I’m terrible with names when I meet new people, but that’s probably because I have no short-term memory. I know umpty-billion useless trivia-bits, but if you say something to me and refer to that conversation 20 minutes later, there’s a good chance I won’t remember it at all.
Freaking miserable, I accidentaly hit the button before I was able to start editing my post, or even finishing it.
Anyway…
skeptic_ev, Shepherdless, Rabid_Squirrel, are the three of you women? Not to be sexist, but I remember reading that women tend to be a lot worse with spatial awareness than men are. And also that most men tend to remember directions by street names and such things, whereas it’s more common for women to remember through landmarks and other seen things.
Female reporting here, spatial awareness is one of my biggest strengths. I’m also really good with maps and directions, and have even found my way successfully on first trips to strange cities sans map (which is a fortunate thing since Hubby can’t find the mayonaise in the refrigerator, never mind figuring out where we’re going). Words escape me now & then, a trend that I fear will accelerate, but on my clearer days I still feel reasonably coherent.
My real flaw is logic. Logic/algebra/chemistry - I don’t get any of them. I can do story problems out the ass, but reduce it to symbols & I’m totally lost. Actually flunked logic as a philosophy undergrad (before I wisely switched back to the Art department).
My area of intelligence failure is “body intelligence”, or co-ordination, proprioception, etc.
I can do calculus, I never seem to be lost for words, and I have an excellent sense of direction. I can remember names, phone numbers and email addresses with one repetition. I can play a piece of music by ear after hearing it once. I’ve never had a problem with those tests where you have to recognise which comes next or completes the pattern.
I can’t, however, consistantly catch a ball. I walk through a doorway and whack my shoulder against the frame because I think I have given myself enough room to get through, and in fact am incorrect in that assumption. Sometimes I discover my hands aren’t quite where I thought I’d left them. I can fall over nothing at the drop of a hat. I have always been picked last (or left out) for every team I ever tried for.
Body intelligence… that’s something I could really use.
Shepherdless is a hairy manly man. <Grunt>.
I do remember directions by street names rather than landmarks, but I’m clueless with areas, as measured by square feet, acres, and so on. It could be from lack of experience. If I worked in real estate or something I would probably know that 30 ft x 30 ft is a pretty big room (I think?).
My short term memory is bad to the point that people MUST think I am on some type of drug. I have to ask directions several times because by the time someone is on the third thing I forgot what the first direction was. (“lemme write this down…go slowly”). I work in retail, and at times I have to check the receipt when giving change because I will forget while I am getting it out.
I also have problems with simple math problems when put on the spot. I have no problems with complicated math when doing it on my own, but if someone stands in front of me and asks, I will probably go blank.
I also have the problem with remembering simple words. “you know the stuff you write on with the pen like this odd hand motion” “uh, paper?”
I have NO sense of…uh… distance. Someone will tell me to drive a mile or 20 feet or anything and I will have no idea how far to go.
These things are most frustrating, because I consider myself to be an intellegent person…the brain is just not always fully active I suppose.
:mad:
Yes, I’m female. No offense taken at all; I do think that probably more women have trouble with spatial things than men. (YMMV, of course.)
Seeing all these posts has made me feel a bit better, but I realize I forgot some things.
I, too, have the “body intelligence” problem, phraser. I’ve gotten better, though. I hardly ever whack into things anymore, and now I really understand what my exasperated gym teachers were trying to tell me when they said, “Keep your eye on the ball.”
I have no sense of direction (Do the rest of you have magnets in your head or what?), though I am good with maps. I really don’t understand how anyone could have difficulty with map-reading, but I’m sure there are lots of people who have wondered how the heck it is that I can’t tell that my hip and the door frame are trying to occupy the same space.
CM is around just to keep track of changes. Yes it can get in the way of a quick fix but without CM you have a huge mess after you make 20+ quickfixes.
I’m very spatial and have a stong pattern recognition. I can spot that unmarked cop cat from 1/2 a mile just by the way they drive or some small thing that is different from a normal car. If I am guided somewhere once I know the way. I can actually drive from my current home all the way back to where I was born stopping at each and every place I have lived. I can pack very efficiently. There usually isn’t much space left for air when I get done filling a car trunk.
But I only know my name because I’ve been using it for the last 30 years. Don’t ask me the name of someone I havn’t seen in the last 2 years. I’ll recognize them but I probably will only know the first letter of their first name.
And if you send me to the store for 3 or more items I need a list. Sometimes I need a list for 1 item I need from the next room.
Err… I’m a guy dakravel. I should really put that in my location or something 
Nope, my spatial awareness is great, I have no problems drawing maps of traffic routes and I’m been doing technical drawing since 15. It’s just remembering putting the names of the streets to the locations that are the problem.
Spatial awareness is not a problem; those block puzzles are a piece of cake. Sense of direction is not a problem; I’ll sometimes just decide to go to the general area and figure it out from there. Logic is not a problem. Body awareness is not a problem; I can be fairly coordinated and graceful when I’m thinking about it (the benefit of movement training in acting school). Numbers not a problem; I committed my wife’s new cell phone number to memory after hearing it only a couple of times. And when it comes to tinkering, it’s like I have a magical instinct; I can take just about anything apart, figure out how it works, fix it, and put it back together successfully, without a diagram and without any leftover bits. My wife still doubts me, for some reason (“are you sure you can change out the elements in the water heater by yourself? even though you’ve never done it? you just know the general principle? are you sure?”), but I keep doing it.
But I do fall down on some things:
Names. As mentioned above, I can be introduced to somebody, and no matter how much I try to remember, the moment I stop holding the name at the front of my brain, it’s gone. We got a new co-worker in our department whose name I couldn’t remember for weeks. Weirdly, the only way I could commit his name to memory was to memorize his email alias, which is a variation of his name. I have no idea why I could instantly memorize his email name but not his actual name.
Clutter. I’ll give you an example: I’m sitting in the living room with a beverage. I finish the beverage and put the glass or the bottle on the coffee table. Instantly, it vanishes entirely from my universe. If my wife says, “You’re gonna take care of that, right?” and points at it, I can see it again, but if I don’t pick it up immediately, it becomes invisible again. I hate this about me, but it’s true.
Spatial awareness? No sweat. Any time my crowd of friends has to move, it seems I’m the one placed in charge of loading the truck. But everyone knows better than to trust me with getting said truck to the destination. Direction sense is one of the banes of my existence.
“Body intelligence” as described above is another shortcoming for me. In particular, I cannot catch things. In college, my roomies tried to teach me to catch – by randomly throwing things at me. Never did learn to catch, but I eventually learned to block.
On a perhaps related note, even though I have a very good sense of hearing, I find it very difficult to hear words in a noisy environment. Much moreso than most folks, it seems.
I have a really good memory for events and conversations, but I have no clue when it took place. I have to use clues in the memory to deduce the time: “Ok, Josh was there, and he moved away in 96, and it was warm, so it was probably summer…”
I also discovered I’ve got a weird way of organizing people’s names if I’ve only met them a few times. This girl I’d met at the bar a few months ago (although see brain weakness #1, might’ve been longer) showed up there a few days ago and came over to say hi. We had a pleasant conversation, all the time I was thinking “what is her name?!?” I noticed that the only details I could come up with was that it was somewhat short, started with an ‘M’, was unusual, and had something to do with math (“Meta” as it turned out). Why that’s easier than just storing the whole name is a little weird, but probably explains why for the longest time I kept using the wrong name for my friends Bob and Ben. They must’ve both been organized under “starts with ‘B’, short, common”, and since they’re roommates, I usually see them together.
Hey, you’re just like me.
My mind has very little in the way of internal brakes. I take an idea and run with it…and keep running…
I’ve spent hours perfecting the details of inventions that already exist. Really stupid stuff like portable CD players, or blankets. Really. I’ll think something like…
“I’m cold. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had something that wasn’t cold? Like a big warm box. But that’d be hard to walk around in. Maybe make it out of something soft…but it might be hard to manufacture. Maybe it ought to be square. I could go the fabric store and make a prototype. It really wouldn’t be to hard to set up a factory. Ben’s mom knows someone who has a warehouse…”
I can get stuck working out these plans to the very finest details only to figure out that they are unncesarry or just plain stupid. My newest one is a gym without a building so that you can feel good for joining but never have to go. Most embarrasingly, I usually blurt out these ideas to people before I’ve realized their fatal flaws, leading people to doubt my intellegence.
I also say a lot of random stuff during conversations because my mind has managed to run off with some small detail. Yesterday I was talking to some friends and they said something about smell. This lead to me blurting out that they should stock up on vanilla because the price is going up. Of course, I thought this was the most relevent thing in the world to say. Luckly, they are used to that sort of thing and started laughing.
I also have a lot of trouble with math. In my mind, math involves taking a number, performing some voodoo on it, and coming up with another number which you’ll get in trouble for if you don’t get exactly right. I can’t spell at all. I can’t remember names. I mix up letters to the point that I often write whole words, sometimes even sentences backwards. And don’t get me started at all the bruises that cover my body because I can’t actually put it in the right place. Also, when I hear two musical notes, I can’t tell if one is higher or lower than the other one.
However, I can write really well and can knock back an A+ essay for an upper division college class that I havn’t paid attention to in an afternoon. I managed to solve those “world’s hardest” puzzles where they have nine squares of a pattern that only fit together one way in seconds flat. I have a very intuitive sense of direction, and can navigate around strange towns with surprising ease.