Do you have any habits so ingrained you've never talked about them with anyone?

In My Humble Opinion
161

Ooh, I have a similar one to these. Every time I’m reading something on the Web (like, for instance, the SDMB), I’m constantly scrolling up and down with the direction arrows, always twice up real fast, then twice down real fast, then twice up real fast, etc. For some reason, it helps me read faster. Between doing that and keeping that damn ball bouncing around in my head, it’s a wonder I have any room left for reading comprehension.

Oh, and there’s another habit I’m fairly sure I haven’t seen anyone mention. It’s actually not a habit of my very own. It’s a habit of a friend of mine’s. Since I have about as much chance of converting him to the SDMB as I have of shoving a bus up my urethra (he’s a computer-illiterate luddite), I’ll just have to 'fess up on his behalf. This is truly a weird one. Every time he reads a book (he is a voracious reader), he’ll rip the corners of the pages off, roll them into little balls, put them in his mouth, nibble them to mush with his front teeth, then swallow them. It seems that the amount of book he eats is directly proportionate to how exciting he finds its contents. Most of his books only have the corners tastefully nibbled, but I saw his copy of Iain M. Banks’s “The Player of Games” the other day and I could literally turn the book upside down and see how exciting each part of the book was, based on the indentation his voracious appetite had made in the bottom margins of the pages. When asked, he explained that he’ll rip the bottom margin all the way off if he’s excited enough, and if he’s re-reading the book it’s possible he will go into the side margin as well, but even though this is an almost completely unconscious activity, he never rips into the text. He always manages to just skirt the edge of it. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who devours books in an absolutely literal sense, and it still amazes me every time I see him do it.

162

OK… I’m also a newbie, but since you’ve admitted so much to me, I feel, as we are friends, I can admit something to you.

When forced to use a public restroom (i’d much prefer to hold on 'till I get home… and have developed a rather unique and possibly unhealthy bladder capacity as a consequence), I don’t like to use the urinal (unless I am under the influence of alcohol, in which case holding on 'till I get home is out of the question), but would rather queue for the cubicle, and then I can only go if I have counted either all the letters in any sign visible, or have counted the wall tiles up to 40. Oh, and I would never, never use a public toilet for a “number 2”

163

I get so many of these thing people have spoken about!

I have this thing about counting. I suffer from insomnia terribly, but I always felt really bad about counting sheep, cos I could only ever imagine one sheep, and I felt sorry for the poor little thing having to jump backwards and forwards over the fence for hours. So I got rid of the sheep altogether and just counted.
I frequently find myself counting for no reason.

If I ever think in depth about how to say something to someone, eg - how to phrase it, I see myself forming the words as though I were typing on a big keyboard floating in front of me.

I have my own language that I speak in my head, and occasionally this pops into general conversation with other people, so much so that my close friends now understand what I am saying and will respond in English to me.

I have to count the numbers of each letter in signs, and I do loads of other strange things with letters and words.

I frequently try and invent a game I can play on my own in my head, like mental solitaire, but I keep cheating!

I also see pictures and patterns in everything! Even blank pieces of paper.

:wink:
For those of you that see days of the week, sounds, etc in colours, or taste you may be Synaesthetic - something which I experience very mildly.

:slight_smile:

164

I already confessed quite a few weird habits… like, I have to grip door handles exactly the right way, and sometimes I´ll take a cup and then put it back because it doesn´t feel right and take another one, otherwise I´m not happy drinking my tea - uh, this sounds scary.

Well, it´s worse. I realized today… When I´m in the interpreting booth*, I only feel comfortable when I´m sitting on the left side. Otherwise it just doesn´t feel right. Okay, sure I can interpret sitting on the right side, but…if I have the choice, I´ll always pick the left. My fellow students are used to it, but wait till I get to work in real life - this is going to be hard to explain.

Come to think of it, in a car, bus or train, I´ll always sit with my right shoulder to the wall. Preferably facing backwards (well, you can only do that on the train). I´d say I have to feel I´m protected on one side, but isn´t it weird it´s normally the right, but the left side when I´m interpreting?
Incidentally, they say the most common occupational disease among simultaneous interpreters is schizophrenia, so I guess I should be happy… this is all pretty harmless :slight_smile:

*(FYI: you know, those booths you normally don´t see, but you might catch a glimpse of them in a full view of the UN General Assembly or some conference… anyway, there´s two seats+ two mics in them, because you have to take 20-30 minute turns in simultaneous interpreting.)

165

Foonf, your friend is a bibliophage in the most literal sense of the word. (biblio: book, phagos: eating, both Classical Greek) :slight_smile:

I do the car runner thing, too, and I’m surprised that I’m not the only one. Mine is an Olympic track runner, decked out in his runner’s outfit and a number. He’s a determined SOB with a real talent for the long jump. :slight_smile:

I do strange things with text. I count letters, and try to make even groups of ten. This is bizarre because for the longest time I could not do arithmetic mentally. I later developed a system of visualisation such that I can now see the letters in words and phrases breaking into component groups of twos and threes and ones (a word with an even number of letters breaks in half, a word with an odd number breaks up around single central letter) that I can then add. I will count spaces, punctuation, and end-of-line `nulls’ (a concept borrowed from C where every string is an array of character values terminated by a character with the value zero, represented by ‘\0’ in code) until I reach an even multiple of ten.

Twenty is a good number to reach, because I can represent it physically by clenching all my fingers and toes. (Yea, I’m really bizarre. ;)) I represent 24 by tensing my ankles and wrists along with clenching my fingers and toes. I can clench less to represent lower numbers: Eleven is all my fingers plus tensing my neck muscles. There’s a nice symmetry in odd numbers, because I can break them around a single unit. Evens I break up around a nonvalue.

Related to my letter-counting is letter-reversing. I try to compose a backwards version of things I’ve read or heard. (I’m a great speller because I can easily visualize written words.) I think this is related to my love of palindromes. “Able was I, ere I saw Elba.” :smiley:

Also tied into my letter counting is my obsessive formation of abbreviations and mega-abbreviations. I turn a phrase into an intialism and then I apply algebraic rules to `collect’ like variables.

Here’s an example:

The phrase “The Original Wheat Thins” becomes “TOWT” and then “T[sup]2[/sup]OW” in my mind. It’s almost automatic now, only requiring minimal conscious effort to form longer abbreviations. Rarely, I will alphabetize mega-abbreviations.

When presented with a numeric value, I will add all of the individual numbers. I will continue this with the results until I reach a one-digit number.

“1776” becomes “21” (six plus one is seven, times three is 21 OR seven plus seven is fourteen, plus six is (ten plus ten) twenty plus one is 21 :)) becomes “3”. Utterly useless, but I can now add pretty damned well. If only I’d developed this in third grade…

OCD? Yea, I’m familiar with the term. And the symptoms. :wink:

:: Prepares to spray Valium over whole goddamned thread once he counts all those canisters. ::

166

Okay maybe the entire world is disturbed and it’s only in the relative anonymity of a forum are we willing to let it all out.

A few more things that came to me after my first post.

If there is a machine (vacum cleaner) making a steady pitch or a regularly variable pitch sound, I make up melodies which harmonize with the sound.

I also get livid if a radio song is too quiet and is in dis-harmony with machine noise. It either must be cranked up to drown out the other sound or off, otherwise I start rummaging around for my gun. Yeah I get that upset about it.

I will sometimes lie in bed and put myself to sleep starting with my toes and working upwards, I don’t move on until the body part actually feels asleep.

When I was a kid I used to have this fantasy in bed,
NO NOT THAT ONE,
I would lie down on the floor and imagine I was without home or family and all alone outside in winter trying to fall asleep and all I had to cover myself with was an undershirt. so I would shiver on the floor undressed except for my underwear and this undershirt draped over me to keep me warm.

This would go on for a few minutes then I would imagine that the next day while I was awake I found a pillow-case, so I would imagine the next night with the pillow case and undershirt,

Then I would find a pillow, then a matress, (here I would move onto the bed) and so on, pausing for a few minutes with each new find to imagine a night with just these items and trying to determine how to arrange them for maximum comfort and warmth.

By the time I was done I was comfortably tucked into bed where I would fall asleep content in what I had.

BTW are there any shrinks reading this thread and imagining all the money they could be making.

167

I think all Doper shrinks have decided we’re beyond therapy.

:smiley:

168

(oldbat pokes her head out from the rafters)

Hi, all! I’m oldbat, M.D., Board Certified in Psychiatry. Great thread!

Anybody here experiencing severe emotional pain on a daily basis related to these phenomena? Enough to impair your work, love or play? Enough to cut you off from the social norms so that, for example, you keep getting beaten up or arrested on a regular basis? If so, scoot your little hindquarters to the nearest good psychiatrist or neurologist. If not, the stuff we’re describing is not, NOT pathology. Like masturbation or nose-picking, it’s something that most folks will either admit or lie about, depending on their comfort level.

What we have here is a host of non-dominant hemisphere functions not directly related to the task at hand. Music, rhythm, math, words as sound or form rather than as communicators, spacial perception, perspective… when the non-dominant cortex is alert but not sufficiently challenged or stimulated, it plays little games. I certainly have some. I have the impression it’s pretty much ubiquitous. (normal?? I have no idea what that means in this context. Not something I ever worry about.)

Strictly speaking, the narration and the explanation features are bringing in dominant-hemisphere functions as well. But it still has a basically playful flavor about the whole process.

Disclaimer 1: similar phenomena can be symptoms of some types of seizure, and if they get a lot more frequent or disruptive I would strongly urge an immediate and competent medical workup.

Disclaimer 2: This a general consideration of the whole experience, NOT a diagnosis or proposed treatment plan for any individual case.

(here endeth the medical-school-style lecture. No tuition. I hope I’ve said something interesting, relevant, or at least reassuring.)

(oldbat subsides into the rafters again in search of sleep) Back tomorrow, probably. Good night!

169

Well, I tap all five fingers on a surface. Then I tap the middle three, and then I tap the middle finger.
And I tap my teeth to songs that I am singing in my head…real songs that I have running through my mind.

170

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I’ll think of a name for each letter of the alphabet. There’s always a different category. For instance, sometimes I’ll think of a different name for boys, or for girls; or of people I know; or of famous people; or names I would consider naming my children; or fruits, or vegetables, or…you get the idea. I’ve done this for as long as I can remember.

When I was little, I, too, had a car runner. Mine looked like the alien from Close Encounters. I have no idea why. He was extremely quick, and very agile. Hmm. Haven’t thought about that for a while.

171

Glad to see this thread is going strong. Don’t think we’re gonna run out of weirdos fessing up soon…

Well i have this other quick, I also like shredding paper. Doesn’t have to be the freshly-read newspaper, just any paper. I used to do it when I was little, not that I remember but my mother told me about it. She would stick me in front of a pile of newspaper and I’d sit there quietly shredding the paper and listening to the sound of the ripping paper.
Then for a long while in my teens I didn’t shred paper, but now my habit is back. I recently acquired 2 little bunnies, so I have legit reason to shred paper to make their litter. Brilliant! I challenge myself to separate the layers of cardboard and peel off wafer-thin sheets.
(yes i so need a social life…)

172

Good god almighty. I have a car runner, too–but he’s like Spiderman, and was never allowed to touch the ground. He didn’t have webs or anything, but could jump incredible distances.
I count stairs, too–but that’s more of a habit from helping so many people move furnitire. I don’t like tripping on one extra stair when I think I’m at the top.
Back in high school I used to think finding 11:11:11 on my watch every day was a good luck charm. It was always in study hall, just before lunch.
That’s just about it, I think.

173

Incredible <shaking head>
I did this when I was a kid. I held a mega-blade 40 or 50 feet long extending out from the car window, chopping everything exactly as you describe. But then I got to feel guilty about chopping down all those trees, and quit it.

When I was a kid I also noticed that the beams from streetlamps made an optical effect on the windshield at night; they seemed to be stabbing spears, spears of light, down at the car. But no matter how many times the hostile streetlamp army threw spears at us, they always bounced off the windshield harmlessly. Yay! We were invulnerable! Somehow I never got tired of this monotonous repetition.

174

Whew. This is quite a thread.

–I have a car runner too. He often does hand springs and flips as he runs along, but he never leaves the ground.

–I do the same thing Derleth does: I add up numbers to see if they’re divisible by three. It’s a compulsion. It’s all about threes. I also prefer odd numbers to even numbers and prime numbers to composite numbers. They seem “cleaner” to me, as if the composite numbers are sullied by their divisibility. I really don’t like even numbers.

–I try to form words out of the letters on license plates; the first letter on the plate HAS to be the first letter of the word; the rest can be anywhere in the word as long as they remain in the order they are in on the license plate.

–There are knots in the grain of the wood in various rooms of my parent’s house: one is an owl, one is an old woman, one is a lion, to name a few. I have seen patterns in wood grains that formed pictures that have actually scared me. I do this with tiles too, usually picturing lion’s faces.

–Sometimes, esp. when I’m driving, I’ll think about a certain word really hard, and suddenly, that word sounds alien and absurd. I sometime even laugh out loud (thank god I’m alone when I do it). I do this with names a lot too.

–I sometimes obsessively search for split ends in my hair, and then I bite them off or, if I have access to a scissors, I cut them off. I have been known to zone out and do this for hours, usually if I am really bored.

–Whenever someone touches his face while talking to me, I always wonder if they’re doing that b/c of something on my face, namely, a pimple or blemish.

–All of my cats have several nicknames: Harley=Harlaby, Mr. Lee, Moopoo Loopoo, Schmoopie, Harley Barley Pudding Pie; you get the idea. Utterly nonsensical and actually a bit embarrassing. I don’t even know where some of these come from, as they are unrelated to the actual name.

–I pull the skin out from under my thumb nails when it gets loose. Sometimes this hurts, but often it feels really good to get the thick skin out.

–Sometimes, I think about randomly punching people in the face. I would NEVER do it–I’ve never hit anyone in anger-- but I think about it. I also think about jumping off bridges when I walk across them, and as a kid I was paranoid that, when we drove over a bridge, we’d get sucked out the windows, so I’d close them all.

–I will never, ever wear brown shoes with black pants or skirts, nor black shoes with brown pants or skirts. I am not a fashion maven at all, but I am a bit repelled when other people violate this rule.

–I can do this thing with my second toe on both feet where I can curl it up and then let it go and it makes a snapping sound. I can do it so loudly that people can hear it even when I’m wearing shoes. Sometimes I do it without realizing it, but sometimes I do it just to mess with people.

–When I step on a crack, my foot feels “warm” so I have to make the other foot “warm” by stepping on a crack too. I used to be much worse about this when I was a kid.

175

I’ve got one of those car runner people. My dudes really cool and whenever he jumps does a couple of flips.And i pretend to have races with other cars willing the driver to beat a car to a certain point. And before that i also had one of those mega blades, i remember stopping coz i thought i would cause an accient. Also i am always counting my steps stopping when i realise i start doing it out loud. And I always stare at the ground thinking of absolute nuthin. I dont have a clue why i do this. I also fantasise bout my teahcers bein killed but only when they have told me off or sumfing.

176

Me too. Not so much any more. Ok, maybe a little. :wink:

I don’t have a “car runner.” On the contrary, I get to confess to an odd habit that no one else has yet mentioned. Given how many people identified with the car runner, though, I’ll be surprised if somebody else doesn’t respond with a “me too.”

When I’m sitting on the toilet taking a dump, I stand my feet on tiptoe.

Seriously. I cannot break this habit. I became aware of it a year or so ago, and in the last two months have been consciously trying to break it. Mostly I forget until I’m almost done, but when I do realize it, and try to put my feet flat on the floor, I find that my, uh, ability to poop ceases temporarily. With my feet flat, I can slowly psych myself back into pooping, but I feel the muscles in my shins twitching with the desire to move. And if I totally stop paying attention to my feet they leap back up into tiptoe.

Tell me that isn’t weird.

177

Am I the only one who’s been reading this thread thinking “Oh, please, let me remain unique”? And, so far, I have, barely…

(1) On car trips, I look out the window with one eye open and watch the poles and stuff go by. And I also concentrate on a particular spot/smudge on the window. Because I only have one eye open, if I switch eyes, I can make the smudge jump either ahead or backwards with respect to the background. I then attempt, by judicious eye-swapping, to keep the smudge from ever actually going through a pole, the edge of a building, or any other obstacle. Rather, it has to jump over all such obstacles. (This is very similar to what Duct Tape King does, but it sounds like he does it by moving his eyes or ducking his head, whereas I keep staring in the same direction, keep my head still, and just switch which eye is open.)

When there’s a wide open space with no poles, I can open both of my eyes for a while, resulting in there being two little spots for a while. It’s like a breather out in the open between the high stress areas…
(2) Somewhat similarly, when reading and scrolling down a file on a computer (often an SDMB thread), if I’m using the little wheel on the mouse, I always try to position the cursor so that as the wheel turns a click and the page jumps up a bit, the cursor always is either in a block of text or in open space, never on a boundary
(3) Sometimes when I’m listening to music, I’ll finger along to it with bassoon fingerings. But that’s pretty normal and understandable (among people who played the bassoon). More obsessive is that sometimes I’ll finger along with it using the fingers of my left hand, with the following restrictions:
(a) my fingers are sorted from lowest (pinky) to highest (thumb)
(b) if the next note in a song is higher than the previous note, I must move to a higher finger, and vice versa
(c) When the music is going higher, and then hits it’s highest note and goes lower, the highest note always has to be on the thumb. And vice versa with the pinky
(d) The sequence of fingers from each occurrence of thumb to pinky or back must always be symmetrical around the middle finger. So a string of 4 increasing notes must always be pinky ring pointer thumb.

So, numbering the fingers for easy communication, Mary Had a Little Lamb would look like this:
531355511135542135555511531

This basically requires knowing the music well enough to predict ahead of time how many notes higher the music is going to go before it starts going down again. If there are three rising notes, it has to be 1 3 5. If there are 4, though, it has to be 1 2 4 5. This is particularly tricky when a phrase ends with a rising string of three notes, but then the next musical phrase goes even higher from there.

A further wrinkle is that some songs have more than 5 notes in a row rising or falling in pitch. Joy To The World, for instance, begins with 8 notes all descending. This can be managed by adding intermediate notes that require two fingers simultaneously. So you get note 1.5 by pressing finger 1 and finger 2 simultaneously. So Joy To The World begins:
5 54 4 43 32 2 21 1 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 5 4 43 32 32 2 1 5 5 4 43 32 32 2 1 1 1 1 1 1 3 5 4 2 1 1 1 1 3 5 4 2 1 5 4 3 2 1 5 4 2 1

(I can’t believe I typed that all out… and anyone who fingered along, I respect you :slight_smile: )
(4) You know how the word “passerby” pluralizes to “passersby” and “attorney general” to “attorneys general”? Well, I sometimes mentally pluralize things like that even when they shouldn’t so pluralize. For instance, I’ll mentally replace then line “You other brothers can’t deny” from Baby Got Back with “You others brother can’t deny”.

(5) When I’m looking at a large repeating pattern, most commonly the holes in the ceiling tiles, I’ll cross my eyes and view the pattern in “magic eye” fashion, screwing up my depth perception

(6) Vaguely similar to people who imagine their actions being viewed by someone else inside their body, I’ll sometimes wonder what other people could think if they could see my skeleton right now, but not any other part of my body, nor my surroundings. Could they quickly deduce that I was showering, or watching TV, or playing a board game, from just the positions of my bones? Also, if I’m going somewhere to meet people, I’ll imagine that they have a little maxthevool-sensing device that gives them the precise heading and distance to me… so usually the distance will be decreasing, but sometimes due to the layouts of freeways or whatever, I’ll go right past them for a while before turning around…

178

Oh! I have one!

When I enter a room or a space, I mentally extend the side of any rectangular objects I see. This forms a network of interescting lines throughout the room, none of which I allow myself to step on. Sometimes it gets rather complicated.

(Actually, I don’t always do this, but very often.)

179

A slightly aggressive variation on the car-runner…
If I’m a passenger in a car, I imagine there are huge knife-blades, about 40 feet long, attached to the sides, so that everything in the car’s path (telegraph poles, people, trees, other vehicles) are scythed through. This is a compulsive habit - I can’t stop myself doing it.
Used to think it was uniquely bizarre until a few years ago I read about someone with exactly the same thing…

180

My god car-runners are popular.

Heh. Maybe we could host an All-Dope Car-Runner Championship. Rough terrain, plenty of oddly-laid-out towns, bridges, and other obstructions. Not to mention having to dodge mega-blades.

And if the world doesn’t think the SDMB’s full of looneys after that, well, the world can lick my car-runner’s balls!