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Comment on The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.

My brain is like a vector database, it stores the “feelings” of information, not the actual information - if that makes sense?

I can make lightning fast connections in my head when something happens, like when something breaks in production, I see the symptoms and the vectors just connect from effect to the cause.

Can I explain to others why and how I know where the problem is? Nope. …Or yes, but it’ll take a long time for me to follow the feeling-vectors and put them into words I can actually communicate to other people.

For actual people and characters in books I also retain the shape and …something about them, but I couldn’t explain how most people in my life look like to a sketch artist.

When I read a book, I kinda retain the “feeling” of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character’s adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an “uniform” they tend to wear.

I’ve read all 5 books (over 5000 pages) of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn’t tell you what Kaladin (the main character) looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.

Oh, and DEFINITELY no voice in my head. I’d get myself committed if I had someone talking to me in my brain.

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vithigar@lemmy.ca ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Holy cow. This is possibly the best description of how I usually think I’ve ever encountered. It was actually a bit unnerving to read. Though I’ve always conceptualized it as “shapes” and “holes” rather than vectors.

The ability to near-instantly make connections between symptoms and cause for any given issue in a system I’m familiar with especially resonated. The best explanation I could give someone without stepping back and basically re-solving the whole thing from a standing start would be “the shapes fit together”.

It feels like I’m being asked how I knew a puzzle piece fit in a space, and for some reason “I looked at it and could see that it fit” is not a sufficient explanation. No, I didn’t need to investigate other possible pieces. They are obviously different shapes. The one that you’re asking about doesn’t even belong to the same puzzle.

Similarly I am also utterly incapable of describing what a person looks like in any detail. I have a “mind’s eye” and can conjure up images of them in my head, but for whatever reason I just completely lack the ability to express what I see in words outside of very high level details. They have brown hair, they’re tall, what do you mean “what shape is their face?” Sara’s face is the shape of Sara’s face. It couldn’t be any other shape.

I do have an internal monologue or voice though, but it’s not constant. It usually only comes up when I’m dealing with other people and need to try to reason through what someone else is doing.

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Brosplosion@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
This is a perfect representation of how my mind is laid out. Everything is a tree with things connected together by feelings/relations. Individual events are painful to keep track of (wife constantly tells me that we’ve already had conversations multiple times). Superfluous detail is lost immediately.

But how a certain function in code breaking can ripple to the whole system is as natural as I breathe. Random trivia facts too, since they were novel enough to connect at the cool thing to know node. What someone wore yesterday or where the ketchup is (I don’t eat ketchup) is just completely filtered out. Couldn’t describe peoples faces but I know them when I see them. 99% of those “celebrity lookalike” things look nothing like them and I get baffled how people can confuse them, but I’d assume it’s from them visualizing the celebrity with some error

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MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
For my own inner monologue, it often feels more like a preview or mirror than like hearing something external. Definitely English words, though I can also navigate nonverbal ideas in a similar sense to how you describe. The “essence” of the item, its database ID in a way.

Same with my inner audio sense: I can play things back I’ve heard several times and recall, like an old song, which is just a copy of how I heard it before (mostly). If it was a 90s mp3, it’ll still have whatever weird audio glitch crept in there during all the piracy. Can’t pick the elements apart, it’s just one layer.

No mind’s eye for me. Good spatial sense, though; it just isn’t tied to any feeling of sight. As for “imagining” an apple, I definitely don’t in any way see an apple. But there’s a part of the brain that, when you look at an apple, takes the incoming light analyzes it, and returns “Apple”. When I imagine the apple, I get that same return, the sense that I have just experienced or currently am experiencing an apple. Does my brain tell me I saw the toothy curves of the bottom of a red delicious? Yep. Did I see anything, anywhere, metaphorically or otherwise? Nope. All analysis, no pixels.

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