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 wish my internal monologue would shut the fuck up. It’s almost always rehearsing arguments. Like for a whole day all I’ll think about is why someone I spoke to in a forum 20 years ago was wrong. I listen to podcasts or loud music to get a break from hearing my thoughts.
I constantly have several streams going at the same time that I cannot control. One is like you said: rehearsing arguments. Another is reviewing recent social interactions trying to make sense of them because, to me, NT and autistic culture are quite different. So, I’m always trying to figure out what an NT meant by something they did and what an NT could presume I meant by something I did. The next stream is a song or drum beat. I am 24/7 playing a song or drum beat in my head. Right now, it’s Pretty Young Thing by MJ. The final and faintest stream is my bodily needs such as hunger, thirst, tired, having to go to the bathroom, etc. This last one can start demanding more attention and disrupting the others if the need is considerable enough. For example, I’m pretty dumb after eating a large meal because the bloating just takes up too much of my attention.
I can relate to some of what you’re describing. A lot of things that I know or solve just happen. I make absolutely no effort and it happens almost instantaneously. It’s extremely fast. However, if I can’t get it that way, I typically have to externalize the whole process, either by writing it down, talking to someone or myself, or acting it out. But, once I practice the information to the point that “feel it”, it turns into that super fast automatic process. People will often say that I’m smart. Even just this week, someone called me a genius. Really, I think I’m pretty dumb. I just have this ability to practice/engage in something long enough that it becomes automatic knowledge that I feel.
Exactly! It’s nice to have my subconscious be so helpful, but trying to think through something without putting it in front of me in some way is damn near impossible. And if someone interrupts me while I’m trying to think, then POOF! It’s all gone.
I feel like an idiot, but other people assume I must be smart because I’m decent with problem solving. I’m really not smart. I’m probably just average, but slightly more self aware of how my own mind works.
It’s such a weird position to be in, right?
I forget if I put this in the original post, and I’m too lazy to check. But do you have trouble with your memory too? Like, I’m okay with recent bullet-point facts about an event, but couldn’t describe what I did yesterday in any real detail.
I can tell you that I ate food in the kitchen and enjoyed it, but I can’t describe the experience of it very well, if at all. In a few days, I may even forget what the food I ate was. It’s already slipping. I know facts like it was hot and had cheese, I stood over the counter and had Dr. Pepper, but I couldn’t paint a picture for you. I couldn’t describe the experience of it very well, because I’d have to make assumptions and try to recreate what it must have been like.
It sucks because that means I’m always recreating the event in mind head in order to try and remember it better, but without the aid of visualization. And apparently that seems a lot like I’m making things up and lying all the time. It sucks so much. And if I tell someone I don’t remember something well enough to talk about it, they also assuming I’m lying. “It was just last week, how do you not remember?”
The more stressed I am, the worse my memory for that time is. And no matter what I do, I’m always the weird suspicious person.
It’s exhausting.
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.
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.
