I still narrate the world around me. When I'm stressed or tired, I forget myself and start doing so audibly.
I'm gonna go get the papers, get the papers
Yes, this is me.
I can picture scenes in my head, but I have to concentrate to do it. Relatedly, I can't really imagine rearrange a room in my head; I have to actually move the furniture and stand back. I can tell whether something fits in a space, but not how it all looks. Part of this may be due to editing text for a living for nearly three decades, but I'm pretty sure I've always processed speech this way to some extent. I completely suck at chess but am a terror at Scrabble, perhaps for similar reasons.
That sensation when you read too much as a kid, and you find yourself narrating the world around you.
A friend of mine in university did this almost constantly, and, if he was to be believed, in the voice of Philip Marlowe.
Has anyone here actually ever seen a working ticker tape machine? Not in a museum, but in an environment where it's actually being used for something.
We had one in the science lab at school, but it just made dots on the tape (to demonstrate things about the laws of motion). I've never seen one that was actually printing something.
5: actually he sounded more like Tom Jones.
6: When I worked in financial markets, very senior people at our clients would have come into the business as actual ticker tape was on its way out. "Don't fight the tape" is still good advice.
I did actually use an Associated Press teletype machine when I did news for my college radio station. So much crappy paper.
Bit of googling, looks like ticker tape was essentially dead as a financial information source by 1970.
Printing on to paper tape went on a lot longer - telegrams. My parents still have the congratulatory telegram my uncle sent them on the day of my birth, which made me feel pretty outdated even when I was a kid, and now makes me feel positively pre-Cambrian.
I don't have any special abilities or interesting mental quirks, but I do have an uninteresting semidisability, in that I have a poorer sense of spatial orientation than anyone I know, except my own mother.
I was about five or six when I got lost in a department store. My parents were trying on shoes, and I stepped away from them for a moment to look at something across the aisle. When I returned to where they were, I discovered that the scene had changed completely and neither they nor the shoe display were anywhere in sight. I went back and forth a few more times, and each time, the whole store scrambled like a Rubik's cube. (It was a box store - literally a rectangle, and not that big, either).
In high school once my parents let me drive to school, and I was late getting home. I explained that I had to pick something up from the store, and in order to get to the store, I had to drive back home first, because I only knew the route to the store from my house. I had been pretty proud of myself for solving the problem, until I saw the look of horror on my dad's face. The store and the school were only a block away from each other.
My dad was overall pretty patient about this, because he had already had decades of experience accommodating my mom's similar issues. (He always, always drove, and if she had to go somewhere unfamiliar, he would either drive her there, or, if he was not available, he would go with her to "practice" the route a day or two ahead of time.) My dad himself had the most astonishing sense of direction of anyone I have ever met. Like, he's been to New England twice in his life - once for a family trip when I was about fourteen, and once for my law school graduation. When he came for my graduation, he drove around easily and usually mapless, because he remembered all the maps from over a decade before. You'd think I'd have inherited some mix of my parents' traits, but no. My siblings both have fairly normal spatial abilities. At least, I think so. I can't actually tell if someone is "good" at directions or not, because it all just seems like magic to me.
My sense of direction is as terrible as it ever was, but it matters less now, because of smartphones and GPS and all that. I still don't like traveling by myself because it's so easy to get lost (and so unpleasant to walk around with my eyes glued to my phone). There are two large streets that head to my parents' house (where they have lived for 35 years, and where I lived when I learned to drive), and if I need to take the less-frequently-used one, I basically just drive around until I land on the right route home. When I go to the other floor of my two-story office building (a not-large building, with only one hallway, where I've worked for the past thirteen years), I have to wander around until I stumble onto what I'm looking for. Etc.
My dad always knew which way North was. I don't know how.
13. I know people who can do this based on the position of the sun and the time of day. Presumably they can't do it after dark. Whether they can do it in an entirely unfamiliar location, I don't know.
I think of myself as having a good sense of direction, but it's really that I spend 95% of my time in a 13x3 mile oval with most of the streets laid out in a numbered grid. Getting out of an unaccustomed subway station is always a little disconcerting for a minute until I see something that tells me which way is uptown: it feels like my internal compass is just swinging wildly.
I think we've discussed it before; while I don't seem to ticker-tape, a lot of inputs do get mentally converted to text before I grapple with them.
I do seem to have a pretty good sense of direction - especially in my stomping grounds (an easy grid, though not sequentially lettered or numbered), but also a decent sense of "back to the hotel" when vacationing. It's different than remembering turn-by-turn directions to get somewhere, in that I can usually improvise routes in the basically correct direction, though some terminal correction may require a quick look. (Like, I can get back to the right avenue, but won't know which way to turn to reach the hotel.)
I think I've mentioned this before, but I'm afraid of wandering from my tent at night to take a leak and not finding my way back. But it's really kind of an abstract fear of the dark and losing my sense of direction. Because peeing much too close to the tent is always an option if the night is really dark.
I guess it wasn't that strong, but the epicenter was at my house
I felt the earthquake about 60 miles away and it was faint enough I could have missed it if I hadn't been sitting and eating lunch.
I think we've discussed subvocalization here before which seems to be sort of a reverse phenomenon from ticker-taping. I strongly subvoczalize and I do think it makes it harder for me to pick up homophone typos in my own writing (and I think maybe almost any typos). Anyway, that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.
I am not exactly sure of the setup, but when I was first joined th oil industry in the late '70s I think they used telex for relaying information from drilling rigs. And I think some kind of private network because of security concerns.
I am old enough to have sent a telegram as an adult. To my folks who were traveling in Germany when I landed my first "real" job.
I can follow the scent of the stream I was born in all the way from the ocean to the headwaters so I can get back there to spawn.
24: I don't think it's the ticker-tape phenomenon, but I truggl mightily with visual spatial skills. I always have to talk through the meaning of graphs that are supposed to be visual aids. The aids just confuse me.
Does it correlate with hyperlexia? I think this might be a thing I do but, as with aphantasia, it's hard to be confident in your comparisons.
lurid and I have talked about this around a difference in how we process text in foreign languages. I do fine with reading even if I have no idea how the words should be pronounced; for her, having a solid auditory sense is essential.
30: I had to be reminded the meaning of hyperlaxia. The Google search brought up a list of signs your toddler might have hyperlaxia. I thought there should be a warning, "If not addressed early, hyperlaxia can lead to your child becoming....a writer "
The ticker tape thing is new to me and the article is fascinating. I find myself trying to see if I can make myself have it and failing.
I used to do the narrating my own life quite a lot when I was younger. Sometimes it felt like a way of detaching myself from an uncomfortable situation. Other times I thought I was working on my memoir.
My mom has number-color synthasethia. Numbers have colors for her and that helps her remember numbers. Even in her 90s she likes to show offher ability to memorize a series of numbers.
15: It should be location-independent as long as you know what hemisphere you're in? I guess a rough idea of the latitude makes things simpler. After dark you have the constellations, which absolutely saved our asses a couple of times getting lost in the Arizona desert in pre-smartphone days.
35: ha! She's doing as well as could be hoped given the circumstances.
I've known for a long time that I do this and that other people generally don't, but wasn't aware it was an identified thing and not just an idiosyncrasy. I note that the author of the article is a child of librarians who grew up to do copy editing for Scientific American. I am a child of a librarian who grew up to do technical editing for the pharma industry. Apparently I am a type.
I am gutted that you could apparently still send telegrams in the UK until 2008 (and in India until 2013!) and I completely missed my chance. https://www.royalsignalsmuseum.co.uk/on-this-day-14th-july/
I don't have the teletype thing, but I do have a very strong internal voice/monologue.
The only text related skill I have is one that quite a lot of people who read a lot, and who work a lot with text have, which is that I can sort of holistically process text without having to scan it line by line. Not in some spectacular "savant" style, more in the ordinary sense that I can get a quick sense of the subject matter of some page of text and whether the information I need is present within it without consciously being aware of scanning it. Similarly, if I'm looking for information in a book I've read before, I have usually got a good memory of the "shape" of the page on which the information can be found, and can just flip through the book quickly and end up where I want. I've spoken to quite a few humanities type people who can do this, so I don't think it's a very rare skill, I think it's quite common-ish.
However, one of my work colleagues and I were discussing it with a bunch of devs in our team(s) and he and I can both do this sort of holistic text processing, and the devs (who are largely not "wordcel"* types) were looking at us like we'd just said we could calculate like von Neumann, or could see smells.
I get very very frustrated watching other people interact with computer screens. I can literally see them scan the page for the information they want--eyes moving methodically across the screen--and it feels like they are operating at 1/100 normal speed. I almost never have to do it, I just look at it.**
"What the fuck? it's right there, on the left, about 1/3 down the page. The designer has helpfully made it blue, and three times as big as the other text."
* I know this is wordcel/shape-rotator thing is a totally false dichotomy used in seriousness by dickheads.
** I work with UX/UI designers a lot, and a big part of my job is designing information dense UIs, so I'm coming at this from a position of looking at UIs _a lot_ and having the text scanning thing.
re: teletypes, etc.
When I worked at Strathclyde University Library (mid 90s summer job), they still had a massive teleprinter in the back office which, I think, was largely used to communicate with libraries at universities in sub-Saharan Africa (they had some kind of relationship with a few). The internet existed, but had not yet taken off, so I guess teletype was still a thing.
re: 42
If I need to actually read a page, I read it like everyone else. The holistic thing is just "roughly what's here. Is X here or not? If so, where?", not any kind of deep read or full comprehension.
The teleprinter sound effect is I think still common in a certain sort of film? The kind where you have a long aerial tracking shot over treetops and then a huge building comes into view and there's a sort of clack clack clack noise as the subtitle "CIA HEADQUARTERS. LANGLEY, VIRGINIA" comes up on the screen one letter at a time. I guess that's meant to be a teleprinter.
39. Super interesting! How crisp are the letters? Are they printed or handwritten ? Serifs? All caps ?
My spatial sense is good for what it's good for and not what it's not. I don't get lost much but I have almost no idea, midway along the road of this life, how the countries in Europe fit together in any but the broadest strokes, and sometimes not that. (Ireland: attached to the other things or no?) My head will just not hold maps together. It's embarrassing sometimes! Factually I can tell you a few things Poland borders but I could not draw a map of any of it to save my life.