Mine is that at my age (barely made it into Gen Z on the old end) I just found out today that a Bo Weevil is an insect (beetle) and not some kind of mole or similar rodent.
It’s, uh, boll. Boll weevil. So you learned two things!
While we’re on animals, every time I hear the word mongoose I picture some kind of platypus-like creature. Like, a half goose, half weasel or something. And that’s not what it is at all.
I thought everyone had an internal monologue, now I’m seeing that’s not the case, I’m still processing it.
Speaking of brains, my girlfriend claims that when she imagines something in her head, she sees a detailed image in front of her, as real as real life. Meanwhile thoughts in my head are just concepts and words. I mean I can imagine what something looks like, but it’s an abstract of the basic concept of the thing, not a detailed image in my mind. It takes a strong psychedelic for me to be able to picture something in my head with detail, but according to her apparently I’m the weird one.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
My partner has Aphantasia. Brains are strange! She cannot visualize in her mind which makes it very challenging to do certain tasks and many things she does are based on muscle memory. Also interestingly when a song gets stuck in her head it is like she is making all of the sounds with her inner voice. For me, I can hear the song like there is a recording playing in my head.
I don’t think I have that because I recall music the same way. Usually it’s just the chorus or a verse playing on loop, though, and the actual song never sounds exactly how I remember it.
You can’t picture anything in your mind’s eye? It’s not seeing for real but imagining you are looking at something. Like a memory. When you say abstract of the thing you just think of the words associated with it or along those lines?
No I can picture things in my head, just not as a vivid image. Images in my mind are vague and detail-less. Like dreams. Mostly I remember the emotions associated with the memory, not what my surroundings looked like at the time.
FWIW I have ADHD, so asking me to remember anything with any sort of detail is already a challenge enough as-is.
You mean like imagining a voice speak out your thoughts? Thoughts are so much faster than speech, I feel like having to speak out all your thoughts would slow things down significantly.
The best tip I learned about reading faster is to stop narrating the words in your head, which puts a hard limit on your reading speed.
I like the reading tip! I think not many people are aware of it.
My thoughts use meaning, instead a specific words.
The whole interpreting my thoughts as natural language often takes longer than coming up with the tought itself.
This results in:
- I often use the intersection of the languages I, and the people I speak with know.
- When it’s a topic I’m knowledgeable about, I often talk too fast and people find it hard to follow me.
- I draw many associations and comprehending the larger picture is easy. Yet I often miss the point in the smaller picture.
I thought rabbits and hares were the same species but just gendered like cow and bull
The way we use our brain. I thought that everybody’s brain was used similarly to hire I use mine. But I’m fact everybody did it differently.
For instance, some people use more of their visual cortex to do maths, and assign colors to different numbers. For some maths takes place more in the language part, or timekeeping part.
Richard Feynman did some experimenting with this: https://youtu.be/lr8sVailoLw ( from 2.08)
But it makes sense, in school nobody tells you how to use your brain, they just give assignments and look at the outcome, also you don’t really control how your brain works, you can train it to do some things more efficient, but you can’t learn to do maths in your visual cortex.
I recently saw a video of a girl being able to spell words backwards really fast and the way it was described is that she just saw the text of the word in her mind and just read the letters backwards. That is so fascinating to me because that is just so so far from how my brain works, I don’t see shit.
That sounds like aphantasia.
Until maybe 10 years ago, I thought that was some exceptionally rare condition, and that I’d be instantly able to tell who had that by how they acted because that person would be so weird or different than everyone else.
Turns out lots of people have it, including my mother.
It was so weird to me, because I have an inner monologue and it’s pretty much always going. And I can “hear” it inside my mind. I can visualize anything I can think about, even watch “movies” with a “soundtrack” in my own mind. It’s so omnipresent in my life, and that’s just not how everyone’s brain can work.
And of course, people who don’t have that in their mind are no less intelligent or anything. Maybe it’s easier for them to focus than it is for me! Lol
But when I first heard about it, I wondered things like, “How can they read?” or “How can they know what something looks like from a description, or how can they understand how something would be moved in a 3D space without actually moving it?” Lol
I do have an inner monologue and when I try to visualise something the closest thing I can get is my inner monologue describing the features of the thing I’m trying to see. But no picture appears. It’s like my brain only saves the concepts of things, like an apple is round, red, has a little brown stem etc.
