I can’t do that with text, but I can with music. When I play music from memory, I often picture the page in my head.
I’m very good at scanning for specific words when looking at a page of text. This is really useful when I have questions to answer about a reading I didn’t do.
I can choose which eye is dominant, i.e., which eye determines what I’m really seeing out of, at any time (no, I don’t just close the other eye). It’s an eye trick, but I think it’s a brain thing as well.
I can do this too. What’s even better is that my eyes have slightly different focus - my left eye is a little farsighted, and my left a little nearsighted. If I can’t quite read it with one eye, just switch over!
My mom can look right at the TV during commercial breaks and not notice a single one. Blocks them totally out.
Ditto that for me. I’m braver though, I’ve done away with my alarm clock (okay, so really I just accidentally left it at home when I came back to school this year). I’ve yet to be late for anything though!
My most useful super-cool thing that my brain does is that it lets me get in a zone when I’m studying where I can completely block out distractions around me and just concentrate totally on math. I can usually just sort of feel the problems coming together when I’m in this zone. I’ll pull stuff out of thin air that I wouldn’t normally be able to do. I’m not sure how to describe it more accurately, but if you’ve been there, you know what it feels like.
-Mosquito
I forget the ends of movies.
I don’t know if this is super cool but if I fall asleep listening to heavy metal music I dream about algebra problems, which go to the rythym of the song.
One night I dreamed I was trying to solve a problem but I could not remember the quadratic equation. I woke up and looked up the quadratic equation on the internet.
Then I couldn’t remember the problem I’d been trying to solve.
I remember my daydreams, mostly because I don’t so much daydream as much as I create extremely detailed, elaborate worlds in my mind. Literally, I’ve composed science-fiction and fantasy opuses (opum?) in my mind, characters, worlds, nations, governments, and even languages. I can keep all my characters straight in my mind, too, and it’s almost like watching a movie or something going on in my mind, and I can flick between them liking changing TV channels.
Putting these worlds onto paper is impossibly hard, though, but at least it keeps me amused on my forty-minute commute to work.
Do you know balloo?
Cool thread. I think Podkaynes addition ability is a really neat example of unconscious competence.
I can do some stuff, not sure how unusual they are:
If I concentrate on it, I can stop hiccups.
I can often control my dreams. I will, while sleeping, evaluate a dream for its interestingness, unpleasantness, etc. and then I can choose to wake up or change to a different dream.
-I can tell when a small number of minutes have passed with 2 seconds accuracy.
My brain is impervious to business bullshit. I sit in meetings and listen to the tripe drivel coming out of people’s mouths and summirize it in my head to 3 words or less. Usually the words are “full of shit” or “useless wanker”.
Also, when I’m on car trips, I amuse myself by calculating time to destination when distance signs come up. I play with my average speed and distance and time remaining. I’ll also play back and forth with converting the speed/distance to metric and calculate my fuel consuption based on the values on my car computer. This I also do by converting back and forth from metric.
I get lost easily in sociological or law texts. I have a decent command of English, I think, given it’s my third language, and I’m not stupid (I read Nabokov and Joyce and Umberto Eco) but I simply cannot stop myself from drifting off every couple of sentences or so when faced with a boring and needlessly verbose text to read. It’s the long sentences that get me. (Which wouldn’t be such a huge problem, really, if I weren’t currently doing law at university.)
On the other hand, I do that memory palace thing, as originated by Simonides and popularized by Frances Yates and Hannibal Lecter, though I imagine my locus is nowhere as grand as theirs (it’s the underwhelmingly craptacular terrace house I grew up in).
I have an uncanny sense of time for anything less than about 10 hours. I will go back to the microwave within 5 seconds of it going off — or to the dryer within about a minute of its completion. (My sense of time over days and weeks and months is utter crap.)
I can hear many songs and tell what key they’re played in; even if I can’t tell what key it is, I can often name the chord progression being used. I can listen to a specific instrument or voice within the mix. I can hear the song in my head on-pitch, and I can often begin singing the song on-key before it begins playing. (However, if a mother or a girlfriend is trying to get my attention while I’m daydreaming, forget about it.)
I can also listen to the radio (or someone talking) and repeat back what I hear within a second. It’s really handy for calling the movie theater and getting the show times; I’ll just relay the information aloud to whomever else in the room is going with me.
Sometimes when I am reading, an idea will pop into my head and then I will find that subject about 2 to 4 paragraphs down from where I was. My friend can read and hold a complete conversation at the same time. She scares me a little.
Some of you might find the Mind Hacks site interesting. I’ll post later with my own brain oddities.
I have mild synaesthesia; I associate each letter and number and musical note/key with a specific color. I don’t actually **see **the color, like some people do, but I nevertheless know what color it is. It’s like seeing a grayscale image of a familiar scene. You know what color everything is, without actually seeing it.
I can also see extremely subtle variations in color that other people can’t see (it took me five weeks to decide which color to paint my bedroom).
When I was younger, I could do all sorts of math in my head, even involving types of math I hadn’t studied yet. Sadly, I no longer have that ability.
I’m very good at “optically” kerning type. I actually did this for a living for several years.
I also have extremely accurate relative pitch.
Me three. If it’s something that interests me or is something I’ve read several times, I can usually open up a book at seeming random and be within a couple of pages of what I was looking for.
“A baloo is a bear.” That’s the only one I remember though.
My super-cool ability is to be able to concentrate on two things at once. Not just a competent subconscious that works when I’m not thinking about it (which I can do sometimes, usually for trivia questions and crossword puzzles), but the ability to read a book and sing a song at the same time without confusing myself, or simultaneously have a conversation and be mentally updating my resume without interrupting either.
That is correct. Not to bad to remember not only what was on the test but the answer as well. It has been 20 years for me.
For a while after I stopped using psychedelic drugs, I saw an amazing light
show every time I closed my eyes. I still do, sometimes, but not nearly as much
as I used to. I used to close my eyes while sitting around fully awake at
school (outside of class) to watch the show. When it started a wave of
relaxation and general good vibes washed over me. I always really looked
forward to it.
I miss it now, but not enough to go back to the drugs.
Same here, although like you I can’t memorize pages of text or anything.
Whenever anyone asks me to remind them of something, I remind them about ten
seconds later. Nobody ever asks twice.
When I was very young I could play the piano by ear. I never took a single
lesson, nor figured out how to read the notes. I remember people trying to
teach me to read the notes of a song, and I would get them to play it first and
then I would pretend to read the sheet while I played it immediately
afterwards. My parents tried to get me into lessons to hone this skill, but I
thought that was the lamest thing I could possibly do with my life. Now I wish
I would have. Oh well.
This is only vaguely related: A couple years back, when I was way into the drug scene, I had this dream where I had to navigate a maze-like trolley system to get to a computer store where I would be able to play a simulation of a fictional ball/grass sport that Army personnel used to stay sharp. The soldiers were known to ground up ordinary garlic bread into powder, and then snort it in order to get the effects of a legal performance-enhancing drug in the bread that couldn’t be taken any other way. Well, the store sold garlic bread so that people competing on the in-house LAN could have the same effect. Its performance effects, for some reason, were only viable for playing either the actual sport or a computer simulation. The store was jam-packed full of people playing the game on the LAN; people switched off, such that one would be playing on a computer while his buddy bought another slice of garlic bread and started grinding it up. During breaks in game play, the next-up would take their hits and sub in, while the other would get his garlic bread and start grinding that up.
For a long time after I had that dream, I would subconsciously take a huge nose-inhale whenever I took a bite into garlic bread, making a horrendous hiccup/choking noise. It still happens sometimes.
I used to have fully lucid dreams, also. I wish I would’ve known then what I know now about lucid dreams; now that I know all the cool stuff you can do in them, I can’t have one for the life of me. But back when I didn’t know there was any significance at all to them, it was my normal dreaming mode.
Me too! I also calculate the time left in a sporting event (even a non-timed one like baseball), factoring in commercials and such, in a similar way.
Wow. You guys are scary. The only things I have are:
-perfect pitch (In addition, whenever I remember a song or piece of music, I automatically hum it in that tune, though I can transpose without difficulty)
-The ability to sleep for short periods of time when I want to. I can’t control it as well as some who posted here, but if I want I can wake up withing 30 minutes no matter how tired I am.
In all fairness, I’m also pretty good at associative memory (some of the more extroverted members of this board might be frightened at how much of their personal lives I remember through simple association with their screenname… which is an interesting idea for a thread, in a creepy, stalkerish kind of way), and I always remembered that the character Baloo from Jungle Book (and TaleSpin) was a bear.
I can still hear the teacher over-enunciating the alliteration, “A baloo is a bear” three times.
It was about 18 years ago for me, so I guess it’s still worthy of putting on my resume.
Strange, the little things we remember.