There's a book by Oliver Sacks that covers people affected by strange neurological disorders and it is fascinating [0]. I can't recall any of them being viewed in a positive light, but it's still worth a read.
That book helped someone I know he was mostly face blind.
Recently I was listening to a discussion where someone was trying to explain her synesthesia about time to a bunch of people who didn't experience that. I found it really hard to wrap my head around, but there is a picture in this article of how one person visualizes time over the course of a year. The idea is just so far from what I think of as normal that it is difficult to really grasp.
"I thought everyone thought like I did, says Holly Branigan, also a scientist at Edinburgh University, and someone with time-space synaesthesia.
"I found out when I attended a talk in the department that Julia was giving. She said that some synaesthetes can see time. And I thought, 'Oh my god, that means I've got synaesthesia'."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8248589.stm
I read a long time ago that it's quite common, like 1 in 7 people got it. Some people don't even know they have it. I always had it as far as I can recall, but it wasn't until my mid 20s, when I stumbled upon a picture, that I reflected on it and the fact that not everyone sees number forms.
Oh wow. Count me in on the I didn't know I had that! camp.
When younger I struggled horribly with ALL things math, and to this day still do. OTOH I've always had a knack for DIY involving measurements: lenghts, rythms, quantities, sizes, you name it. I just invoke my own "dynamic mind ruler" for the task at hand and usually get it right 1st try. Cooking something new? I intuitively know the proper amount of ingredients and spices. Doing work in a friend's car? That nut looks like a 3/4 and that one a 11/16, and who the heck put a 11mm in place of a 7/16??
Incidentally, the whole concept of Time always flows from right-to-left to me. 1000BC is waaay to the right, and 2030AC is just a stone throw away to the left. Now I wonder if it's something only I perceive that way, or everyone does.
Oh wow! Thanks for that, I lost a bunch of time with my coffee this morning thinking about time. I feel like I've lost my sense of time and it is all smeared together. It always has been to some extent but the last couple years have been stressful with business health and family health issues.
This line made me laugh "A straight fucking line. Because life moves ahead
Right handed man, 20-29, Eastern Norway" and think about the reporting on the Aymara who describe the past as infront of them and the future behind. That was hard to grasp but then it made sense because one is potentially visible and the other is unknowable until one passes through it.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2005/feb/24/4
This almost caused me an existential time crisis until I drew out my own year and realized it’s still as I remember. It just gets a bit smeared out in my head.
As long as we're discussing Dr. Sacks, I just read his short story (part of same-titled book) "An Anthropologist on Mars." The titles derive from Dr. Grandin Temple's perception of being high-functioning autist in academia/husbandry; she is best-known for re-designing slaughterhouse shutes, able to "see" as animals do.
Her entire story left me, a spectrum-kiddo, grasping for what "real" even is.
The thing that struck me as her "most unhuman" aspect [but with which I can relate, self-inflictedly]: Dr. Grandin doesn't understand most human social customs, so from a young age vowed to never enter into a romantic relationship.
She considers this entirely a waste of time, and lives to work.
Highly recommend Dr. Sacks many books/collections, may he RIP:
[I'm just a fleshbag]: Man Who Mistook Wife for Hat
Another book that is very illuminating is "My Stroke of Insight" by Jill Bolte Taylor. Reading the brain stroke description can give non-experiential understanding of various Zen koans, including the non-verbal one where Buddha simply holds up a flower and it becomes entirely understandable to Mahakasyapa.
It also points to the natural tendency of human beings to attribute profoundness or spirituality to various forms of brain malfunction. The author does it in the later chapters of the book.
One of the more terrifying books ever written, if nothing else for the fact it opens one to the possibility we may all have such disorders on a species-wide level. What if there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive?
You don't find the idea the world might work in ways we specifically will never, can never, comprehend doesn't frighten you at all? The fact it isn't strictly impossible there could be something right in front of your face and you would never know it?
Not sure what you're asking. What is "that" which would require "'learning it' to have zero persistence in any form'"?
What I meant is, even if we all learn that everybody in the world has "such disorders" and that "there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive", what would the objective change be to make this "teriffying"?
"There's a killer out to get you" or "you have X disease which will have those symptoms" is terrifying.
"There are things that you don't know, and that you as a species can't even perceive" is at best amusing.
This sudden knowledge doesn't change anything that's happening or makes anything that happened before more frightening, does it?
>>>> One of the more terrifying books ever written, if nothing else for the fact it opens one to the possibility we may all have such disorders on a species-wide level. What if there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive?
>>> After learning it, it would still be the same exact world as was before we learned about it.
>> That would require "learning it" to have zero persistence in any form would it not? How might one know such a thing?
> Not sure what you're asking. What is "that" which would require "'learning it' to have zero persistence in any form'"?
"That" = "it would still be the same exact world (as was before we learned about it)".
World-State: 1
World-Event: at least one human becomes open to the possibility that we may all have such disorders on a species-wide level, that there may be things none of us allow ourselves to perceive. (And once an idea exists in one person's mind, they may act upon it at some point in the future.)
World-State: 2
Are the two states identical? I would think not.
> What I meant is, even if we all learn that everybody in the world has "such disorders" and that "there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive", what would the objective change be to make this "teriffying"?
To me, it can be "terrifying" to see risk that others cannot or, or refuse to try to see.
Scientists and "scientific thinkers" often express fear of the quantity of "deniers" that don't agree with their risk assessments, and get even more terrified when the "deniers" refuse to listen to reason.
Similarly, people like me feel similarly when it is the scientists who behave the same.
> "There are things that you don't know, and that you as a species can't even perceive" is at best amusing.
This is a consequence of the epistemic norms (lazy, colloquial, bad, etc) of the culture you grew up in: under strict epistemology (philosophical epistemology vs scientific epistemology), risk exists regardless of your personal opinion on it.
Of course, this "is" "pedantic", so no expectation for you to take it seriously...though if my memory serves you are usually the one going against the grain here on HN, so perhaps there's a chance. :)
> What if there are things none of us allow ourselves to perceive?
What if? There are plenty of topics that people cannot discuss in detail (they're typically referred to as "culture war" topics) and HN enforces such things (to the degree that it does, to be accurate) like most social media platforms...doing otherwise would be ~"inappropriate", etc...culture + the nature of evolved and culturalized consciousness sees to that.
[0]https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63697.The_Man_Who_Mistoo...