I have a similar freakish ability, but mine has to do with writing. I can basically ~see~ approximately three pages of prose in my mind's eye while writing. It only works under certain conditions, but it feels just like I'm transcribing something rather then doing any kind of deliberate thinking. People are shocked what comes out of me, and even more so when they see how quickly it happens. You would need to see me in person to experience the full effect, but my body does not match my words. Imagine the biggest lumberjack you've ever seen describing the petals of a flower with such high precision that it takes your breath away. That's me. I've started to slowly nurture this talent, because it finally occurred to me that it might be special.
Interesting, I have a similar ability but for code. I write some of the best code when I'm not at a computer because it doesn't take any time to refactor and I can play freely. A lot of the time when I write new code it's just transcribing the systems I created from memory. It's similar for reading code, being able to keep a lot of system complexity and behavior in my head at once. I wonder how common this is for mastery in other circumstances, like sports or art.
I know what you mean, I also "see" code in a similar way as the OP author explains numbers.
It's though mostly "blocks" that interact with other "blocks" and a large application is comprised of probably hundreds of blocks organised in specific shapes with interaction lines between them.
This helps me spot "poor" application design when blocks that should be separate are actually intertwined (tightly-coupled or concerns not separated).
It's sometimes hard to describe these in architecture documents or PR's as it seems not everyone is seeing the program on this level.
> You would need to see me in person to experience the full effect, but my body does not match my words.
It's fun, isn't it? One of the saddest things about aging is I never again will be a 17 year old blonde girl who looked like Rapunzel with a decade of programming experience in the mid-00s. The dissonance drove people insane.
Oh my god! I had the same experience in the late 2010s as a tiny little emo girl. The absolute shock in CS group projects with a bunch of guys who were upset that they “got put with the girl” when I had the whole thing done in an hour was chefs kiss.
I “booksmarted” so many guys in college who didn’t get that in real life you can put points into other stats like chr and it doesn’t take away from your int.
I think I was rolled by a min-maxxer: 20 INT and probably around 18 CHA (based on the fact that I could get 100 10 year olds to cooperate as one of them), but damn my CON and STR are so low I have constant pain debuffs to all my rolls. It's BS.
That’s interesting. I never “see” anything like that in my mind, but a few times in high school, I was explaining some geometric proof to a classmate; at the end, he noted that my verbal explanation and my finger pointing at the chart were compatible but out of sync with hand motion being about twice as fast, and then went to repeat both verbal and finger pointing, albeit at a slower rate, and they matched perfectly.
This happened more than once though not many times, and I considered it weird but kind of forgot about it.
This description makes me think I might have a mental canvas like this as well, except it might be a headless browser or something :)
Wow. I can’t "see" anything in my head. I think I have aphantasia (though I’m not really sure, I can see flashs of things but not keep them).
So I totally have to write the code to reason about it. I didn’t knew people could imagine portions of code so it explains some things. I’m not sure it bothers me or even if that’s abnormal because it’s always been like that so I can manage that. But it’s tiring.
But it also forced me to learn to be concise and to express the fullness of my thoughts through langage (or code). Which is really useful in this job.
Also, I have ADHD which I know from my psychiatrist affects short term memory. I wonder if "picturing" things happens in the same brain région than short term memory. It would explain a lot of things. Maybe I’m just some individual with broken RAM and I had to compensate with "overclocking" my CPU of thoughts. </personal-theory>
I do something similar when writing longer things like papers. I'll think about the general topics I want to cover and the order, highlights, etc., and then I can write 10 or 20 pages more or less as a continuous flow.
