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How is your mind different from everyone else's?

5th Dec 2011

1 min read

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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.

Typical Mind FallacyWorld Modeling

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180Deliberate Grieving

How is your mind different from everyone else's?

2Normal_Anomaly

3grouchymusicologist

10grouchymusicologist

3radical_negative_one

19Luke_A_Somers

2Richard_Kennaway

1Jayson_Virissimo

1sixes_and_sevens

5sixes_and_sevens

14sixes_and_sevens

2sixes_and_sevens

3sixes_and_sevens

7Normal_Anomaly

1Normal_Anomaly

4Dreaded_Anomaly

-1Normal_Anomaly

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2Normal_Anomaly

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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.

5Kaj_Sotala13y

Whoa, that's awesome. That also made me realize that I, too, have several visualizations for numbers, all of which are perceived in slightly different ways. The visualizations for generic numbers as well as years mostly resemble sort of horizontal lines, though with many "layers", which I can't fully describe. The ones for hours in the day and months in a year are circles. Temperatures are a vertical line, with differing colors above and below 0 degrees Celsius. The year timeline is probably the most interesting, as it has several regions: the 1990s look different from the 1980s or 2000s, but it's hard to describe exactly how. The 1980s are pretty dark in color, with the 1990s much lighter. At 2001 there's a kind of an association to images of 9/11 and the day when I heard about it. 2005-2006 has pictures of my siviilipalvelus period. Late 1930s up to 1945 have pictures of Europe and Germany, and 1945-1949 or so have pictures of Roswell/Area 51 and generic US Air Force bases. The time around 0 AD has pictures of the Mediterranean and Rome, while "the time of the dinosaurs" has pictures of the Earth from space. The future is kind of a grey fog. There are a bunch of other years with their own images as well. There is a differing resolution in the timeline depending on how well I happen to know the period: for the 1990s and the WW2 period I can see each year separately, and they're clearly marked, while e.g. the 1950-1980 period is much more indistinct. At various points the timeline seems to head in different directions: the 1990s are left-to-right, the 1940s are right-to-left, and 0 AD is down-to-up. I don't actually see the timeline making any sharp turns, however: the regions just gradually fade into each other.

4[anonymous]13y

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1Cthulhoo13y

Although the color matching is completely different from mine, it's interesting to know that this kind of trait is not totally uncommon. Any guess about what's originating it?

5Morendil13y

If you're like me, you played with cube blocks as a child with colored numbers on them. I wonder how we'd go about testing that hypothesis.

4Cthulhoo13y

I honestly don't remember, but it's definitely a possibility. About testing this hypothesys... well we could create an army of baby clones and when they grow up we can still use them to conquer the world ;)

2[anonymous]13y

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2Cthulhoo13y

I also have colors associated to all kind of concepts: time periods, numbers, letters, tastes, music genres, even people. E.g., my timeline is a ladder, where early universe era is dark blue, dinosaurs time is bright green, human prehistory is brown, 0 AD is yellow/orange and medieval times are light blue. Modern to contemporary era is detailed to a finer scale, e.g. the seventies are purple, the eighties are azure, nineties are yellow and 00s are white. However, this is a very general thing: each time I recall some concept from my mind, my inner google also returns the color associated with it.

0dbaupp13y

Does it fall under the category of synesthesia?

-2Cthulhoo13y

You're probably right! I wasn't aware this was a known and reported condition.

2Normal_Anomaly13y

I find this amazing. I have no visualization for numbers at all. I do have weak color associations, though: 0-black 1-red 2-blue 3-yellow 4-orange 5-brown 6-green 7-silver-gray 8-teal 9-blue-gray The associations are stronger for 1-6 than 7-9, and usually only noticeable when appearing as groups of consecutive digits, eg 34. I don't actually perceive the numbers as being those colors when I see them on a page, but they have the colors in my mental imagery.

0Sarokrae13y

I'm in an almost entirely similar place with number synaesthesia: absolutely no positional awareness for them, and colours for each digit. If I visualise a longer number I visualise the digits as being different colours. Interestingly, I have the same colours as you for 1, 2 and 3, then: 4 - green 5 - pink 6 - light blue 7 - gold 8 - dark green 9 - dark orange 0 - grey/colourless. Unlike you, all my colour associations are equally strong, and very usefully, even digits are cold colours, and odd digits warm colours. I also have colour associations for some but not all letters (but English isn't my first language), and some but not all music notes. I suspect that these associations arose partly from the number colours, but I have no idea why "w" is the same green as "8", and "f" the colour for 5 and not 4.

2ESRogs13y

It's interesting that you put history on there. I also have a history timeline that's separate from my generic number line, but I don't think I'd seen that mentioned before in what I'd read about spatial-sequence synesthesia (see my reply to jsalvatier). At some point I realized I had a line like this for just about any sequence of things I've ever thought of. Besides the ones you've mentioned: days of the week, months of the year, grades in school, etc. My sequence lines are not all totally unique though. For example, on the history timeline the years within a century just follow the pattern of the numbers from 1 to 100, and for me minutes/seconds and temperatures fall on the normal number line.

5prase13y

I have lines for weekdays and months, but they are trivial (the mont sequence turns 90 degrees right in the middle of June, on 1st September, just before Christmas and on 1st January, forming a rectangle. The weekday line turns right before and after the weekend, so two weeks together make a rectangle. My lines can also have a fractal substructure - if looking in a detail on a particular region, further turns appear, usually inherited from the general number line or another relevant line or part of it. This may not be compatible with the overall structure: for example, from greater distance the stretch from 1910 to 1920 is a straight line, but in detail, any single year has the "closed rectangle" structure, beginning and ending in the same point. To help understanding the interplay of cultural bias and synesthesia, this is the hopefully full list of turns in my history line when looked at in detail (the probable cause for the turn - a historical event or other thing - is in parentheses) 1. cca. 220 B.C. uncertain direction, perhaps multiple turns (Punic wars) 2. 40 B.C. right (end of the Roman republic) 3. 30 B.C. - 0 A.D. left 180° curved 4. 0 A.D. or 14 A.D. right (beginning of millenium / death of Augustus; context dependent) 5. during 1st century left curved 6. cca. 70 A.D. uncertain, probably left - right - right (end of Claudian dynasty, destruction of Pompeii) 7. 100 right (end of century) 8. 110/114/120 left (generic number 20 / conquests of Traian) 9. 130 left (generic number 30) 10. 150 - 200 right curved (to return to previous direction?) 11. cca. 330 uncertain (Christianity official in Rome) 12. 476 right (fall of Rome) 13. cca. 500 left (maintaining direction?) 14. 6th-8th century right curved 15. 880 left (generic number 80) 16. 890 left (generic number 90) 17. 900 right (generic number 100) 18. 910 right (generic number 10) 19. 920 left (generic number 20 / assassination of Wenceslaus I) 20. 1000 right (end of millenium

0ESRogs13y

Yeah, mine have that substructure-available-on-zoom too. It seems pretty clear that our brains are doing the same thing here. Out of curiosity, do you feel that you read more quickly or more slowly than others? I'm a very slow reader -- my silent reading speed is about on par with my reading-aloud speed, and I've sometimes wondered if this is connected at all to my tendency to visualize things, or is completely unrelated. On the other hand, I think having a detailed timeline helps me to remember when events took place. I've noticed on movie rounds at pub trivia that I'm often able to make more use than some of my teammates of the year a movie was released, if that information was given, to rule out possible answers -- not because I know the exact dates of when many movies came out, but because if I'm familiar with the film at all, then I have a general sense of where it should go on my timeline. (Disclaimer: it's quite possible that this is all just confirmation bias on my part.)

1prase13y

I have no idea how quickly others read. My silent reading is generally faster than reading aloud, but the speed depends on what I am reading and I am not sure how big the difference is.

2jsalvatier13y

One of the Seattle LessWrong meetup attenders described his mild synesthesia in the same way you've described and claimed he read a book about people having similar number lines (with cultural differences).

7ESRogs13y

It was these essays (The Visions of Sane Persons and Visualised Numerals), linked from the number form wikipedia article. I think the cultural differences thing was just my conjecture, because the recorded number forms (as well as my own) often had turns at twelve and then subsequently at the decades, which led me to believe that they were probably based on the cadence of counting in English (one, two, three... ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen... nineteen, twenty, twenty-one... twenty-nine, thirty, thirty-one, etc.). Whereas a Spanish speaker might be likely to develop a number form with a turn at 15 instead of 12, and a Chinese speaker to develop one with turns just at the decades.

2prase13y

Suppose that you don't remember what book it was?

2jsalvatier13y

I've asked him, and I'll post here when I hear back.

0prase13y

Thanks.

[-]Multiheaded13y220

(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... (read more)

8Kutta13y

Maybe someone should do some study about that peculiar group of depressed and/or psychopathological people who were significantly mentally kicked by NGE. Of course it's all anecdotal right now, but I really have the impression (especially after spending some time at EvaGeeks... ) that NGE produces a recurring pattern of effect on a cluster of people, moreover, that effect is much more dramatic than what is usual in art.

6gwern13y

The funny thing is, the more I research Evangelion - interview people, translate or transcribe obscure interviews and articles, etc. - the less I find any real depth to it but the more I admire Anno & co.'s intuitive skill with cinematography and improvisation.

2Kutta13y

What do you mean by real depth? In cinema, isn't skilled cinematography included in that? If I recall correctly, I've read from you somewhere that you think most of NGE's narrative/mythological background is an impromptu, leaky mess (which I mostly agree with), so you might mean that by lack of real depth, but that doesn't subtract much from NGE's overall success at thematic exposition, so I'm still not fully getting it.

0gwern13y

I'm not a cinema person, so I don't really know. I approach my anime from essentially a New Wave SF literary standpoint.

5Multiheaded13y

Yeah, I posted about my experience on the Evageeks forums once, and quite a few people expressed something similar in response.

2antigonus13y

I don't imagine it would have nearly as much of an effect on people who aren't familiar with anime. But I would read that study in a heartbeat if it existed.

[-]Protagoras13y170

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.

7cata13y

I don't know if this is fair, because it's not me, but a family member of mine credibly claims to have no conscious visual memory. For example, when she drives down a highway which she has driven many times before, she doesn't automatically recognize the different parts of the highway as I do, without effort; she has to remember specific facts about where things are (like, I take exit 102 to get to place X, which is after a radio tower and then a curve) and then apply those facts to know where she is. She cannot picture her house in her head; she recognizes it by remembering salient features of its exterior. In contrast, her semantic memory and general cognitive ability is exceptional. Some tasks, like playing games or solving problems that lean on visual and spatial imagination (e.g. the IQ test problems where you fold shapes up) are very difficult for her, although some of those can also be hacked around by remembering relationships (the dot is on the side clockwise from the square, etc.) According to her, she didn't even realize that other people had this capability in a different way until she was college-age or so. Personally, I have what I think is above-average visual and spatial imagery -- I play chess and see the pieces moving in my head, I read fiction and imagine the settings and characters, and so on. I guess it takes all sorts.

5SarahNibs13y

I have 5 distinct experiences of vision. They are each qualitatively very different. * Seeing - When my eyes are open, I see the world around me. I believe this is the standard sense "vision". * Static - When my eyes are closed, my visual field is mostly colored static, not very bright. Like static on old TVs, but definitely colored. * Eddies and Afterimage - I can create extremely limited pictures out of Static, nothing more complex than the union of a few very simple shapes. Blobs or occasionally lines. * Mental Imagery - Bright images as distinct as Seeing, but fleeting and not directly caused by photons. * Imagination - No visual change, but I "know" what the object looks like or how it is moving. If my coffee mug were to grow legs and walk away, aside from the visual phenomena I would know I was seeing my coffee mug growing legs and walking away and that that was really happening. Imagination is just the middle - the knowing what I am seeing, without any of the visual phenomena or the really-happening sense. When my eyes are open, Static is still present, but in most cases my brain edits it out and reports only Seeing. When I am looking at a solid color or just paying careful attention it is clear Static is still present. I did not realize this before making an effort to investigate what I am actually Seeing. Until I read Yvain's Generalizing from One Example post I believed that what I'm calling Imagination is what everyone did when they said they were visualizing. I only have Mental Imagery rarely: sometimes when on the boundary of sleeping and waking or after minutes of effort during meditation. These images are distinct and lasting enough to, say, read about half a line of text from a Mental Image of a page of a book. My memories of the experience of Mental Imagery and of the experience of images seen while dreaming seem to feel the same. I have not been able to focus on these long enough to tell if they have background Static, as paying much attent

2[anonymous]13y

"Static" might be visual snow. I have it, and in my case it's probably due to lots of staring at computer monitors over the years.

0SarahNibs13y

The description of visual noise on Wikipedia describes my "Static" fairly accurately.

1VincentYu13y

Your descriptions of 'static' and 'eddies and afterimage' match my younger experiences, and I just realized that I no longer have these visual phenomena. I used to see them as vivid blue and red dots when I closed my eyes.

3[anonymous]13y

I do this too, but only for faces. I have detailed mental images of things like buildings and circuit diagrams, but I don't have good mental pictures of people's faces. I don't have too much trouble recognizing people (though I suspect I am below-average at it), but I can't visualize or describe anyone's face when I'm not near them. Likewise, when I'm reading fiction, I don't have clear mental pictures of what the characters' faces look like.

1NancyLebovitz13y

I have very limited ability to visualize images or to imagine/remember sounds. The weird thing is that sometimes with fiction, I'll feel as though I know what a character looks like, even though I can't visualize it. This is strong with Tolkien (the movie hobbits were wrong, wrong, wrong), while with Bujold, I simply have no idea what the characters look like. Having a sensory experience with fiction is so rare it seems like a miracle. At the same time, if fiction has too few sensory cues, I'm apt to feel disconnected and uninterested. This is especially notable with military science fiction-- and it may be related to my having more problems with telling people apart if they're wearing uniforms. I've wondered if what fiction people like has something to do with brainwave similarities between the author and the readers.

0Sabiola13y

So they were, and Galadriel was even more wrong.

1[anonymous]13y

It may be the reverse spirit of the post, but voted up for putting to words what I've best said as "I can't describe person X, but if you have them in a crowd I can find them."

0fiddlemath13y

I have this too, though I've moderated it some by explicitly practicing the skill. I essentially never see people's faces when visualizing what they're doing, nor when I'm dreaming.

0[anonymous]13y

How did you practice it?

8fiddlemath13y

I'd already learned that, to be able to remember's people's names later, I had to make an actual effort to repeat their name to myself while I was looking at them. So, I then started consciously trying to notice details about people's appearance when I first met them - what's their hair color, what color are their eyes, what are they wearing and carrying. Eventually, this effort became a habit. Now, I usually do this automatically when I first meet someone, and I remember more of those details.

1[anonymous]13y

Thank you! I will try doing that from now on.

0[anonymous]13y

As to what they're wearing and carrying, I'm practising to avoid relying on this too much now. I've gotten into trouble before by remembering people by what they're wearing when I'm introduced to them instead of by their faces. :/

[-]shokwave13y120

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.

9erratio13y

If I may ask: how old are you? I used to have the same ability (and am still well above average) but it's lessened over the past 3 years or so. I've been trying to work out whether it's due to a) age (greater number of life experiences and/or memory naturally less good), b) studies (prioritising studied material over episodic memory), c) greater socialisation (I used to be fairly isolated, so it's possible that there were just fewer noteworthy things to remember), d) some other factor. And relatedly: do you also have that sense of frustration when people keep repeating themselves over multiple conversations? It took me a long time to realise that they weren't doing it on purpose and that not everyone can remember what they've said to who in the past.

6NancyLebovitz13y

I can live with repetition over multiple conversations, but prefer it if the person will let me mention that I've heard and remember what they said. What drives me crazy is the extent to which most people repeat themselves in the same conversation. I may not be doing anyone a favor by pointing this out-- but if you listen, you'll find that the real world sounds rather like Waiting for Godot, though the topics are more varied.

[-]TheOtherDave13y100

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.

3NancyLebovitz13y

That's a good point. Do you have a way of telling whether what you're saying has registered, or do you use a heuristic that a certain number of repetitions is likely to work? My impression is that a lot of repetition isn't strategic, it's nervousness (I think people are more likely to repeat themselves when they're looking for support and feel unsure of getting it) or making sure they get more time in the conversation.

5TheOtherDave13y

I came to the conclusion that repetition is valuable by looking at how often, after giving a presentation in which I convey certain facts, the audience subsequently follows up in ways that make it clear that they neither retained the facts nor the awareness that I'd presented those facts. When I started making a point of repeating my key points several times during a presentation, tying it back to multiple different topics and multiple different questions, the incidence of that sort of followup question dropped. That said, I haven't done a careful study, and I could easily be misattributing the result to the wrong cause. For that matter, I could easily be perceiving a result that isn't actually there. Humans make those sorts of errors all the time. I agree that a lot of repetition is nervousness, and that a lot of it is an attempt to grab floor-time. (I'm not sure I'd call the latter nonstrategic.) I also think a lot of repetition is an attempt to maintain control of the attention of the group. (As in: A: "X" B: "Y" C: "NOT(Y)" A: "X."

1TheOtherDave13y

Looking back at this, it occurs to me that I may have misunderstood your question and thus answered a different one that you meant to ask. There are things that I take as real-time indications that what I've said has registered -- for example, being able to answer questions or to ask sensible ones -- and things that I take as indicators that it hasn't, such as asking questions I've already answered. When I'm talking to groups I often get neither, unless I've done enough prep to create exercises specifically intended to obtain them,

2MixedNuts13y

If the person you're talking to is distracted by another task or has a short attention span, they may appreciate repetition, for example if the person you're talking to is distracted by another task or has a short attention span. (I have accidentally sounded like this in LW comments before.)

2atucker13y

Weird, I also used to be really good at this. Specifically, I could recite funny scenes from Futurama episodes verbatum after watching them once. It's gotten worse.

0Curiouskid13y

I had the same problem but with the of the second Harry Potter movie when I was in second grade. People got tired of listening to me on the road trip.

1shokwave13y

Currently 22. The effect was present and seemingly unaffected moving from early school (no study) to final few years of school (lots of study) to university (some study) to current day (very little study). I've always been highly social, can't rule that out. And yes! It's not quite as frustrating for me as it is for them, because I finish their stories for them, sometimes in the words they were going to use. I'm guilty of the same thing, though - I find it hard to remember which stories come from where. It's only once the person begins the story that the rest of the story becomes available.

1erratio13y

Well, I'm 26, so if there's an age-related phenomenon going on you should be due to start experiencing it any day now ;)

0christina13y

Actually, I used to have a similar ability as well, although that was primarily for life experiences + written material (came in handy on tests--read once-write anywhere, heh). It faded and largely disappeared sometime during high school. I feel I compensated fairly well afterward, so the loss doesn't bother me too much. Not that I wouldn't be interested if I found a way to get it back, though. It seems different people may experience changes in this type of memory at different times. Maybe those adults who are considered to have really good memories just never had their childhood mnemonic abilities fade over time.

2[anonymous]13y

That reminds me; while I tend to remember techniques and equations easily enough, my software has a bug where people with similar occupations and similar initials are easily confused with one another, even if they look very different from one another. I think the classic example was the time I mistook Britney Spears for Beyonce.

4NancyLebovitz13y

This may be more common than you think. I know two women who are close friends and whose first names begin with the same uncommon letter. One is white, the other is black. One was plump, the other was slender (they've converged to some extent since, but I'm talking about a while ago). One has a loud voice, and the other a soft voice. People would confuse them with each other.

-4Logos0113y

-- is there really much of a difference? --

2[anonymous]13y

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3bentarm13y

How can a link to a video of one of two people show that there is a difference between them? Or usefully illustrate that difference. My guess: you are claiming that Beyonce is a better singer than Britney Spears, but it could be any number of other things.

2[anonymous]13y

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3grouchymusicologist13y

That is awesomely put.

0[anonymous]13y

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[-]grouchymusicologist13y100

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.

2[anonymous]13y

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2arundelo13y

You might enjoy Solange (Beyoncé's sister) covering "Stillness is the Move".

0[anonymous]13y

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[-]SilasBarta13y100

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 ... (read more)

3Antisuji13y

I have a tendency that's possibly related to your #3: when someone makes a factual assertion I immediately consider its negation as a distinct possibility. That is, the negation becomes more available to me, and therefore in some sense more plausible. Else, why make the assertion in the first place?

5CronoDAS13y

This is actually a pretty good habit to get into when doing math. Lots of plausible-sounding conjectures actually do turn out to be false because math can allow for some pretty strange-seeming things. For example, you can have functions that are continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere, or uncountable sets with length zero, or all kinds of other crazy things.

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... (read more)

3erratio13y

Hey, I have those too! I always assumed it was a natural outgrowth of normal kid fantasies (being a magical hero and facing evil, no meaningful relationships) that for some reason I just never gave up on. As I've gotten older I've noticed certain tendencies in the way my protagonist acts and relates to others that have given me insight into myself, and I've stopped using them as a sleep aid because sometimes the adventure was interesting enough that I would deliberately stay awake so I could keep generating the next part.

3vali13y

Oftentimes, if I need to fall asleep I'll pick a really peaceful one. When I was younger, I had one where I was a full sized person in a world made entirely of legos, including tiny living lego people. I'd fall asleep, dreaming of building secret tunnels under the ocean, vast cities with towers a mile high, train tracks for the lego people that climbed mountains that rose above breathable atmosphere to reach secret veins of special legos. It was only during the day that floods, earthquakes and rival lego people threatened. On a related note, I have such awesome ideas for a Minecraft mod.

0RomeoStevens13y

This makes me think that a website where people anonymously describe their fantasies/daydreams would be really interesting.

1Nornagest13y

There's a thread running through Methods of Rationality on the implications of patterning your developmental schema on the coming-of-age narrative typical of epic fantasy. (Haven't been able to isolate any specific examples there, but similar topics come up in "Formative Youth".) I'm pretty sure that sort of thing is very common among members of our particular tribe, and it's a topic that I'd love to see explored in more detail; unfortunately, no one I know of has ever approached it in depth, let alone with much rigor. Might just be another holdover from the EEA, come to that; it's a lot easier to be a hero and save your social world when your social world consists of fifty-odd people, all of whom you know and maybe half a dozen of whom share your particular skillset. But hither lies a Just-So story.

0erratio13y

I don't think I do that, there was never any doubt in my mind that it was just a story (eg. at several points over the years I've gotten bored of 'me' but not of the universe I've spent hours creating, and started following another character instead. Or introduced long timeskips so I don't have to narrate boring but necessary-to-my-current-plot events). I'd say that if anything, I absorbed less from all the fantasy and sci fi tropes I read as a kid and teenager than most people. It never occurred to me as a kid that I should be modelling any part of my behaviour after the people in books.

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... (read more)

4MixedNuts13y

Just a reaction to being repeatedly told that being unusual in any way is evil and bad and horrible. Sort of like gay pride.

2Crux13y

Good point. That must be a large factor as well.

3Nornagest13y

By way of disclaimer, I'm neurotypical, bar a childhood ADHD diagnosis that I'm quite skeptical about. In any case, I agree that it's pretty common for Internet communities to place an unusual and perhaps undue emphasis on neurodiversity, possibly because of the subculture's generally high Openness (although other reasonable hypotheses exist); I did time on TV Tropes for a while, for example, and in its later years it got to be about as dismal a hive of self-congratulation as I could describe. I've heard the superpower analogy too, and I don't find it a whole lot more convincing than you seem to. I don't think this is a signaling phenomenon, though, at least not primarily: a diagnosis carries certain sick-role implications that might be useful from a signaling perspective, and it might also further a desire to be seen as unique in some subcultures, but neither one seems to match the actual behavior involved. I think the explanation's simpler: a lot of bits have been spilled on how the Internet fosters self-reinforcing identity groups, and I think it'd be naive to suppose that this tendency doesn't extend to identity categories based on some kernel of neurodiversity. The broader culture's also gotten a lot more welcoming of small identity groups in recent decades; this might be what you're getting at with your mention of political correctness, although I'd definitely hesitate to use that term. And none of this is fundamentally a bad thing. It can lead to bad things, if it fosters fixation of destructive traits that might otherwise wash themselves out of the memetic ecosystem, but I don't think that's worth complaining about here; LW's always been fairly welcoming of self-improvement as an objective. The rest comes down to a nature-versus-nurture debate, and this isn't really the place; but this thread, I'd say, is fairly harmless. It's not hugely useful from a theoretical perspective, being self-sampled, and in any case I don't really expect to find any unusual ne

0Crux13y

I see what you're saying, and I guess I perhaps should have considered making a discussion post on the topic rather than throwing my rant in this thread.

1Kaj_Sotala13y

At least to some extent, I would agree with this. But the first step in deciding to change is knowing that the change is possible and an alternative exists, which requires people to first know how they differ from others.

2Crux13y

Agreed. There's nothing wrong with this thread, and without further information I can't prove that anybody who answered is committing any of the errors I outlined. All in all, I probably should have considered starting a new thread on this topic instead of simply dropping my rant in here.

[-]Logos0113y80

I am:

Anhedonic
High-functioning autistic
Polyamorous
D/s (service-dominant & sexual sadist)

-- 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 ... (read more)

6Incorrect13y

Perhaps it is because you are trying to do something which you do not consider an action (Is there a sequence post about this? I seem to remember reading something...). Rather than trying to "open up a new bank account" why not try to get in your car, drive to the bank, get out of your car, etc. I often have the experience of feeling completely unable to do something but I can always break it down into concrete actions and then do those instead. For example, sometimes I need to write a paper for school but feel it is impossible. So, instead I open a text document to begin my outline and ask myself what the first section should be about. Instead of trying to "do my paper" or "do my outline", I tried to do the steps that make up those actions. I think this experience of feeling completely unable to do an abstract task is virtually universal for humans.

8Logos0113y

What you described is a very normal response to reducing the difficulty of a task in order to reduce the anxiety response to said task to manageable levels. It is, however, unhelpful to autists who only know the global task. If you ever work with an autistic child, it would help you to be aware that such a strategy would be counter-productive. An example of what I mean is that to a profoundly autistic child, the knowledge of how to tie one's right shoe does not and cannot translate into how to tie one's left shoe. He would have to be re-taught each individual step in the process as a separate and independent task, and then he would have to be manually taught how to assemble them into both the right-shoe and the left-shoe before he might be able to begin to extrapolate from those into other situations. It's not, you see, that I didn't know the basic steps to each of these tasks. It's not even that I couldn't conceive of ways of simplifying them. It was that I had no "algorithm" by which to assemble them into a whole. I lack the language to properly explain this difficulty to someone who has not experienced, except to say this: it is not that I was "overwhelmed". It was... like being given a road-map and shown images of every important point along the route you should take to get to the destination, and then being given a car in a disassembled state. If you don't have the tools to put the car together, no matter how well you know "how to get there", you simply lack the means to do so. Breaking down the route further isn't going to help make that happen. You have to have the ability to traverse it at all. I am frustrated by my lack of ability to elocute this notion. I apologize for my lack of clarity and/or communicative skill.

9Incorrect13y

I have been diagnosed with Asperger's but am very high functioning. There are definitely tasks I feel this way about; for example, sometimes I will feel completely unable to call people on the phone. Although I often have to plan my conversations in advance, I can usually accomplish such things by breaking them down into subtasks. EDIT: Actually, on second thought I think I understand what you mean. If you asked me to "make a friend" or anything else that involved too complex a decision tree I would be unable to comply. END EDIT So specifically what would happen if after simplifying the task of opening a bank account, you simply tried to follow the steps? 1. Drive to the bank 2. Walk to the back of the line 3. Follow standard line procedure 4. Say to the person at the counter "I would like to open a bank account" etc. Would you be unable to come up with this list? Would you really be unable to complete the first step, driving to the bank? Would there be some interstice between steps in which you have a mental breakdown? I realize you are saying you cannot complete the task as a whole, I am asking that if you tried to complete the individual steps of that task, at precisely what point would you fail?

1Logos0113y

I wouldn't get to step one. Nah, that would be just fine. I'd done so more than once. Without the "whole" picture, it's like trying to put a jigsaw puzzle together when you can't see the whole picture and it has no apparent borders, and the pieces have all been repainted black. You know the pieces all go together. You know you have all the pieces. You just can't visualize how they all go together. There is an underlying assumption here that "breaking down the task" is intelligible on some level. This is why I tried to give, originally, the example of the fact that tying one's right shoe wouldn't translate to tying one's left shoe. The pieces are learned as a whole, and conceived of as a whole. Breaking it down into individual tasks just makes it more complex, not less. It's like tearing apart the jigsaw puzzle -- it has to be put back together again before you can actually see the image on the puzzle.

[-]fetidodor13y70

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... (read more)

[-]Morendil13y70

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?

6[anonymous]13y

Hmph. I was seconds away from typing a snarky reply about it, but then you went and ruined my fun. On a related note, I suspect that people are better at noticing typos in other people's writing compared to their own, possibly because they know what their own writing is supposed to say and have it somewhat memorized. However, this is unfounded speculation and generalizing from one example.

5Vaniver13y

This is a recognized effect called the Proofreader Illusion.

4Kaj_Sotala13y

If you hadn't mentioned it, I wouldn't have, and even then I had to read through your comment word-by-word to find it.

2Sabiola13y

Me too.

0lavalamp13y

I didn't consciously notice until you mentioned it, at which point my eyes focused directly on it.

0NancyLebovitz13y

It took me a couple of tries and some effort to find the typo.

-1MinibearRex13y

I caught it as soon as I was looking for it, but not the first time.

[-]Luke_A_Somers13y70

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?

7Nornagest13y

I'm a little surprised that those uncalibrated pain scales enjoy such wide use; with no obvious anchors, I'd expect people's subjective responses to them to vary quite a bit. Since this doesn't seem to be the case, I suppose most people are anchoring on something I'm not. The last time I was asked for a pain rating (doctor's visit following trauma to an eardrum), I hemmed and hawed over it for a while and finally interpreted it as a quasi-logarithmic scale with 1 being the least perceptible discomfort definable as such. This seemed to confuse the nurse.

[-]JenniferRM13y200

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."

5TheOtherDave13y

My answer at one point (when I was in a rehab center recovering from a stroke) was something like "if 10 is, say, having a burning building collapse around me, this is a 3. Maybe a 2. I'm not sure... I've never had a burning building collapse around me, but I'd expect it sucks." Eventually I calibrated my answers against the pain meds they were giving me and just started giving them numbers.

[-]Prismattic13y140

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!

3radical_negative_one13y

I was talking to a paramedic, who uses a 1-10 pain scale as part of his patient assessment. He said that it's common to have a patient reply "ten" and then the paramedic would say something like "When your wife gave birth to your child, that was a ten. Are you sure this is a ten?" after which the patient decides that the pain is actually more like a five.

6Prismattic13y

I'd be skeptical too. There's no way your pain sensitivity is finely calibrated enough to give 3.14 as an answer, never mind 3.1415..... ;)

[-]Luke_A_Somers13y190

Did I claim error bars? No, I didn't! pi is not intrinsically more precise a number than 1, 2, or 3!

[-]tgb13y140

There's no way your pain sensitivity is finely calibrated enough to give 1.00 as an answer, let alone 1.0000.... ;)

2Richard_Kennaway13y

XKCD.

5NancyLebovitz13y

Hyperbole and a half Pain chart that I've seen pain sufferers recommend.

-1[anonymous]13y

.

0Rubix13y

This one is the best I've seen so far.

[-]erratio13y70

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.

4komponisto13y

By contrast, I am unable to fall asleep except by accident.

0[anonymous]13y

I have basically the same thing, maybe a little less marked. Nap are pointless for me unless they last at least 90 minutes, because I'll spend the first half hour or so barely dozing. I can sometimes fall asleep more quickly, though, when extremely tired. ETA I have never fallen asleep by accident (once or twice I've noticed dozy sensations creeping up on me, but it's quite rare), and I'm an extremely light sleeper.

[-]erratio13y70

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.

2quentin13y

Wow, I thought everyone got those. Some from that list I would have imagined to be universal (who doesn't get shivers and tingles listening to Beethoven? seriously.), but these in particular are both incredibly accurate for myself and things that I figured were personal quirks: Sometimes I watch instructive videos on youtube, where the narrator has a slow, interesting voice and is methodically explaining how to do a mundane task, like... folding clothes. This gives me extremely pleasurable sensations, with a slight hint of shame for having such obviously wierd tastes. I'm glad to know I'm not a freak :D A similar experience can be stimulated in most people with a device... it consists of dozen or so wire prongs that you massage your head with (The Octopus Tingling Head Massager, I'm completely serious)... the feeling it produces for me is similar to ASMR, and I've never had anyone tell me it didn't feel really good. Also, "head orgasm" is a pretty accurate phrase for this too.

1argumzio13y

I experience this during intense aesthetic events as in music, literature, or cinema. It is delightful.

1Jayson_Virissimo13y

I get shivers down my spine when I am in dangerous situations (like when I narrowly avoid a car accident or I hear a nearby gunshot I wasn't expecting), but they are not enjoyable.

1sixes_and_sevens13y

I am genuinely shocked that this isn't a universal experience. I routinely experience this at dramatic or highly emotive points in cinema or television. I assumed this was what people meant when they say that something "sends shivers down your spine". Although thinking about it, there's a similar but distinct and less pleasant experience (which I associate with the expression "like someone walking over your grave") that I also experience.

1jsalvatier13y

I think that was my comment. My girlfriend gets these too but actually dislikes them, which I thought was interesting. It's also worth pointing out that that site is run by non-scientists and I haven't been able to find research on this topic.

1erratio13y

When I looked at some of the links from that page, I found it mildly weird how enjoyable some people find it, to the point of using it as a form of mood management and bemoaning the loss the of it. This leads me to believe that a) not everyone has the reaction (eg. some people on reddit thought they were being trolled), and b) it's highly varied in strength/frequency/pleasantness (eg. I have very few reliable triggers and it's not so great that I seek it out).

0lessdazed13y

I used to get those, but haven't much since I turned 19 or so.

0lavalamp13y

Wait, you mean this isn't just a figure of speech?

0Kaj_Sotala13y

Wow. I've had enjoyable shivers several times, but at first I was really puzzled to see that site: why make such a big deal out of it, any more than you'd make a big deal over feeling nice after having a cup of coffee or something? Then I followed the Reddit links and found that people were talking about it as a "head orgasm", and realized that apparently for some people it's a really strong experience, much stronger than it is for me. Fascinating.

-1Jolima13y

I've got this too and have learned how to do it more or less at will. This post from that same page ties the feeling to Seratonin release which seems to make sense. I haven't looked into it enough to say it's certainly true though.

-1falenas10813y

Huh, interesting. I have this and knew that most people didn't, but never knew anything about it. For me, it's usually triggered by either intense emotional or intelectual stimula, or a sudden relaxation or alteration of body position (e.g. going from hunched over to sitting up straight).

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... (read more)

7thejash13y

I also had an uncomfortably strong level of empathy specifically towards people doing something that would make me uncomfortable, in a social sense. When I watched someone talking and embarrassing themselves in class for example, it felt like my insides were trying to escape my skin. This actually went away after watching all of the seasons of The Office (the American version). However, I'm pretty sure I feel an abnormally low amount of empathy for other emotional states in other people (both positive and negative, this was unaffected by watching The Office)

[-]Kaj_Sotala13y130

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.

3Nornagest13y

I'm American, and I feel that sense of embarrassment-by-proxy strongly enough to actively avoid a lot of the situational comedy that the US film and television industries produce. But that seems fairly unusual in this culture, if my social group and my perceptions of the American mainstream are anything to go by.

3Kaj_Sotala13y

One explanation - that actually seems a bit too obvious to me - is the uniquely strong individualism of American culture. In a more collective or family/group-based culture, feeling ashamed over somebody else embarrassing themselves is an entirely reasonable reaction. If someone belonged to your group, it would be your responsibility to look after them and make sure they don't embarrass themselves or otherwise fare badly. By embarrassing themselves, they would also be shaming you. Of course, the characters in television shows don't belong to our family, but adaptation-executers not fitness maximizers.

0RomeoStevens13y

I strangely find peep show watchable but curb your enthusiasm not watchable. Maybe the accents help me delineate.

1Sabiola13y

In Dutch we call it 'plaatsvervangende schaamte' - my dictionary translates that as 'vicarious shame', so English does have an expression for it, too. I think that the Dutch expression is clearer about you experiencing shame in place of the other person, who doesn't seem to feel any...

0DanielVarga13y

I have this thing, too. It would be interesting to figure out if it is overrepresented in this community, and if yes, why. I googled and found this account, which basically says that it's simply empathy: Vicarious Embarrassment: Awkward Moments Trigger Pain Centers in the Brain I am not sure I can believe that.

0Prismattic13y

I have this as well. I would not generally describe it as feeling like empathy from the inside.

0eugman13y

I can say, as an American, I've never met another person who had to cover their ears or eyes during a show because of this sensation.

0Sabiola13y

In the Netherlands it's apparently quite rare too.

0eugman13y

It looks like I have to take back what I said. I was watching Moulin Rouge and a friend covered her eyes. It was the elephant room scene.

0wedrifid13y

That's true, I've noticed it myself.

0eugman13y

Have you found any negative consequences from this exposure therapy?

1thejash13y

None that I've noticed It's actually quite nice not to feel personally liable when other people are doing stupid things anymore. If you're willing to generalize from one data point, I say go for it :) If you DO go for it, note that most of the benefit came from watching the first two seasons, so if you don't experience any change after that, it probably isn't worth pursuing. Also, I watched it with a bunch of friends who all clearly enjoyed it, so that might be a good detail to replicate if possible. Also if you try it, let me know how it turns out, I'm really curious.

0lavalamp13y

I've seen the first two or three seasons, and it didn't cure me. :(

2lavalamp13y

Your first three paragraphs describe me to a bizarrely high degree of accuracy.

1eugman13y

Do the the dimples on the side of your face approximate the big dipper? We are a part of a cloning project run secretly by the government in the late 80's. More seriously, are you an INTP? Does one of your parents have a severe mental illness? Is the other an electric engineer?

0lavalamp13y

INTP, yes. I think-- been a while since I took one of those tests, the P might be iffy. The rest doesn't match, although there is mental illness in the family tree-- just not that close to me. Unless you count religion, anyway.

1eugman13y

Ok, just curious. One friend of mine is very similar in many regards and those were three of the biggest parallels in our lives. Technically he was INTJ, iffy on the J too. Additionally, you would have been freaking out if all 3 had matched.

1[anonymous]13y

.

0Sabiola13y

Thanks, I'll have to remember that. I'm the same as eugman in that respect.

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... (read more)

[-][anonymous]13y60

.

0RomeoStevens13y

Would you be willing to try to figure out how you did this emotional expelling and describing what you think your process is? This sounds highly valuable.

1[anonymous]13y

.

[-]mstevens13y60

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.

[-]woodside13y50

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... (read more)

There's an interesting chapter in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! in which Feynman describes trying to see if he can count while doing other activities (he can't, for many of them). He finds that a friend can perform the task easily. Here is an excerpt.

[-]sixes_and_sevens13y50

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... (read more)

3Eneasz13y

I don't understand. What's particularly special about that, that it counts as the most inappropriate personalized message? Why is it worse than, say, lots of tiny heroin needles spelling out "Your Child's Leukemia Is Hilarious!"

[-]sixes_and_sevens13y140

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... (read more)

2Eneasz13y

Hm. Very well then. I suppose I'm just an old curmudgeon who doesn't understand inappropriate humor. At least it's better than puns.

0prase13y

I probably share your sense of humor. But just two nitpicks: Since the neo-Nazi activities are often illegal, the Nazis may quite easily say "fuck the police". I am not too familiar with the Nazi subculture, but (therefore?) I would be able to mistake the combination for a genuine expression of political opinion (not sure about that if they happened to be painted on an easter egg). This sounds tautologically trivial, unless the faculty is defined more precisely than it was.

2sixes_and_sevens13y

I've met (way) more than my fair share of anarcho-communists. They're real, fairly intelligent and reasonably well educated people who simultaneously hold what I believe to be radically opposed and mutually conflicting philosophies. The fact they exist doesn't make those philosophies any less radically opposed or mutually conflicting. It does make them kind of funny, though. As regards the tautology claim, I'm not saying people who share my sense of humour will prefer things I also find funny. I'm saying that my sense of humour is informed by my tendency to spontaneously formulate inappropriate responses to situations. Impropriety is in many ways an aesthetic property, and other people with that tendency to formulate inappropriate responses to situations will have an aesthetic appreciation for it when they see it carried out by other people.

2prase13y

I wasn't meaning that existence of Nazis fucking the police implies absence of contradiction in that action, but rather that "fuck the police" and swastika aren't necessarily immediately perceived as symbols of opposed ideologies. I know what a swastika symbolises, but as for "fuck the police", my internal ideology analyser returned a rather generic "political contrarian" label, under which Nazis can be classified without difficulty. Needless to say, I have no knowledge of gangsta rap. (In a sense, putting two contradictory ideologies together makes them somewhat cancel each other and makes the whole thing less inappropriate. Combining two compatible symbols would have a stronger effect, as long as inappropriateness is the main goal.)

3sixes_and_sevens13y

I think a distinction needs to be drawn between "inappropriate" and "shocking". Shock is about the magnitude of anticipated response, whereas impropriety is about things being out of place. They can go hand in hand (the most inappropriate things usually have a shocking aspect), but they don't quite work in the same way. If you want to maximise shock, you transgress the biggest taboos you have available, but if you transgress too many at once it stops being shocking and starts being farcical. If you want to maximise impropriety, you need to provide something tailor-made to transgress the specific taboos of the situation you're in. By way of example, if a gynecologist wolf-whistles while giving a patient a pelvic exam, that's inappropriate. If he stabs her to death, that's shocking. If he chops her up into bits and feeds her to orphans working in his sweatshop that manufactures clubs for killing baby seals, that's farcical. The contradictory nature of "fuck the police" in swastikas is somewhat farcical, making it irreverant about serious issues in a way that isn't as bluntly shocking. This is probably the "cancelling out" you mention. It could certainly be more shocking, but it's supposed to be out of place, not to generate a response of high magnitude.

0David_Gerard13y

You would probably be somewhat distressed by how many police are neo-Nazis and how tolerated they are by their fellows.

0wedrifid13y

How many, how well, how many of the neo-Nazis who commit crimes are also neon-Nazi police and says who?

0CronoDAS13y

I'm reminded of a scene in the novel Contact in which a character from Soviet Russia expresses his fondness for a button that reads "Pray for Sex". As he explains to the American main character: "In your county it is offensive in only one way, but in mine it is offensive in two different ways."

0SilasBarta13y

That seems similar to my number 3. Glad I'm not alone!

[-][anonymous]13y50

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.

[-]WrongBot13y40

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... (read more)

7Normal_Anomaly13y

Could you do a discussion post on this? It would really help me.

4WrongBot13y

That's something I've wanted to do for a while, and I've tried to start writing the post a couple times, but I've had a really hard time putting a lot of it into words. I'll give it another shot, though, interest is highly motivating.

1Crux13y

I would also be very interested in a post on that topic.

1eugman13y

Do you have an android device? This tool was useful for me personally. It only covers facial expressions for the fundamental emotions; however, I can now reliably notice the disgust response in people where I couldn't before.

0nerfhammer13y

Check out Paul Ekman's books

[-]arundelo13y40

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... (read more)

2quentin13y

I'm not sure if I experience the same thing, but it sounds similar. It sometimes happens with peoples faces, more often with my laptop screen when I've been staring at it for a while. It is impossible to put into words... sort of like my sense of size becomes meaningless. Depth perception vanishes. Sometimes things seem very small, or very large, but that is not quite it. It is more like my brain doesn't know how to parse anything related to absolute size. Sometimes when I'm trying to fall asleep, I'll experience it with very high intensity. Normally when I think of an object, it is in one of two ways. Either I'm modeling it in my head, in which case it seems roughly head-sized and located (where else) in my head. Alternatively I superimpose it on the environment, and I can roughly envision it at appropriate scale. So whatever part of my brain that is responsible for these tasks seemingly deactivates. It's really interesting in an abstract way, but its accompanied by mild nausea and vertigo.

2Crux13y

Something similar happens to me. If I'm talking to somebody and staring them right in the eyes for more than like 90 seconds, my whole visual field seems to go totally haywire and I start seeing multiple, partial images of their face stacked on top of each other, rotated randomly, and bleeding into each other. It's of course very difficult to explain what it looks like because of how unfamiliar the patterns are (and thus how hard it would be to remember them in high enough detail to draw or whatever), so a real explanation will most likely have to wait until there's technology available to simply scan my visual field onto a monitor, but it's something like what I wrote above. Anyway, this only happens when I'm so intent on staring them down with absolutely no interruptions for so long that I end up totally overriding my natural inclination to dart my eyes around in the specific pattern designed to scan the room and form a good representation, so it seems like this phenomenon is simply the chaotic result of overriding the preset updating system for vision.

-1pwno13y

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/07/15/disturbing-face-distortion-illusion/

[-]CronoDAS13y40

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 ... (read more)

1Normal_Anomaly13y

Cool, I'm not the only person who has this!

0billswift13y

It happens to me too, but in my case I know what caused it. I had shingles in 2000 and have several facial scars and one small bump of scar tissue in my ear canal. The neuralgia associated with the scars has mostly faded, but it is fading more slowly on the scar in my ear, direct contact on the scar still triggers it and in that case gives me an urge to cough.

1[anonymous]13y

This also happens to me (well, not the getting frustrated part). I sometimes joke that if I ever start snoring it will be the end of my academic career.

0Crux13y

I get this too, and in fact have long speculated it to be the way that most people probably experience emotions. For example, I feel fear as a ripple through my chest with two distinct parameters. The larger the waves and the more they travel outward from the epicenter, the greater the perceived danger. And the further to the right or left of my chest the center of the splash, the more likely the alleged danger is coming from that side. I have introspected plenty more where that came from, and have gotten confirmation from plenty of different people that their subjective experience of emotions is similar. This isn't common knowledge, but I assume that's only because of the difficulty of introspecting such fundamental mental facts. Most people have had this sort of mental phenomena on auto-ignore since they were in their single digits, so it's usually quite hard to dig up. There must be a subjective experience constituting each emotion (or they wouldn't exist), and it generally seems to be a combination between (1) a comfortable or uncomfortable bodily sensation and (2) various other things that would take a while to explain.

1eugman13y

Relevant?

0Crux13y

Yes. Thank you for the link.

[-]Dreaded_Anomaly13y40

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... (read more)

6MileyCyrus13y

From the other side of the spectrum: I pray to a god I know doesn't exist, just because I feel a compulsion. Many atheists do not understand what the need to worship feels like. It's not about being scared of life and wanting a sky-daddy to comfort you. It's not about trying to outsource critical thinking. For some people, worshiping a god is just something you've got to do. Like taking a stretch after being cramped in an airplane.

0Postal_Scale13y

Were you raised in a religious family?

4MixedNuts13y

Data point: I do the same thing, and I wasn't.

0Postal_Scale13y

Can you elucidate why, and indeed what it is you're actually doing when you pray/worship?

3MixedNuts13y

Why: doing it feels good; not doing it feels bad. If I haven't prayed for a while, either I get listless, nervous, and irritable, or I haven't had the urge because I'm badly depressed. What, from the outside: Being either alone or with other worshipers. Possibly using a focus (religious music, a picture, a rosary). Making a fixed set of gestures. Saying, whispering, or rattling off in my head prayers (usually a psalm, a mantra, or something outright silly like the alphabet). Sometimes, doing louder things like shouting, kneeling, jumping, dancing. What, from the inside: As I pray, I start feeling relaxed (it feels deep, but actually doesn't last). Then, if I'm lucky, I'll start feeling a specific emotion - awe, reverence, loyalty, gratitude, things like that. I also sometimes feel it when looking at very beautiful things. I might also get strong feelings of joy, hence the shouting and dancing (psalm 117 is made of fun and party hats). Sometimes after praying for a long time I get visual illusions and auditory hallucinations, but that's just me.

1MileyCyrus13y

I was. After reading Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids though, I suspect my god-shaped hole has more to do with genetics than how I was raised.

[-]Morendil13y40

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... (read more)

2[anonymous]13y

I do this so frequently that I have come to call it "rounding to the nearest cached person." Based on conversations with people I know (warning: anecdotal evidence), it seems to be a relatively common phenomenon. I agree with Nancy's prognosis that people vary a lot more than is commonly thought, which seems to explain this.

6Morendil13y

The kicker though, for me at least, is this: how many social conventions are built around an idea of how people commonly think - which in many cases is largely wrong? For instance, using name tags at a social gathering will earn you my everlasting gratitude, especially if they would not normally be expected. So will encouraging people to look at them, and designing so that they remain visible at all times (large type helps). There is a special spot reserved midway between Heaven and Hell (actually not, but you get the idea) for people who have the bright idea of providing name tags, then screw it up by printing them only on one side and putting them on lanyards where (in accordance with Murphy's Law) they systematically end up chestwards.

1SilasBarta13y

Our badges at work are like this[1], and unfortunately, it has implications beyond not remembering names -- that makes it easy for an unauthorized person to go through the facility unchallenged by having the (uninformative, easily-faked) back side of the badge showing. [1] Well, in that most people use them or something else that allows the badge to dangle and have the same problem.

1Emily13y

This is what I was going to post about. I am terrible at recognising faces. People I know well are fine, but even a quite good acquaintance in the wrong context can easily throw me completely. There are a very small handful of celebrities I can recognise by their faces. I recognise most people below the level of fairly-good-acquaintance by their voice, not their face. There have been many occasions on which I haven't realised I know someone, or have seen an actor in something else, till they speak. It's also not quite that I remember the features but can't synthesise them into a face, which I think some people with this difficulty find -- I have real trouble remembering features, too. Half the time, if you ask me whether friend-so-and-so has dark or light hair, or is tall or short, I'll struggle to say for sure. I think I'm relatively bad at reading facial expressions, too.

-1Normal_Anomaly13y

I have the same thing, with the added complication that I can't recognize voices either. I can remember people's hair color and approximate height, though.

0Sabiola13y

I usually (fail to) recognize people as appropriate, but one time I failed to recognize my own sister, and another time I kissed a total stranger on the cheek, thinking he was a friend.

-1NancyLebovitz13y

I believe that people vary much more than is commonly thought in just about every mental respect. Language is a way of conveying a sketch of shared experience.

[-]BenLowell13y30

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.