How is your mind different from everyone else's?

It can even be something as trivial as always having conceptualized the passing of years as a visual timeline, and then finding out that not everyone does so.

I visualise numbers in a strange way. All people with whom I have talked about this (there weren't many) said to visualise numbers on a line or a circle. My image, on the other hand, has many sharp turns. I have put it here. The round turns in the picture aren't visualised as such; instead when thinking about numbers lying there, the whole picture turns around to maintain orientation while keeping the curved sections straight.

(Sorry if my English comes across as odd or bland; I'm tired and my feel for the language might be off.)

Here's a bit of a confession, because I feel like it.

I was diagnosed with encephalopathy of some kind when I was 19. Can't recall the specifics right now, but the gist of it is, I was born with brain damage. Due to that I've been suffering from a severe attention deficit, frequent emotional turbulence or periods of apathy, and rather unpleasant failures of willpower throughout my life, growing particularly troublesome around the last year of high school. I used to be rather disfunctional socially and emotionally, and found myself growing very nihilistic, neglectful and careless of myself and others.

I used to had a few good, true friends at school - despite being very introverted and getting tired of any company easily - but they all drifted away after graduation. Entering a state university and coping with most classes was trivially easy for me (my IQ is 135, and I simply enjoy reading up on a broad range of humanities on my own), but I flunked after my first year for three times in a row (due to hardly attending at all after the first month, neglecting to study for finals and failing to hand in papers). Didn't make any permanent acquaintances at uni, in part because of my prosopagnosia, in part because of my becoming rather callous to people.

As a child I had a great deal of empathy, but it hurt me, so my shell grew way too tough and I eventually started taking comfort in not caring for anyone; I frequently dreamed of my family/parents dying and me inheriting their small fortune, I lied to my parents habitually and took a sadistic kick of them being hurt by it, I hated the very thought of anyone being dependent of me and looking to me for aid, etc.

Then, in one winter week, things changed. I watched the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion and my shell was utterly shattered. It was a moment of utter catharsis for me. My fears, shames and anxieties were all laid bare in Shinji, and in following his story I learned of a way to remake myself. During a month of internal strife, I reconsidered my core values and found a new sense of ethics. My social anxiety is also gone; whereas previously I was hesitant to initiate any social contact, now I'm unafraid to try, occasionally fail and lose status, yet learn and suffer virtually no embarrassment. I'm often seen as eccentric, to put it generously, but it's still a hell of a lot better than what I used to resign myself to.

That was about 3 years ago, and in that time I have reforged the bonds with my immediate family (some considerable issues remain, like fits of hysteria or times when I lie pathologically, but it's nothing like the giant cold-hearted deception on my part that it used to be). I also realized my bisexuality and got into a relationship with an awesome guy who's greatly creative and truly sympathetic of me. (it's long-distance sadly, we only met a couple of times so far, but the total contact and connection between us was the best thing that ever happened in my life). All that helped me get my life moving; I'm finally making an honest effort to get an education in a field I enjoy (social work). I still have a lot of issues, and I'm going to need more professional help with my condition, perhaps more medication too, but what I'm certain of is that NGE was a helping hand when I needed it most and expected it least. No wonder I became a rather obsessive fanboy :)

I was intending to write a bit more, but I'm falling asleep. Damn, this ramble is unlikely to earn me much karma, and I'm being way too forthcoming about myself. Eh, I wanted to confess about all that to people that are high-status in my eyes, so here you go.

I'm not sure how common or rare this is, but the visual images I recall are stunningly lacking in detail. For example, in the case of people, even with someone I know very well, it is rare for me to be able to report so much as their hair color on the basis of the mental image I call up when I try to think of them. I don't seem to have any unusual difficulty recognizing people, or any tendency to confuse my various mental images with one another, and the mental images don't seem incomplete until I start thinking about questions like how to describe them. I'm sure I would be completely useless to a police sketch artist if I were ever a witness to a crime.

I have abnormally good memory in some respects. Dates, time-passed-since, and sources are hard to remember, but stories, phrases, quotes, noteworthy or unexpected events, and some portions of conversations are accessible word-for-word years later - an example would be telling an amusing story to a friend who'd been the original source of the story, and using the same words they did to describe it to me years ago, which more than a little unsettled them.

As far as I can tell I have no feeling of this kind of memory as opposed to any other; it all feels constantly available, there's no 'lookup' or 'let me think' feeling at all. Up until recently I have never had the 'tip of the tongue' phenomenon (it's either available or not and I automatically know which without question), but I've been practicing trying to remember things I think I can't, and I think I've had this feeling once or twice.

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 fail it in the worst way possible. For example, if I'm told not to mention Bob's balding hair to him, I immediately think of the most horrible way to do so. (Naturally, I don't act on these ideas, but my mind sort of defaults to thinking about them to fill the empty space.)

Thanks for doing this, I've been wanting to gather this information as well, perhaps later come up with a standard checklist so people can find out what kinds of mentalities they have are abnormal.

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 some sort of narrative I can use to construct these images. So for example, I can read a history book once and never forget. I can look at a map, and navigate to anywhere on that map. I have an excellent sense of direction. I can close my eyes, and imagine myself anywhere I've been. I know it sounds like I have a photographic memory, but not really. If you gave me those tests where they show you a picture with a bunch of things, then ask you to repeat them back, I'd do pretty normally. My memory is average for details, excellent at the big picture.

I like to daydream. I have a bunch of different daydreams, and they function sort of like a screen saver for my brain. If I'm not doing anything mentally taxing, I turn on one and tune the world out. I can still remember as a child imagining all my stuffed animals as a council, sitting in a circle and doing something. Most involve a faceless, nameless protagonist who has some sort of magical powers. There are almost never meaningful relationships, and never names, in these daydreams. It's kinda creeps me out, what this fact says about me. These daydreams are very similar to what I experience when reading a book, in form if not content. These stories always involve some sort of enemy that needs defeating. Most run several years, until I get bored of them. I use them to help fall asleep. If anyone is interested, I could post one here.

I also have a really strong reaction to music. I can sit and listen to the same song on repeat for an hour, and I might as well be high, given how differently I think.

I mentioned earlier that books swallow me up, and spit me out later. I'm not capable of analysing anything I read critically the first time through. I have to go back and read it again, as an outside observer.

I have a bad habit of getting into emotional feedback loops. The need to control my emotions was what led to my current interest in rationality, and eventually here to Less Wrong. I would be a very different person if I hadn't needed to master my emotions at such a young age.

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 being fundamentally neurologically atypical; it's probably just something atypical about your lifestyle that makes you like that.

Is this guy physically atypical? Yeah of course. Most people aren't that strong or agile. It's pretty rare to walk past somebody who's at that level. But does that mean that he's fundamentally any different than most people? Probably not. He's no more remarkable than a dude who's super obese. They have different lifestyles, and it results in different looks and abilities.

I don't want to over-generalize my own experience, but I think there's plenty of truth in what I'm saying. I think there's way too much of an emphasis on being born all special and unique, and way too little on just how much control you have over your mental and physical abilities. I'm perhaps an astonishingly boring case when it comes to these kinds of threads, but it may well be because I wouldn't let an arbitrary mental abnormality stand longer than the duration in which I fail to introspect it.

I think there's a way over-emphasis on and exaggeration of mental oddities in communities like this, and I think it's for a very basic reason of social signaling. In a lot of ways, they function as backhanded compliments. Usually they come in packages of great disadvantages but also epic benefits. High-functioning autism comes to mind, where they claim to have various problems (social etc), but then also have a few super-powers. It's socially easier to sell your identity as a bundle of strengths and weaknesses than it is to stroll around claiming to be 100% awesome.

I don't really know anything about autism or Aspergers or anything, and I certainly don't want to insult anybody who really was born fundamentally neurologically atypical, but I think there's a huge social pitfall in communities like this, where people throw around labels like that way too recklessly. I've read countless posts on here that sounded as if they were bragging about their HF autism or even about how the LW community seems to have an abnormally high saturation of this neurological oddity.

It may be important to note that a lot of psychology seems to have a destructive, politically correct outlook on personality types etc. For example, the Myer-Briggs whatever seems to go out of its way to emphasize that no personality type is "better" than any other, and that they're all just different. Each of them has their advantages and disadvantages, just like a ton of the comments in this thread and others seem to imply.

Well I have a different outlook. I'm striving to be an unmitigated success in everything I care about. I don't want to have advantages and disadvantages; I want only the former. And I think it's possible, or at least much more possible than most people seem to act.

In summary, I think a lot of what passes as "neuro-atypical" is simply the result of various lifestyle factors. I see no reason why you can't simply change from being a visual thinker to a verbal one or whatever. Most discussions seem to make it seem like you just get to announce what kind of thinker you are or what your personality type is (introverted or whatever); way too little seem to discuss which personality types or mental oddities are good, which are bad, and how to switch between them.

Less Wrong perhaps does a lot better of a job on this than most, but still not very good.

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 universally failed to recognize my issues in that regard. One of the things I will always be grateful to my ex-primary for was her ability to enable me to learn how to handle new situations and inputs that were markedly unfamiliar to me: if I did not have a -- for lack of a better term -- "subroutine" for a given situation, I would literally lock up and be unable to force myself through the situation, regardless of the amount of willpower. This could be as simple as opening up a new bank account, or as complex as getting myself a new date. (Caveat; this was not an anxiety response; but rather just... like trying to open a door when there's no light in the room and you can't feel the seams. I to this day lack the proper language to communicate the sensation.) I have never before encountered another individual with similar reactions to the world.

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 just weird, unusually demonstrable performance characteristics.

It's difficult to be more specific than that, but when I started noticing this, it made me extremely interested in the sort of topic you're discussing. One of the ways this became apparent to me was when I realized that it wasn't just the difference between someone being stupid and smart, or something generic like that. I think at first I was disconcerted by this level of mathematical aptitude in some people, but then eventually after getting to know a lot of people like this I realized I could still hold my own with them, the aptitude wasn't some kind of signal for all around mental supremacy. I'm sure many people in my profession and people in various other areas of academia (biology, chemistry, all the engineering areas, philosophy, etc.) are just as "generically smart" as pure mathematicians, but when it comes to high level mathematics, it's astonishing what kind of massive gap you can observe between two people who are both "generically smart".

My personal intuition is that this really comes down to a brain wiring functionality that is peculiar to mathematical talent, since doing mathematics and doing proofs has such specific, strenuous requirements on serial logic processing, memory, symbolic representation, and so on. These constraints aren't that specific in nature, but they are much more about just doing ordinary things at a very high level of functionality. For example, mathematicians have to have a very high capability in learning new definitions and inserting them into their knowledge base, reminiscent of language, but it's essentially a task that all of us are able to do already, just not as well or as speedily. Hanging around mathematicians, you just start to get the feeling their minds are acting a lot more like computers than the rest of us, for example, just performing basic serial logic at an unusually high frequency.

An almost trivial but (to me) interesting one: I'd be a great proofreader, typos just jump out at me. This appears to be unusual; most people just mentally paper over any mispellings they encounter. (Random web page turned up by a Google search for affirmations of this principle.)

As a tiny test, did you immediately spot the (ETA: more subtle) typo I deliberately inserted in the above paragraph?

In one psychology experiment run by an acquaintance of mine, I was asked to dip a hand into ice water for an extended period and rate my discomfort level (the experiment also included groups which were lied to as to when they'd be told to remove their hand). I rated it as 2; days after the experiment, my acquaintance said that was abnormally low discomfort.

Similarly, in the hospital as I was recovering from peritonitis, the nurse was skeptical of my 1-10 pain rating of pi.

I guess it's just that I can remember how much things really hurt when they really hurt so my 10s are much closer to the real maximum pain than most peoples'. In that case it's not really my brain, but my mind?

I am unable to take naps or fall asleep by accident. I have to be explicitly trying to sleep, and it usually takes at least half an hour to fall asleep. This holds even when I haven't slept for over a day and I'm exhausted - I still have to give myself permission, and the process is still not fast.

Enjoyable shivers down the back of the spine

First I heard that it might not be universal was someone's comment here a few days ago. Not sure if it's a mental or physical difference though.

One that I realized quite quickly, I have an uncomfortably strong level of empathy. Or more accurately, a strong discomfort towards emotional disharmony in others. The strongest is in strong arguments or social awkwardness. I can barely stand to watch those intentionally awkward scenes in sitcoms and movies.

I have a preternatural ability to see what others are trying to say. This comes out in two ways. One, if someone is talking to me, and they make an error, my brain will autotranslate. So if they said brother and meant father, I will hear what they meant. Sometimes I don't notice this translation until they point out an error they made. And then I'll be able to recall specifically what they said. The other way it comes out is I can spot miscommunication very easily. If two people are having a "who's on first" moment, I'll see exactly where the confusion is, and what needs to be said to fix it. It's awesome and weird.

Both of the previous items cause me to have a natural urge to resolve any conflict going on, trying to act as mediator.

Like some here, I think I have mild number synethesia. Mental math sometimes has a visual component, with numbers splitting and merging. Additionally, numbers...um....look a certain way. So the number 15 looks really 3-ish and really 5-ish. It's also a very sturdy, compact number (because it fits into 60 so well.) The lower numbers also have an aesthetic, usually based on how divisible they are or how common a divisor they are. So, 2,3,4,12,60 are all pretty but 31 or 57 are ugly. Higher numbers blur a bit for me. This may be a heuristic for how easily my mind manipulates those numbers.

Also, and with the main population I feel like an oddity for this, I derive significant pleasure from completing math problems. I imagine many others here do too.

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), but am slower and tend to get lost in tangents. For this reason I used to regard the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as obviously false. Now I consider it to be a confused question.

I experience ASMR only when a barber uses electric clippers on the back of my neck.

I get butterflies in my stomach when I'm in love and/or on rollercoasters. This is a physical sensation.

I'm under the impression that in male sexuality, sexual desire is supposed to be pleasant and empowering. I did not experience it that way until I tried certain recreational drugs.

Despite being a native English speaker, I perceive /ɪŋ/ as /iŋ/.

.

There's something about identifying syllables in the sounds of words that other people seem to automatically "get" which is a complete mystery to me. I normally cannot count syllables in words.

I have an absolutely atrocious memory for specifics when it comes to interpersonal interactions. I have a very difficult time saying what a person did or said even later that day. What makes this strange is that I have an excellent memory for a more abstract accounting of people's abilities and can predict people's reactions to different situations with a high degree of accuracy. I deal with utilizing people very often in my job (military officer) and I am known and respected for being very good at putting the right team together for a situation and splitting tasks between people in the most efficient manner. I always have a high confidence model of what a person is capable of, how trustworthy they are, how much stress they can handle etc, but when I try to analyze where this opinion originates from I can never remember anything. Since studying rationality I've become somewhat skeptical of how accurate I actually am in this regard, but after many attempts to test my gut opinions about people I've concluded that whatever my brain is doing, even in the absence of any consciously accessible data, seems to work.

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.

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 recognise other people who have the same faculty if I talk to them for a little while or appraise their work in any detail.

Staying on the subject of poetry, I also have an utterly fastidious and unrelenting need for perfect scansion in poetic verse. When I read or listen to the work of a poet or songwriter, I can generally tell if they have that same need. Over 160 years after his death, for example, I can tell that Edgar Allan Poe was driven to distraction by stray metric feet in the same way I am. If he wasn't, his work wouldn't be the way it is.

When I think about things, in addition to mental images and internal monlogue, I have very vivid tactile and kinesthetic sensations. For example, if you were to say "high-heeled shoes," I would only dimly picture a pair of heels, but I would immediately imagine how they would feel in my hand, how it would make the arch of my foot feel to wear them, and the emphatic stamping sensation of walking in them. It's the same even with abstract ideas; negative numbers feel a particular way in the pit of my stomach, and factoring feels like a physical process of disassembly.

When I was younger I had a great deal of trouble recognizing facial expressions. For example, it was hard for me to tell whether someone was smiling or barely managing to hold back tears. I could usually figure out which was which from context, at least when the emotions involved were so different. With nuances like the difference between a smirk and a grin, I was completely unable to tell the difference. Ditto for picking up emotional content from intonation and vocal tone.

As a teenager I trained myself to recognize specific small details that reliably distinguish between otherwise similar-looking expressions; tightened muscles, gaze direction, shoulder height and angle, things like that.

I've been diagnosed with Asperger's, ADHD, and delayed sleep phase disorder.

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 again when I look back at the person. I can't make it happen at will, but once it starts I can turn it on and off to a limited extent.

I first noticed this when I was 13 or so.

(I don't think this is quite the type of thing Kaj is most interested in, but it's the only peculiarity of my mind that hasn't already been mentioned in other responses to this post. Indeed, I've never heard of it anywhere, so if anyone has, please share!)

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 up almost totally oblivious to the world around me. I also read very quickly. And if I'm not keeping my brain occupied by something, I tend to either fall asleep or get very frustrated. It also causes me to be unaware of any pains or discomforts I'm feeling.

I often have trouble paying attention to what people are saying when they are talking to me and need to ask them to repeat what they are saying; my brain seems to interpret people's voices as background noise and I have trouble turning this off.

I often have a song of some kind playing in my head. I can play melodies by ear on the piano, but not harmonies, and I usually find that when I try to recall a memorized song I can only "hear" the singer and not any of the accompanying instruments.

Whenever I am in the process of inserting an earplug inside my right ear, it presses on a spot that causes me to feel an urge to cough. It happens every single time, and it doesn't have to be an earplug pressing the spot; an otoscope can also trigger the sensation.

I don't like the taste of most chocolate. I particularly dislike chocolate milk, chocolate ice cream, and chocolate cake.

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 still need time to myself in order to recharge mentally. Extroverts tend to see me as "one of them" at first, and then they become confused when I don't always want to go out and party.

I never went through the (seemingly typical) stage in childhood where one has a general dislike of/aversion to the other gender. I was friends with both boys and girls, more or less equally, since preschool if not earlier. (I myself am a straight male, to contextualize this for those curious.)

There was an interesting survey several years ago on Cosmic Variance about our mental images of time. I'll quote my response:

My main physical conceptions of time are in terms of years or weeks. Both involve spirals, although oriented differently.

For years, I think of them as a clockwise spiral going upwards, such that any two years make a complete circle when seen from “above.” For example, if I picture this year and then next year, it’s a circle where the bottom is January 2009, the left middle is Summer 2009, the top is Winter 2009-2010, the right middle is Summer 2010, etc. There’s definite seasonal imagery connected to this view. To try to demonstrate this, a diagram is -(:)-, where the -’s are summers and the .’s are winters. I often picture myself as being “on” a certain part of the spiral/circle, e.g. right now I’m coming up to the “top” of the 2009-2010 circle.

For weeks, I think of them as a spiral going to the right, so that if you look at it from the side, “days” are in the front and “nights” are in the back. I picture a week like this: |S|M|T|W|R|F|S| (often without the days labeled, but I put that there for clarity), where each day goes off to night and then loops around behind to connect to the next day in the morning.

I imagine any other timescale as just a long line going left to right.

There seems to be quite a range of mental images of time among people.

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.

I have difficulty recognizing emotions. I tend to categorize them as physical feelings, such as a certain tightness to the stomach, or between the ribs. I've come to associate these with commonly known emotions, since some of them correlate with thoughts making them easier to pinpoint, but sometimes I have specific feelings and I don't know if it is a known emotion or not.

It is pretty rare that I don't know what I'm feeling, but I have a record of the first time I felt intense jealousy/anger/stress, and I wrote about "hot skin, wide eyes, a burning feeling on my chest like a rash, and tightness between the shoulders" and my thoughts before I realized the name for what was happening.

I experience romantic longing as a warmth starting in my heart which radiates outwards depending on intensity. Normally it only gets to about my upper lungs, but sometimes it makes it through my torso and a little bit down the upper parts of my arms. It feels slightly pressurized, but is incredibly pleasant.

Connectedness feels similar to that, but cold and associated with blue, with weird sensations in which my head either feels floating, or my arms don't feel separate from the world. This is a very rare feeling to have much of, normally when it happens it only occupies a section of my heart.

I have an incredibly poor memory regarding spatial relations. I still have to look where the night stand is by my bed is to avoid hitting it, and it's been there for more than a year now. I get lost constantly, I can memorize routes from point A to point B, but I can't extrapolate routes between points based on location, because I have no general idea of location outside of specific routes and landmarks. Given that my verbal and visual memory are superb, and that I can absorb relatively large amounts of information in short amounts of time for most things, my inability to get anywhere without a GPS or absurdly specific directions is met with disbelief and amazement on the part of those who know me. I experience very strong sensations when reading, not just visual but the other senses as well, but I imagine that's not too uncommon.

I sometimes (every few weeks) hear a pretty loud, high pitched sound. It eventually (within a minute) fades. No idea if that is normal or not, but it just occurred to me that it might not be.

I read at about 1100 WPM. I had no idea that people sounded out words in their heads until about two years ago, when I was speed reading an article about speed reading and realized I was speed reading. I am curious how much faster it is possible to go? Can anyone here go significantly faster? I want to know if it's worth training further.

My memory of faces might be weird. The more familiar I am with a person, the less I can visualize what their face looks like. But, I CAN visually recall (pretty accurately) pictures of those same people. For example, I have no idea what my mom's face looks like if I think of it in the abstract, but I have a screenshot that I took while we were talking on skype a few weeks ago, and I can visualize that quite well, including the glasses she was wearing, her hair, and the quality of the webcam image.

I have VERY few memories of my life before I was 11. Probably 30. And no memories of my time before I was 6. Consequently I am quite interested in life logging :)

Once I passed out while I was getting a small amount of blood drawn. When I woke up, it felt like literally ten thousand years had passed. I still feel as if there was a gap there (This is not related to the above however, I've always had about the same small number of memories of childhood). That happened when I was about 17, I am 27 now.

The older I get, the slower time seems to go. I think this is partly environmental and NOT mental in that it also corresponds to less structure (the older I've gotten, the less structured my life has become to the point where now I am completely self-directed all day every day)

I'm not sure if this counts for what is asked: I have been told that when I speak I often repeat voicelessly the last bits of what I said (one or two words, perhaps) clearly enough to be lip-readable. I am completely unconscious of doing it.

I experience numbers as being on a line that runs left to right, swerves to the left at some number, continues upwards, and then returns to running from left to right. My experience of temperatures, people's ages, and the days of months is similar, but with different patterns of where the turns are. However, I think it may actually go right to left somewhere in the millions, though I'm not sure. Negative numbers run to the left forever, as far as I can tell. Calendar years are slightly different, in that they take more rounded turns and seem to be capable of going in any direction. The months of the year are very different. They make a letter "D" curve with January at the top and December at the bottom, but the link between January and December seems to be "pinched" rather than connected by a straight line. Also, the days of the week have different shades, Monday-Friday are all slightly grayish, while Saturday and Sunday are bright.

I also experience the letters of the alphabet, numerals, punctuation marks, months, days of the week, and various mathematical symbols as having genders and personalities.

I seem to be unable to think without internal monologue and visualization both being active. Whenever I imagine something, my internal monologue is describing it, and whenever I think verbally I visualize what I'm "talking" about.

I have an exceptional memory for auditory information.

I am usually almost completely indifferent to adult suffering.

I can get lost in deep thought such that I may forget where I am or the time of day or what I'm doing, etc. In these episodes, it may be quite difficult to get my attention.

I can hardly look at an object or person without them having a strong influence on my line of thought.

I conceptualize manipulations of mathematical expressions as movements consisting of slides and "flips".

I used to go around saying, "I am the only person I know of who does not believe he is unique."

(Always loved deliberate irony like that.)

It's true, though. I do not believe it likely, or even statistically possible, that I have thought any thoughts not thought by someone else, and this seems to be an uncommon (but not unique) thought.

I've also been obsessed with meta, and I thought this was uncommon as well until I started reading Hofstadter.

Does any of that count?

I have a weirdly good memory for things I hear said in conversation.

More interestingly, it took me many years to understand that I did not experience hunger in the same way as other people. I feel no physical sensations associated with it (nothing like a "hollow" feeling in the stomach, or rumblings, which are apparently more common symptoms). When I haven't eaten, I just find that my thoughts just keep turning towards food items. I have recurring thoughts of fruit, or something like that. When I was a kid, my parents didn't understand the way I was eating. I would never get seconds at meals. I would just eat whatever was on my plate originally, even if it was tiny, and then get up. A couple of hours later, I would be getting an apple from the refrigerator.

I think the most different part in my mind is how I value sensory inputs very lowly compared to most people. I do enjoy (some) food, but I don't care much about it as long as it's not something I really dislike. I prefer games which are more abstract (like pen&paper role-playing games) over more graphically shiny games. I do enjoy sex, but much less than other people seem to enjoy it, and I would definitely not do much efforts just for sex (relationship is a different issue, but it's not the sex I value in it). I prefer, by far, to read books rather than to watch TV. I value much more "internal" things (feelings, ideas, planning, knowing, understanding, ...) than I value "external" things.

My other difference is that I tend to not visualize spatially things well (I prefer text over schema, I'm easily lost in a city, ...), but that comes from a birth defect that made me unable to see in 3d until I got a surgery at the age of 2.

I'm fascinated by kinesthesia. I've put in some 30 years getting moved into my body. It would probably be more exact to say that I'm improving the connection between my conscious mind and my kinesthetic information, but "getting moved in" is how I think about it.

I think of myself as having a very good associative memory-- you talk about something, and there's a reasonable chance I can remember a magazine article I read 20 years ago that's related to it. However, when I've mentioned this, a fair number of people say they have it too.

My ear-mouth coordination is poor-- I'm bad at singing or imitating sounds.

I'm good at summarizing.

I'm fascinated by the inside of my head (details of how my experience works). Sometimes this pays off-- I discovered recently that some attention and movement problems were the result of my believing that I didn't to things fast enough, so I'd try to do them faster than I could get the sensory information I needed.

Psychetypes by Michael Malone is a rather theory based look at the Myers-Briggs personality types, with emphasis on how they perceive time and space. The general theme is that there are many ways of thinking and acting which add up to normal-to-excellent functioning, and they're more different from each other than you could imagine if you only look at your own experience.

While I'm not convinced that the Enneagram is a complete theory of personality, it's another good angle for looking at mental variation. The hypothesis is that everyone makes primary use of one of nine filters, though the others can come into play. I will say it explained some things to me when I realized I'm apt to use the search for perfection as a general way of looking at things.

My visualization for aversions is that they emanate waves of pushiness.

I don't feel like they are pushing me away (unless they're active), but it looks like an invisible field which would push me should I try to interact with it.

Strength varies, probably with aversion strength.

I'm close to the mean in most respects, except that I seem to enjoy abstract thinking slightly more than average.

I'm told by friends I have a mild case of Prosopagnosia.

What about the converse phenomenon, in which you have a particular quirk you think very rare, and try to hide it, and then one day you realize lots of other people have the same quirk?

I suffer from a form of depression, which comes along with a symptom I call "brain-ache": it essentially consists of a sharp pain that feels as though it's internal to my brain (unlike headaches, which I also commonly get, which are focused in my skull).

Brain-ache is worsened by deliberate conscious thinking, and trying to focus on things, and it is generally accompanied by a "mental fog" which makes it hard for me to see my own thoughts, and therefore hard to think about anything complex.

I have a few other pecularities [photic sneeze reflex, I used to cough instead of crying (that was a conditioned reflex due to abuse) and occasional verbal tics] but most are relatively minor.

Oh, yes, I can have full conversations in my sleep, that I don't remember in the morning. This includes answering the phone. This is a recent symptom, probably due to my current medication.

I'm stupid about 80% of the time.

When I'm deep in thought, I will sometimes have a short, convulsive shiver for no particular reason. It's strong enough to be visible to people nearby, and unnerving to some of them. I don't know if that counts as my mind, but it is weird.

I am very interested in my dreams, and make a point of remembering interesting facts about them whenever possible. I have vivid dreams with a wider range of sensations than anyone else I know, including: color, sound, texture, proprioception, sense of falling, the sensation of having something disgusting touching me (does anyone else get that as a distinct sensation?), realistic vomiting, occasional lucid dreams, and occasional metacognition during non-lucid dreaming. I don't have all of those in any given dream, but I have experienced most of them in the past year and all at least once.

When I have falling dreams, I (sometimes?) jackknife my actual body into the air such that it hits the mattress when my dream body lands and I wake up. I know this because I once woke up on purpose in the middle of falling and caught myself doing it.

One of my examples.

I plan to post more in one or more separate comments.

When I listen to music without words, I still feel as if the melody expresses some sort of grammatical structure. Though, I am unable to introspect any particular meaning from this grammar.

how are you a beautiful and unique snowflake?
200 comments

An invitation to talk about myself? Yay!

First of all: complex machinery is universal.

As for me? I'm smart, curious, I get math, I'm good at teaching, and I try to reconcile all my knowledge with itself. These are probably normal for non-impaired, non-darkside people.

I can't think of anything transnormal.

Mild prosopagnosia -- I know it's not total, but it can be hard to tell where the line is because with people I know well, I have an abundance of other cues for determining their identity. Watching a film or TV show, I can keep the characters differentiated just fine, but it's hard to recognize actors across different performances (with a few exceptions).

I have very strong empathy if you go by the impact of others' emotions on me, and my ability to detect them; it's actually quite overwhelming. I've learned a few tricks for displaying it socially, but they only work at the best of times. This is probably related to my being autistic (I'm not sure how to describe my functional level -- it seems to be very high or very low, but seldom between). I also apply it broadly -- even plants routinely provoke an affective response..

I have intense, immersive visions and "spiritual" experiences from time to time; in the past, they gave me a lot of trouble, until I practiced ritual magic (note: I don't believe in anything literally supernatural) for a while and learned how to channel into comfortable realms of imagery.. This is probably related to me being diagnosed as schizotypal.

I'm a weird hybrid of introvert and extrovert: being without contact or space for long enough seem to be equally-draining and unpleasant experiences. I need plenty of both.

I'm synaesthetic: sound maps to bursts of colour, some sounds map to touch sensations, body language maps to colour/flavor combos that I perceive around the person, and concepts are...complicated. I basically seem to manipulate them as 3-dimensional surfaces of an n-dimensional object. Experiencing logical arguments (which are carried in but not solely determined by the words used) is a matter of trying to trace a continuous line between two points on different faces of the object, an unknown number of permutations away in 3-space. Gaps in the argument, my understanding, or the concepts involved will result in an inability to finish tracing that line. Finally, I can mentally simulate the texture of an object's surface just by looking at it.

I sometimes lose the ability to communicate verbally, or maintain balance, when stressed, exhausted, drugged or hungry.

I've been emotionally polyamorous as far back as I can remember.

My orientation seems to be undefined; I will often experience my attraction to others as specifically same-or-differently gendered after the fact, but it doesn't appear to be a primary criterion for evaluating initial attraction to others. Some nontrivial portion of my attraction just doesn't invoke gender at all, though I'm neither blind to it nor disinterested in it. At this point I have no social hangups about pursuing a partner of any gender; I also don't seem to have any inbuilt limits on how many partners I can feel for; only time and resource constraints seem to affect the size of my concurrent dating pool.

Odd quirk: I can't see stereograms, and am unaffected by some optical illusions. Despite this, I am very easily hypnotised, and quite susceptible to mind-altering substances.

Very hedonic, very intensely affected by my emotions except when there's a crisis (I can be overwhelmed with ennui, sadness, anxiety or frustration; it impairs my self-control but not reflectivity, which leads to frequent embarrassment) but seem to transform into a very rational, reflective, and controlled person when disaster strikes. It also kicks in when others are very emotional.

Nothing too exciting.

The easiest one is: sexually attracted to the two most popular genders. (Possibly to others as well; I don't know.)

In my twenties, I was involved in some lexical priming studies in which I seemed to be a radical outlier in terms of how long secondary meanings of words stayed activated as I processed a sentence... I was several sigmas out on the right-side tail of the results I saw. There's a pretty obvious just-so story to be told about the relationship between that and the ability to notice alternative interpretations of an utterance, which is something I'm unusually good at in my cohort.

I suffered pretty severe brain damage a few years ago and recovered from it... fully, as far as I can tell.

The last thing I can remember having the "Oh, other people do this too?" experience about was the photic sneeze reflex, which according to wikipedia is actually pretty common.

This isn't really what the post asked about per se, but I'm just curious how common this is.... I occasionally have dreams that are not from my own perspective. I don't mean simply that I'm in some other place or time, but that I'm clearly not me in the dream, to the extent of sometimes being a different age or, occasionally, female. I've had dreams where the 1st-person perspective actually switches mid-dream. This even includessome occasions when this occurs because the first me (or not-me) has been killed.

Anybody else have that?

I think in far mode more than average.

I probably share this with many people, it's just that I haven't come into direct contact with anyone who shares this. I'm extremely right-brained. I'm an actor. I'm slightly introverted, but I do pretty well with people, I struggle in math and science.

Yet I want to be a scientist. Which is a fairly left-brained aspiration, I think. Especially the heavier sciences, like physics. I don't know if that's a realistic goal.

And that isn't really unusual, my mind is higly regular. It's just that I'm using my brain for things it's not as capable of as other people... This is beginning to sound like a disadvantage. But being right-brained isn't all bad. Coming up with creative ideas is nice and fun. :]

I'm not sure if this is what you are looking for, because it is a developed bias as opposed to something congenital in my cognitive architecture, but...

When I was a child, I used to receive a lot of hand-me-down clothing from from a relative. Their family was better off than mine, but the age difference was just enough that their fairly-expensive clothing was suffiiciently out of style and a source of teasing for me through much of my childhood. Consequently, I have a bias against used goods. For example, I'd much rather buy a new Honda or Ford than a used Mercedes of equivalent value. The used luxury good would have to be A LOT more valuable than the new standard good before overcoming this preference.

Perhaps a separate discussion thread on idiosyncratic biases would be useful?

I experience something that may be perfectly normal, but I've often wondered if anyone else has it. When I imagine myself or someone else getting hurt, for example when reading about some accident, I often feel a strange, tingling sensation in my skin, especially the insides of my legs, usually starting at the thighs and going down farther if the sensation is stronger.

I do not know whether this is atypical. At the very least, I have never encountered anyone talking about it. However, my visual experience is almost always similar to, but less vibrant than, a monitor being degaussed.

I always assumed (and still do this) that people do all sorts of things on purpose, having thought about what they do and why they do it. So I'm kinda paranoid. May be a mind projection fallacy, may be not.

I experience ASMR, but it's only ever been triggered by listening to, or rarely by thinking about, certain songs. None of the ASMR inducing videos people put on Youtube worked for me even remotely. I do feel a somewhat pleasant numb feeling in my throat sometimes though, which seems to get triggered by the same things that trigger most people's ASMR, like soft voices. Never heard of anyone else who experiences that one.

I also sometimes can feel a weird feeling on the bottom of my foot if I rub the bottom of the opposite foot against a hard surface, like the corner of my subwoofer.