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?
Man, you’re describing me. I don’t have a lot to offer other than to say you’re not alone.
My memory is garbage, luckily I’m in software development, so I can live and die by search engines, digital notes, and calendar notifications.
I definitely have to “sketch” things out or pseudo-code ideas or do something to get it “in front” of me so I can organize it. I really can’t do it mentally.
My wife is befuddled by my inability to visualize. She asks me to describe people I’ve just met and the best I can do is, “couple arms, a couple legs, some fingers…”
Anyway…happy to answer other questions if needed, but like I said, you’re not alone.
I was having a networking issue, and found a decent solution on stackoverflow. After fixing my problem, I went back to say thanks, and added a couple other tidbits I found. Only after that I realized the original solution was also mine, posted a couple years earlier.
Oh man, my last job was in IT and I’ve been trying to get back into it. I can throw together a decent script with some Google-fu, but anything longer than a hundred lines and I start to forget how everything interconnects and what supposed to be doing what. I keep having to relearn things that I haven’t used in a couple of weeks. How do you handle the complex nature of the beast? I just worked as a generalist, so luckily I didn’t need to do super complex tasks.
Depending on the code, I have a hard time following things longer than a couple hundred lines. I didn’t know if that’s typical, though spaghetti code is certainly common. I do push harder than many people to factor out helpers, but ultimately it leads to cleaner, more testable code.