Hey all,
Just curious about something. I’m in my 30s and it took me until my early to mid 20s to realize that the cartoon thought bubbles or echoy voiceover thinking in shows and movies was kind of a real thing.
I almost never can visualize, and when I do it’s not something I can control. I can’t just summon the image of an apple in my head, but apparently everyone else around me can. Even when I can visualize, it’s like a thin mist that’s hard to pinpoint details and easily blown away.
Similarly, I almost never have an internal monologue. The times I do are short-lived and conversational, like “Wow, you should really wake up, it’s past noon”. or something.
However, I’m pretty good at playing songs in my head and quietly jamming out to sounds that don’t exist.
When I have a puzzle or something I need to think about, my subconscious handles it and just tells me the answer most of the time, without me having to do anything but look at the problem and wait. That’s super helpful for most day-to-day stuff, and people think I’m smart. But it means I’m terrible at doing math in my head, and can’t think through any kind of complicated issue in my head.
It also doesn’t help that my short term and long term memory are both terrible. Any memories older than a couple of weeks are just gone, or they are emotionless fuzzy snapshots with no before or after. If I know something, it comes to mind without effort. If I don’t know something, it’s probably just gone forever unless I have some kind of visual reminder and get lucky.
Basically, I can’t do anything in my head. I have to write it down, or have some other way to externalize the information in order to go over it. This make people think I’m stupid.
Add in the classic “bad at social-anything” and every interaction feels like a disaster.
And don’t get me started on how often I forget what I’m doing or how badly I fail to multitask. Makes finding a job I can live on very hard, and the one time I had a decent job, I felt like I constantly had to prove myself. I was always making seemingly basic mistakes and letting everyone down.
Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I wanted to give kind of an overview of how my head works. I was wondering what kinds of brains everyone else is dealing with.
Does anyone else deal with things like visualization, or poor memory, or anything like that? How do you cope with the day-to-day?
I suppose I’m on the opposite side of visualization spectrum. I can easily conjure images so realistic and detailed that they pass for the real thing. I can also add texture, smells, temperature, sound, etc. but I can’t fake weight or pure white color which for some reason always turns out somewhat grey or beige.
I don’t think much in words however, most of my thoughts are in images and sensations. Which does make verbal communication somewhat challenging at times.
Sometimes the realism of visualization worries me somewhat. Many mental processes have a tendency to get a bit out of conscious control, and it would be quite troublesome to no longer know which of the things I see are actually real. On the plus side, I can visualize paintings on my walls, without actually buying any! I like having no decorations in my home, which seems to confuse people. Perhaps I should start comparing it to a blank canvas…
That’s amazing!