The kids I grew up with knew I was "different", but my parents and school insisted I was normal. Now I've explored #Autism#Prosopagnosia#Alexithymia and #Aphantasia and have an idea what was going on, but then I thought everyone saw the world like I did, just coped better. I coped by becoming a #PluralSystem by age three when I realized my girl self would have to be hidden. After six "guy" IDs, I'm now back being that girl. Still running the system, but with more E and less T...
Despite all that, I've been online since #ARPAnet and #DJNR, wrote the first magazine article with simultaneous code distribution (via 8" floppies in the post), coded fab robots to move 6" & 8" Silicon wafers, built my (almost) independent #SolarPV and #SolarThermal house (7K lines of C++ from 1998, 42 device outs), and evolved an audio system with bandwidth from DC to a half MHz. Helped raise four unique kids, as adult minds in young bodies. Still mystify most of the adults I encounter...
I seem to remember someone here posting a question about the relative vividness of dreams versus waking life. Can't find it now. But it has made me think while writing my dream notes...
From this morning:
I think I found it digging in an old equipment collection, a complex device that supposedly controlled temperature for some bigger system. About 6" diameter, there was a setting lever that moved 180° around a serrated red pre-plastic circle at the bottom. That rotated the vertical rod mechanism that extended up about 7" at the center of the device. Maybe an inch out from the bottom of the rod, on a mount that didn't rotate, was a tiny motor with an inch of exposed ~1/32" shaft extending above its top, angled to point toward the top of the main center rod. Seemed it was supposed to rotate more mechanism via a rubber wheel touching it, but I never found that. A long way from understanding the thing.
Most of those details were not images, or at least were instantly converted to logical conclusions and lost to "vision".
But clearly I saw a vivid picture image of the black handle at the end of the lever and the red serrated semicircle it moved around, to the point it was obviously not modern smooth shiny bright red plastic, but the flat grainy orange-red "bakelite" from my childhood. It was a single still image that stayed the same as I moved the lever back and forth between its limits - the lever disappeared from attention and only logically moved.
And I saw a vivid image of the tiny motor shaft, its perfect shiny finish and its angle (but the image did not extend to include the bottom half of the motor, or the top of the device it pointed at, that conclusion was only "felt"). The rest of the device was only "seen" as a vague memory of first touching it, general size and shape, not enough light or detail to resolve any of the internals.
The problem with any conclusions from this is that my daily vision works the same way - each object has an "icon view" (saved from my first encounter with the object) with a current spatial reference to my entry path into the room, or the front of the house, or north. More detailed views are tiny snapshots located only by #SpatialViewCells, no connection to #HeadDirectionCells or objective directions except that I remember where the icon currently is. (At least that's how I explain it to myself...)