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How is your mind different from everyone else's?
I've come to believe that there's a lot more variety in human minds than many naively expect, and I'm thinking about writing either an essay or a book with plenty of examples of such differences. From commonly known and ordinary, like differences in sexual orientation, to the rare and seemingly impossible, like motion blindness. 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, please reshare this update to spread it further. If you're only seeing this update because somebody else shared it, please come to the original post to comment so that I can see it. Also, if you don't want to reply in public, feel free to send me a private message.
I've come to believe that there's a lot more variety in human minds than many naively expect, and I'm thinking about writing either an essay or a book with plenty of examples of such differences. From commonly known and ordinary, like differences in sexual orientation, to the rare and seemingly impossible, like motion blindness. 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, please reshare this update to spread it further. If you're only seeing this update because somebody else shared it, please come to the original post to comment so that I can see it. Also, if you don't want to reply in public, feel free to send me a private message.
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+Tapio Peltonen: That's quite interesting.
When I asked this same question elsewhere, one person posted this as an illustration of how they perceive numbers: http://koroptew.webz.cz/lwd/numbers.png . It seems somewhat similar, but even more complicated. It'd be interesting to see yours for comparison.Dec 5, 2011
The above link 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.Dec 5, 2011
I often use my sense of rhythm for counting. Somehow it enables me to split the count into powers of two. For me, this requires less attention as I don't have to think about all the individual numbers in the process. A disadvantage of this method is that if I make a mistake, I may be a large number of steps off.Dec 5, 2011
I'm not recognizing this concept of a general visualization of numbers at all. Thinking of any specific visualization that contains specific numbers the closest thing would be brightness, with black being 0.0 and 1.0 being white... except it breaks down outside that range, and the visualization doesn't, nor does it conflict with other simultaneous things. Brightness being a special case of number seems more consistent than the other way around...Dec 5, 2011
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 with my wife or with friends, and hear "Oh look, here goes X" where X is someone I saw too much of on TV. And I've totally missed them going by, and a second glance leaves me unconvinced it's actually X.Dec 5, 2011
Perhaps the biggest gulf is between the drug-naive and users of psychedelics. Psychedelics can open up entirely new state-spaces of conscious mind. Despite numerous claims to the contrary, I'm not convinced such drugs unlock mystic wisdom:
http://www.erowid.org/
Rather it's precisely because such state-spaces of consciousness have not been recruited by the minds/brains of living organisms under pressure of natural selection for information-signalling purposes that makes their extraordinary effects so hard to understand.
By analogy, imagine if you were congenitally blind and living in a congenitally blind community of rationalists. You take a drug that induces visual experiences (but not of course the visual apparatus to permit electomagnetic frequency discrimination.). How would you communicate the profound importance - and potential - of your discovery to your blind fellow rationalists?Dec 5, 2011