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 can visualize whenever I want, but I have the same fuzziness issue you describe. It’s like quantum mechanics, a detail only resolves when I specifically measure it, and it’s in flux as I interrogate other details. My dreams are also like this, and all my senses are poor and low resolution, yet I don’t notice until I’ve awoken.
If I needed to somewhat accurately visualize something, I’d remember details of it in like a list form and reconstruct an image following that. Usually I don’t have enough details memorized/given and I have to much freedom in the recreation, leading to inaccuracies. At least I’ve known for a while that my “memory” is actually reconstruction and so I can’t trust it.
I can remember 100 digits of pi, but I can’t remember my family’s birthdays/anniversaries/whatever and it takes me a moment to remember my own! A calendar is a necessity for me.
Interestingly, I almost always monologue, even now I’m reading this out as I type! If I skim information faster than I can form words, I notice the monologue gives up, but I also am less likely to remember the information or form connections with it. It’s a strange feeling knowing that I’m almost listening to the language of pure information whenever my monologue stops, although the information is usually fuzzier than I would like.
When I was younger, I’d occasionally have hyper detailed dreams. Even though I think seeing the future is most likely BS, those dreams usually ended up being something that gave me massive deja vu months or years after I had them. Or rather, something would happen and I’d remember the dream, like the dream predicted the event. Wasn’t even anything interesting. One was literally just standing in line for lunch, seeing the seasonal decoration that got put up, and thinking that a poster was a different color than it had been in my dream. Can’t explain it, and it’s probably just my bad memory mixing things up.
The reason I mention it is because I almost never dream. And even when I do, it feels shallow and empty. Like you said, poor senses and low resolution.
But that made the rare and unexpectedly rich movie-like dreams all the more striking when I woke up. Most of the time, I simply go to sleep, then wake up as if no time has passed. Kind of makes me hate sleeping, because I feel like I’m just wasting time.
That said, my sleep schedule is all screwed up to. Always has been. My body never wants to stay awake or stay asleep for the same amount of time. One day, I’ll be wired for 20 hours and crash. Other days, I’ll sleep for 12 hours, wake up for 8, then need to sleep again.
Sorry if that’s a bit unrelated. Your sleep comment just made me think of it.
I’m curious if this visualization is like my own. I can very vividly imagine an apple but then the web of thought expands out, and I’m near simultaneously visualizing different colors, shapes, varieties, artistic representations, states of being eaten or degraded, and viewed at different angles, lighting, and settings in rapid succession, so that all the images overlap in a blur of what it is that’s meant by apple.
No, I just don’t get much detail. Perhaps a related phenomenon: in dreams I really struggle to run, like I’m running through a viscous fluid. I think I just can’t simulate my senses well.