I have a heavy internal monologue and do almost all thinking that way. I notice that my thoughts are fully formed prior to myself “hearing” the sentence, but that I have difficultly progressing onto the next thought until I “say” the first sentence to myself. It’s like I have a mental log which can hold one sentence at a time, saying it to myself gets rid of that sentence and fills it in with the next. Then I proceed to say the next.
I have almost no ability to imagine images. I have some ability to imagine motion, but no real ability to imagine colors or textures. I can imagine sounds, particularly my internal monologue, and find it difficult or impossible to imagine sounds that I could not attempt to create with my voice. Doing scientism’s test of putting my tongue on the top of my mouth at first seemed to impair my ability to make imagine some sounds but with small effort or practice I find essentially no loss of ability. I can imagine feelings or textures better than images but not as clearly as sounds. If you were to ask me to imagine a cow, the best I could do would be to imagine tracing my hands around the cow and sort of “explore” its shape that way. It’s very much a local phenomenon in the sense that I only feel a small region as if my hand were feeling it. I have difficulty imagining such feelings outside of a perhaps 1 meter diameter sphere in front of my face and extreme difficultly in imagining a feeling as occurring beyond about 10 meters.
I have poor sense of location and relative position. I tend to get confused in buildings, even if I have been in them before. Just the other month I entered a room from an unusual angle, thought I knew which angle I was entering but was wrong and spent upwards of 20 seconds confusedly thinking that the room had been drastically changed before realizing that the door I was looking for was a couple feet to my right. I had entered that way once before and had been in the room dozens of times before. I cannot navigate my way back if I have taken a car ride while someone else is driving. If I drove, there is still a moderate chance that I will mess up on the way back. I remember driving directions entirely as a “turn left here, then right there” sequence, not as a route in 2 dimensional space. However, I perform very well on tests of ability to mentally rotate objects.
I have difficultly discerning music notes, sometimes even in the apparently trivial way of saying “the second note is higher than the first note”. I played an instrument for 6 years, though I was never good at it. I was incapable of tuning to any accuracy by trying to match a given note.
As for the Feynman article, I usually count verbally to myself. In response to this article, I learned to count (though I do not actually use this in any real cases) by visually imagining putting “dots” down in regular patterns, particularly in a 3x3 grid followed by a 3x3 grid of 3x3 grid, etc. to let my count up to at least 81 reliably (mental math required to convert that to decimal...). I am able to do this while reading aloud, as Feynman had hoped to develop a tactile method of counting. I imagine that using something like this toy would let you easily develop a tactile counting system (I can do this, but only with moving my fingers in the patterns that the game requires, and cannot just imagine doing them while reading aloud).
I have a heavy internal monologue and do almost all thinking that way. I notice that my thoughts are fully formed prior to myself “hearing” the sentence, but that I have difficultly progressing onto the next thought until I “say” the first sentence to myself. It’s like I have a mental log which can hold one sentence at a time, saying it to myself gets rid of that sentence and fills it in with the next. Then I proceed to say the next.
I have almost no ability to imagine images. I have some ability to imagine motion, but no real ability to imagine colors or textures. I can imagine sounds, particularly my internal monologue, and find it difficult or impossible to imagine sounds that I could not attempt to create with my voice. Doing scientism’s test of putting my tongue on the top of my mouth at first seemed to impair my ability to make imagine some sounds but with small effort or practice I find essentially no loss of ability. I can imagine feelings or textures better than images but not as clearly as sounds. If you were to ask me to imagine a cow, the best I could do would be to imagine tracing my hands around the cow and sort of “explore” its shape that way. It’s very much a local phenomenon in the sense that I only feel a small region as if my hand were feeling it. I have difficulty imagining such feelings outside of a perhaps 1 meter diameter sphere in front of my face and extreme difficultly in imagining a feeling as occurring beyond about 10 meters.
I have poor sense of location and relative position. I tend to get confused in buildings, even if I have been in them before. Just the other month I entered a room from an unusual angle, thought I knew which angle I was entering but was wrong and spent upwards of 20 seconds confusedly thinking that the room had been drastically changed before realizing that the door I was looking for was a couple feet to my right. I had entered that way once before and had been in the room dozens of times before. I cannot navigate my way back if I have taken a car ride while someone else is driving. If I drove, there is still a moderate chance that I will mess up on the way back. I remember driving directions entirely as a “turn left here, then right there” sequence, not as a route in 2 dimensional space. However, I perform very well on tests of ability to mentally rotate objects.
I have difficultly discerning music notes, sometimes even in the apparently trivial way of saying “the second note is higher than the first note”. I played an instrument for 6 years, though I was never good at it. I was incapable of tuning to any accuracy by trying to match a given note.
As for the Feynman article, I usually count verbally to myself. In response to this article, I learned to count (though I do not actually use this in any real cases) by visually imagining putting “dots” down in regular patterns, particularly in a 3x3 grid followed by a 3x3 grid of 3x3 grid, etc. to let my count up to at least 81 reliably (mental math required to convert that to decimal...). I am able to do this while reading aloud, as Feynman had hoped to develop a tactile method of counting. I imagine that using something like this toy would let you easily develop a tactile counting system (I can do this, but only with moving my fingers in the patterns that the game requires, and cannot just imagine doing them while reading aloud).