Huh...

Fell down a link black hole from something deird1 posted about the fallacy of thinking that everyone experiences the world the way that you do, and not just in a philosophical or cultural sense, but that our brains are sometimes simply wired differently.

Which led me to this link: What Universal Human Experiences Are You Missing Without Realizing It?

And subsequently to this link: Generalizing from One Example

While resisting the tangent into the "why do women like bad boys don't like 'nice guys' " detour (because that will lead to ranting about paternalistic sexism).

I was intrigued about the discussion of mental imagery. From career and college I learned a long time ago that there are certain forms of imagery that some people are not good at doing.  I run across people all the time who cannot look at plans and visualize what they mean in three dimensions.  This is how I end up in long arguments with engineers that they simply cannot place that size ERU in an attic because it would poke through the flipping roof or that you cannot run ducts that direction because there simply is no room above ceiling for it... and no matter how many times you explain this to them, they cannot visualize the roof/ceiling, whatever.  {I've also discovered that there's a limit to it.  I had a roof last summer that had one too many angles to figure out and it was like my brain switched off and went "I have no way to process this much information simultaneously"... that's when you're reduced to building models.)  You frequently see it with clients as well.  They see the picture of the elevations but... that's about it.

Being capable of looking at a plan and seeing all the bits and pieces in a three dimensional fashion (which is rather necessary to figuring out how to actually build the darn thing) while a skill, depends greatly on an ability that seems hard wired into our brains. Which probably explains my slow drift into being a bit of structural guru at work.  In school I hated all the math of structural design (still hate the math) so it has continually surprised me that over the years I've become so structurally oriented...except I do it all visually. I can 'see' how it works...which brings me back to the above links and how there were people that didn't believe that people see actual images in their imaginations, that it was all metaphorical (and that there actually are people who DO NOT see images...which seems quite a bit step further than an inability to translate two dimensional plans into three dimensional mental objects).

Then you read of people who 'hear color' and...what?  My brain is not wired this way.  Not at all. (The closest I can associate such a thing is something 'tasting' green... but then that's associated with the flavors of green vegetables so I tend to think that's association rather than visualizing another sense.)

I have long realized that everyone does not see color in the same way (see: multiple arguments with my mother and sister over what is 'green', what is 'blue,' the gradations in between... and don't even get us started on shades and tints of 'gray').  And, actually, women physically have more red receptors than men do, so there is a difference with gender as well... though one can probably never actively experience the difference.  You see what you see.)

But 'seeing music as a color'?  Nope. My brain does not work that way... which probably makes sense in that I have zero musical ability.  I can enjoy music, but I have no intuitive 'feel' for it.  I took piano lessons for nine years and what I got out of it is the ability to sight read music. That's it.  I still have no intuitive feel for it (or talent for it).  As a kid, I was always jealous of a friend of mine who could hear music then could play it in class (hence why he advanced so far beyond me in music class).  I could quite simply never, ever do that.  I could visually read the music score, but never acquired any intuition for it.   (And I'll rec the book: This is Your Brain on Music as an interesting read as well.)

It also makes me wonder about something my niece said to me once about her inability to enjoy reading being that she didn't like the narration voice in her head.  I couldn't help but think, "Well, change it then..."  (I find the 'sound' in my head while reading to be quite mutable and prone to regional accents for characters and place).  But... what if it is actually different for her?  My mother insists that she doesn't see images when she reads, which totally boggled my mind.  Wha-huh?  Personally, for me, the images when reading are as vivid as television.  I remember stories visually for the most part.

Which brings me to a personal quirk that this whole blackhole of links made me think about and consider.  I tend to think of writing stories (and the construction of stories) in almost the exact same way as laying out a floor plan. And I've always had an inability to explain that in a way that would make any sort of sense to anyone.  I tend to see buildings and plans as a layering process.  You build them in layers, you analyze them in layers, you deconstruct them in layers.  I see them in that way.  And I see storylines and plots that way: threads and layers.  It's a layering effect.

...and that strikes me as a very, very visual way of discussing writing.  Which feels odd.  And which I am not describing very well, I know.

But the links above make me wonder whether its part of the hard wiring.  It's part of the particular way that my own mind is wired.  And I probably do lean more visual than aural.