I were to try to draw a bird, it would look like a 4 year old's drawing, because I can't visualize a bird and don't know what they look like. If I tried to draw a bird which was right in front of me, it still wouldn't work. Because I could only see the bird while I was looking at it. As soon I looked down at the paper, I couldn't see the bird any more. Scudworth posted:If you're in a store and trying to determine on the fly if you need something or not, how do you determine that? There are two types of memory, sensory memory and data. If I ask you what 8 times 8 is, the number 64 pops into your mind, rather than probably the experience you once had memorizing your multiplication tables as a child. If I ask you how old you are, or your birthdate, the information comes to your mind. These are things you know, regardless of whether you recall the time you learned them. You have both types of memory, I only have one. My past consists of things I know happened, but don't actually recall. If I'm running out of something that I need to buy at the grocery store, I remember this fact, without having to have any sort of visual memory of it. I would probably be just as good at a game show like Jeopardy or a game like Trivial Pursuit as you are, I have a good memory for facts and data.
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Jun 25, 2016 09:03
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I think, I will look in ask/tell because sometimes there are interesting posts. I see this thread and click on it. I see the huge wall of text and think "i bet people are bitching about the OP." I am right. That's a total piece of poo poo OP. You ruined an interesting thread by writing for hours. When you have a conversation with someone do you just talk and talk and talk until the person is asleep? If someone knew you were going to talk for that long, don't you think they would have left. Why don't you close this thread and write a new once that has 2 or 3 short paragraphs introducing your topic and let other people talk, too.
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Jun 25, 2016 23:14
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The Doctor posted:On the other hand, my reading comprehension is incredibly high and I can get a great deal of enjoyment, for example, out of a book like Finnegan's Wake. It's like watching The Animaniacs in my head. Huh. I'm not sure that is high reading comprehension. The Doctor posted:My boyfriend and I read Thus Spake Zarathustra together and he never had a clue what was going on, but I could understand the whole thing perfectly because I could see the pictures in my head. I do incredibly well with abstract ideas, impressions, etc. Poetry practically comes to life for me. I write professionally and I am very good at it. Unsurprisingly, I'm extremely bad at math. I can't even do long division. Now, I don't think that some people are just "bad at math", I think because it didn't come naturally to me like everything else, I rejected it and subsequently failed at it.
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Jun 26, 2016 04:41
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Phyzzle posted:Huh. I'm not sure that is high reading comprehension. It doesn't apply to non-fiction. I'm a Historian so I literally read for a living. If I couldn't remember the texts that I've read, I'd be out of luck. There is little to nothing I can't sit down with and understand pretty quickly, but that doesn't mean I could always do that. I have always loved books, but when I came to university I had to learn to take in the information from challenging, specialized, and highly theoretical texts. I wanted to be an expert in my field so that meant being willing to sit down with some of this stuff for hours on end. That doesn't mean I have any special ability, just that I knew what I wanted and I was willing to grind for it. I've specifically avoided looking at a summary or article about Thus Spake Zarathustra, and I can tell you now that all I remember from it is that the main character is a messiah-like figure who is seeking a higher meaning than that of the average people he calls "bread eaters". He lives a secluded life in a cave in a mountain, and the book is basically him explaining, largely metaphorically, why it is that his way of living is best. There's some scene where he describes something as water coming from an acorn? But I may have mixed that up with a story from Aesop's Fables that I read as a child. I remember the 'gist' of things, but not much of the actual contents. Then again, maybe I just have no point of reference for what remembering something fully actually looks like. What do other people remember of what they've read? I really have no idea. This is interesting for me because prior to realizing that people think very differently, I would argue with anyone who touted different 'types' of intelligences. I believe that most people are capable of just about anything, at least within the limits of what we understand as 'normal' intelligence. For example, I do not believe that most people who are bad at math have some innate disadvantage. I believe that some people like math and some people don't. The people who don't are not as willing to try at it, and therefore do not do as well. I say this because our standard for what qualifies as 'intelligent' is very low in my opinion. I don't mean that to be in any way insulting, but simply to say that any average person in a good environment should be able to get straight A's throughout school, and reasonably successfully complete just about any undergraduate university degree. I believe that most people who don't excel simply don't care that much or have a lot of other things going on. The hardest part is focus. And that's not anything to look down on someone for. School success is not a good determinant of a person's ability. Put people in environments where they can pursue things in which they are interested, and they will show what their real abilities are. Then again, now that I've discovered these differences in the way people think, well...I'm not sure. I have not found anything to indicate a difference in the general intelligence of a visual and a non-visual thinker. Maybe we are really more likely to be good at one thing than another, but I believe that we are ALL good at something. My partner is completely non-visual, and compared to me he is fantastic at math, logic, spatial reasoning, and all that stuff. Not only that, he can keep up with any theoretical discussion I engage in concerning my field of study, when I know other historians who can't. Honestly, I think curiosity and an open mind are huge factors in determining whether or not a person will learn easily. You just have to want to know. Waltzing Along posted:I think, I will look in ask/tell because sometimes there are interesting posts. You're right, it's too long. I'm studying at the moment but I'll come back later tonight and cut out most of it so it's more accessible. I'll also try to avoid my posts becoming too long-winded. It reads as arrogant and self-obsessed. The Doctor fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jun 26, 2016 |
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Jun 26, 2016 17:56
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I read about half the OP before it got too long winded, sorry OP. Personally I take the information and kind of go blank, then usually get the answer after a second, I imagine working mostly subconsciously. I didn't picture anything in the meantime for most abstract problems. More complex problems usually involve this plus trying to remember all the variables/breaking the problem down to manageable bits. Overall I don't usually visualize unless the problem directly involves something spatial. When that comes up or I need to picture something I end up visualizing something with realistic dimensions, perspective, and scale, but is often washed out and in a colorless void with little to no non-critical detail which I can easily rotate and apply things to. I can imagine both real and made up things this way. Because of this if I need to fix something I can usually find a viable substitute that can be adapted by just looking around. I've been told I would make a good engineer.  I however cannot change the properties of what is visualized or my brain will just go nope and change some other aspect until it makes no sense. Naturally this has made my art more technical than 'artsy'.I have never thought in sound unless a song is stuck in my head. The voice in my head is toneless and when I read it is spoken aloud in my head and rarely shuts up except when listening or watching something. I have an excellent sense of time but my sense of direction is so bad that all the Zelda/Metroid games are basically impossible. Eventually I learn routes but it's usually by the width and curve of a road or the spacing of objects and not by landmark or road name. However if I have even paper map access I can plot a pretty direct route to most anywhere and follow it. I'm not sure if this is what you wanted, but there you go. Edit: This was too long, shortened. Autoexec.bat fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Jun 27, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 02:20
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I read the first quarter of the OP and skimmed the rest, but it sounds like you might want to read about aphantasia (which I don't have). Here's an NYT article from a year ago. I enjoyed reading this article when it came out. Here's a BBC News article from almost a year ago.
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Jun 27, 2016 03:57
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What's right isn't always popular. What's popular isn't always right. 
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Jun 27, 2016 07:08
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My thinking is done primarily in terms of "audio" narration. Typing this out is pretty much like taking dictation from myself, but I have a fairly continuous narrative running in my head even when I'm not specifically composing text. I have fairly decent visual memory and visualization skills, but I don't necessarily "think" in terms of pictures unless I need to recall a specific image. I still think of myself as being visually-oriented, though. This wound up being an early stumbling block in my otherwise fairly smooth relationship with my wife; when we first moved in together, she'd sometimes ask if I could get some object for her that I'm not familiar with by name (e.g. tools for sewing or other crafts.) Then when I'd ask for clarification she would respond with: -What the object is for and how it's used -Other names for the item -Functional differences between it and other similar items -When and where she got it from -Roughly how much it was purchased for (or who gave it to her) -The last time she used it, and for what purpose ...even if I wasn't there for these things. But she'd leave out details like color, size, shape, general appearance, or the place she saw it last, and if I pressed her on it she'd only be able to describe them with difficulty. So I'd get frustrated because she's asking me to locate something by reciting its history, and she'd get frustrated that I could be standing right in front of the thing she wanted and not getting it for her (because none of the terms she uses to think about them help me identify it.) The odd thing is that she's a fledgling artist, and is more than capable of coming up with cool visual designs. But even then, when she's talking about them she tends to describe them in very functional, categorical terms.
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Jun 27, 2016 15:44
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I do not think at all. I simply try random things until they work.
Hate Fibration fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Jun 28, 2016 |
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Jun 27, 2016 18:59
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My thoughts are pretty obscure, you've probably never heard of them. Heh.
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Jun 28, 2016 06:54
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The Temple Grandin movie is awesome. Everyone should watch it to better understand autism. Thinking in pictures means that a wave of memories fly through your head at an insane velocity. You think too fast. Every time you think of a word, you see every memory in your life all at once. It's all visual. When I glance at my old Trapper Keeper from grade school, I see every memory associated with that time period all at once. For me, I see solutions to problems in my head as a diagram and a process. It's all like watching a movie in fast-forward though. But I suck rear end at math and I can't even get started in learning computer programming. I've tried for over 20 years. My mind shuts off. I can read a 300 page book in a couple trips to the bathroom, but I can't read music no matter how hard I try. I can dissect a contract in minutes, but if you ask me what 7+9 is, I have to use a calculator. I don't know, a million? Negative 2? Yet I can use algebra without even thinking and I can find a single wrong digit in a 64,000 row spreadsheet just by scrolling through it. It's all about the pictures.
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Jun 28, 2016 13:15
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A super interesting instance of synesthesia is that of that one crazy smart savant who turbolearnt Icelandic and can recite pi to some ridiculous number. Daniel Tammet. Unlike most savants, he can actually begin to explain what's going on in his brain, and to him each integer is mapped to a specific colored shape. Some of them were inherently gross to him and some were really pretty. I always thought the human brain and how we wire our memories is really focused towards synesthesia - it seems weirder to me that there are people who think it's a special snowflake made-up thing. Like what, you've seriously never listened to a wordless song and some images ended up forming with it? Or you've never felt like certain sounds are particularly dark/light or hard/slimy? I can believe that, but I can't understand it.Scudworth posted:I think in images in the form of a non-stop movie in my head, with both things that have happened and things I'm making up or wondering about. When asked to "picture" or "imagine" a thing, as you did with the champagne bottle, I first thought of the last time I saw one (on tv so I saw the whole scene), then the second last time I saw one (also on tv so another scene), then as usual my thoughts became the mental equivalent of Google Image Search and flashed through every version of a champagne bottle I could think of, each one in equal detail, some real, some cartoons. gently caress, this post blew my mind. Like, I never considered it, but I pictured things in like the laziest way possible... If someone said "draw a champagne bottle" I'd probably think of one champagne bottle and just go with that. I feel like just by being aware of this now I'm going to naturally dig further through my image bank, so you describing your own brain really helped mine grow. Thanks!! The time thing I can't adopt, though, because whenever I look at an analog clock I basically mentally unscrew the circumference and conceptualize it like a vertical number line, like I do with digital displays.
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Jun 29, 2016 00:30
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As a voracious reader myself, I appreciate this effort post. I can imagine visual things, but they are only vivid and photorealistic when they are totally useless, like an evolving kaleidoscope imagery that can change into crude neon butterfly's fading into the periphery of my minds eye. Weed or drugs definitely help, it's pretty crude without. I used to think very logically through steps and with words, but after suffering insomnia from it and it not actually being of much help, I made a conscious decision, aided by my reading of many subjects, to slowly transition into a more subconscious stream of thought. I don't actually have a stream of words anymore bugging the poo poo out of me until I force it to stop, instead I could speak automatically about anything I knew of without actually going through the steps in the back of my head, I sometimes have to backpedal and make minor clarity corrections, but it's effortless and requires no real conscious thinking on my part. I firmly believe that the subconscious is more powerful than the conscious, after backing away from a problem for awhile, or sleeping on it, the solution usually, eventually, appears in a flash, if not just from looking around the room or double checking/running through the "givens" I place very little importance on the past and live in the moment, I need to get better at making goals for the future or write things down to crystalize them. I draw from my experiences, yes, but I place very little detail or effort into the memory of it, just the information. Everything I've read I kind of half assume it's true, even if it's registering on my bullshit detector and my brain kind of sorts through it on it's own and makes conclusions that are constantly added to and tweaked, I save interesting perspectives and useless information that I can draw from to better connect with very different people to respond to the things they are saying. I've read books or threads I've only gotten a few ideas from consciously, but they are there to call from at the right moment in the future. I am not a very good story teller and speak mostly in concepts or responding to others like, "sometimes it's like this, or I've heard read this once, what if that." I couldn't tell you every detail, just the gist or my conclusions as of that moment, sometimes I'll remember something in error or get new info and update them years later even though they may not remember. I love teaching and am constantly learning, I get kind of mad and cold towards people who aren't willing to update their views or learn, though I've learned not to waste effort vigorously debating close minded people. I state my view and tell them to look it up if they don't believe me or just quit talking about it. I can remember my favorite music note by note accurately even though I gave up instruments 10 years ago, I know all the notes to solos and know when the changes will hit, I can mostly anticipate changes and progression in simple songs I haven't heard, but It's much more difficult with progressive and unpredictable music, though I still get hints. I paradoxically can't remember lyrics worth a drat unless they are my top 100 favorite songs or sparse. When I get tripped up on this sort of autopilot lifestyle, I quickly go through some short symbol-like concepts or few word options, and then return to auto, I rarely have a "voice in my head" or imagery helping or guiding me. A way to sum it up; Subconsciously knitting all of my knowledge on the fly into language, or new (to me) concepts and methods to get me through the day. Most novel ideas and solutions I have, come in an immediate flash with no discernible process or narration, I then check to see if they are appropriate and acceptable to speak of unless it seems very obvious. (This is limited to thinking, "wait maybe don't blurt that out here and now" or just wait and listen until I can confidently proceed, Or I ask clarifying questions) My filters come off around friends, trusted coworkers I've begun to understand and loved ones, I entertain more outlandish and nonsensical ideas when there is less fear of stepping out of line of social conventions and being judged for a whimsical lark or a play on words that barely makes sense or could be rude or inappropriate. I'm good at puns and comebacks and thinking on my toes, drinking increases my vocabulary because I love words and limit myself otherwise with too many social filters. (I'm more likely to say things I am unsure of to get the ball rolling and then clarify as I go and as they respond.) I've never hallucinated anything that wasn't there per say, but It does warp things into other things, ripples and movement, sometimes abstract patterns or simple cartoons, but I can see the things under it that are real, like seeing moving faces in woodgrain. Closed eye I can imagine loads, but I don't have total control of it. I can come up with cool songs too rarely, but I haven't figured out how to translate it to the real world. I'd have to hum and beatbox it to a recording because I can't retain it, then I'd have to hope I could translate it later. It would be a hollow shadow of what's in my head because it would no longer be an orchestra but just what few parts my mouth could capture. I also speed read, just seeing the word or part of it registers it, something like this old trick http://www.livescience.com/18392-reading-jumbled-words.html I can read much faster than I can talk. Quaint Quail Quilt fucked around with this message at 00:37 on Jun 29, 2016 |
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Jun 29, 2016 00:31
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Cobweb Heart posted:I always thought the human brain and how we wire our memories is really focused towards synesthesia - it seems weirder to me that there are people who think it's a special snowflake made-up thing. Like what, you've seriously never listened to a wordless song and some images ended up forming with it? Or you've never felt like certain sounds are particularly dark/light or hard/slimy? I can believe that, but I can't understand it. Never on both counts. And finding sounds to be slimy makes me think you might possibly be a member of an alien species.
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Jun 29, 2016 10:56
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I think with my brain, OP.
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Jun 29, 2016 11:04
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