Wait, you mean not everyone does that?

So last night I was feeding my science junkie with Nova Sciencenow, and the episode was on the human brain, and how we just don't understand how it really works.

They had an segment on Grapheme–color synesthesia which is where you perceive numbers and letters as colors. It is pretty uncommon, and interesting how it works.

Jägerette said: "Wait a minute, you mean that isn't how everyone is?"

I said: "Hang on, you mean you see numbers and letters as colors?"

Her: "Yeah, I thought that was just how everyone saw the world. So I am abnormal?

Me: "Yeah, in a way. How come you never mentioned it?"

Her: "Well, I don't talk about how I see the shape of the letter A, everyone sees it the same way, so I thought everyone just saw the colors"

She spent the rest of the night with her mind blown that she was unusual. I told her I was going to ship her off for experimentation.

Focus:What are things that you do that you thought were completely normal and done by everyone? Or vice-versa.
Alt Focus:What weird body/perception issues do you have? Are you color blind? Well then:

 

I have very mild synesthesia in that I associate letters, months and states (as in the United States) with specific colors. Interestingly not numbers, though. I also have no binocular vision and am incapable of seeing in 3D, so I can't watch movies, see stereograms, or anything like that. From a practical perspective it has little impact on my life; the brain picks up many more cues to depth.

 

This is fascinating; Blue Dog and I overlap quite a bit, especially with the months. I just realized that I have the tools at my disposal to actualize what I see in my head. This is a very close approximation of what these concepts look like to me:

(EDIT: Fuck, Blue Dog just reminded me that numbers do have colors for me. Only single digits, though.)

 

Compared to those of you who actually have a full color palatte of words flying at you all the time, this isn't that big, but I have these odd little eye floater things in both eyes. I can never focus on them directly, but they move everywhere I look. I honestly thought that I was the only one who had them, because whenever I'd try to describe them to people, they didn't know what the hell I was talking about.

Then Family Guy did this, and I was immediately legitimized:

 

I have these too. Our brains are fine though, we just have debris in our eye ball fluid.
Eye Floaters

 

I thought I was the only one. It makes the eye test at the DMV interesting.

I was born with a severe lazy eye (the left) and also badly cross eyed. My mother doesn't have any pictures from when I was a baby because they all made me look like I was retarded.

Four eye surgeries before I turned 7 corrected those, but they left me with no binocular vision. Better than being blind in one eye, which was the alternative. It also left me wearing glasses that if a person with decent vision puts them on, they can see into the future.

 

My wife described to me recently how she used to be very worried about eye floaters because she didn't realize other peolpe had them. And then, sure enough, that episode of Family Guy suddenly made her feel very very relieved that she wasn't the only one.

I have this thing where I can make a sort of hollowed out buzzing noise in my ears. It obviously has zero usefulness and I don't think it's actually creating a sound, but somehow I can cause this sense of sound whenever I want and I have no idea if anyone else knows what I'm talking about or does it.

 

Apparently not everyone is at all capable of being self aware and intelligent.

I have known a great many people who who seriously lack capacity, this blows my mind. When something bad keeps happening in your life, how is it that you can't see the pattern and change your behavior?

 

This is semi-related to the focus, but something interesting I only recently discovered the cause of.

When I was a kid, I realized that I could make myself see double by concentrating on my eye muscle. Eventually, when doing it while looking in a mirror, I realized it was because I could move my eyeballs independently of one another. Furthermore, it REALLY freaked people out when the saw me doing it, so it was kind of a fun thing to do when I was talking to friends who were telling stupid stories.

Flash forward to my last trip to an ophthalmologist for something unrelated (did you know you can be allergic to the preservatives in eye drops? Because I didn't.) He notices right away that when he moves a pencil between my eyes, they go all wonky. I explain to him that i can control it, but I only lose control when something is put right between my eyes.

Turns out, I have a latent strabismus, my eye muscles don't operate in conjunction with one another. The interesting thing is, this should give me a wonky eye that I have no control over. However, where the "latent" part comes in is that since I figured out I could control it as a child, I DON'T have a wonky eye at all. (It wouldn't have been a lazy eye, that has to happen earlier apparently and involves being blind in the lazy eye)

You know when your parents tell you not to make a face because it might get stuck like that? Just the opposite in my case. Because I made that face all the time, I strengthened the muscle and have control over it. Fuck you, common parental advice.

 

I can't roll my tongue. I also can not wink my right eye.

 

When I look at this, red looks furthest to the front, yellow in the middle, and blue the furthest back. (It's not forced prospective, fyi, the fonts are the same size, letters on the same line.) I figured this out on my own a long time ago, but it wasn't until a couple years ago that I realized not everyone will see this in 3D. It's not like a magic eye thing, where I have to adjust my eyes, it's just instantly 3D.

 

I have 2 different types of the rarest colorblind conditions. I guess I'm still kind of confused as to how it works but I can still generally see the difference between two colors with various shades or hues. Now, when these same colors are say, on a map or in an electrical circuit there's no way I can tell them apart. If I have to do any electrical work with things like motor control switches where wires are similar I have to mark them with tape. Generally I just stay away from electrical, though. People still don't understand how I can't see letters or numbers in the little color blotch tests. Just for reference, if you look at the font color box on the right of your screen when typing a post I have a very hard to impossible time of telling some of those colors apart.

 

When I close my eyes, I see splotches of colors flying around in my vision; there is also this colorful background static when my eyes are closed. I have yet to figure out what is triggering it but they are there. I didn't realize that I had it until about a year ago, when I was reading about synesthesia and realized that I've always had the color swirls in my vision. I just thought it was normal and everyone had it.

It's a fairly useless power as it does me no good, what so ever.

 

I have excellent vision both near and far so I've never had to worry about it. I can see those 3D color pictures without trying, however when 3D movies became popular I found that it makes me fidgety and itchy while I watch them. The bugs flying around in Avatar almost pushed me over the edge.

I am the only one in my group of friends (read: other moms about the same age) that can still hear the "cricket" ringtone that some bastard children use on their cell phones. This is like a knife in my ear. In fact, we were all at the bowling alley last week and one of their phones went off and I started yelling for them to turn it off with my hands on my ears. It was awkward since I was the only one that could hear it. They turned to look at me like I was nuts.

I thought growing up that everyone knew how to swim. We grew up on a lake and all of my friends and family knew how, so I always thought that this was just something people knew how to do. Both my ex-husband and my current boyfriend don't know how to swim and I find this baffling. Isn't not even something I can teach them since I have no memory of a time when I couldn't swim and it just comes naturally.

My son was born with a lazy eye that is not correctable by surgery so he wears bifocals. The doctors say he will not have binocular vision but when we go to 3D movies he says he can see it. Go figure?

 

Wait, that's not an everybody thing? What does everyone else see when they close their eyes (use your hands over them to clock out light filtering through the eylids) if not some random static?

 

When I do that, I still just see full black with a few random specks of whitish light. If I keep them closed for a little while, however. The mixture of black and the small amount of white would start to move around and change shapes. I'm assuming that's normal and not freakish like the rest of you freaks. Freaks.

 

My joints are hypermobile. My arms and legs hyperextend past "normal" and it looks like my arm/leg is broken. Also, when I was a kid I used to plant my leg and then shift side to side, slightly rocking my knee out of socket. I assumed that was the way everyone was built until around middle school when someone saw my arm "straight" and said it was gross. And I asked my friends about the knee thing. Nobody knew what I was talking about. I stopped doing that.

Also, growing up I was hypersensitive to clothing tags and the majority of my clothes. I asked my mom to cut out all of my tags, and I remember feeling miserable most of the time I wore clothes. In most of my elementary school pictures I'm not smiling and I'm on the verge of tears...it's because all I could think about was my clothes and how much they were irritating me. It was like I couldn't get rid of the itching and burning all over my body. It felt like blades of glass. My mom used to tell me I was imagining things or being silly/an attention whore. So, after a while I stopped complaining as it fell on deaf ears.
In the last few years I've worked with many kids who have sensory integration/processing disorders...I even interned at a facility that mostly worked with SI disorder kids. The things they say DO sometimes sound ridiculous and fabricated, but they aren't. I related to a lot of these kids because I'm pretty certain that's what was going on with me. It felt good to know that my mom was wrong; it wasn't all in my head, and it's actually more common than people think.

 

I am pretty severely colorblind. According to this website*, I am a deuteranope. I have a red-green deficiency, which I believe is the most common. The problem with being colorblind isn't that I can't go through life or even see color, for that matter. It's that people treat me like I'm retarded when they find out. It's not something I go through life wishing I was different. I just don't know what I'm missing. Does that make sense?


I had an ex-girlfriend take pity on me when I mismatched my clothes. She was all condescending and treated me like I didn't know how to read. One time, I bought a light pink shirt not realizing it was pink. Fall colors don't jump out at me and sometimes, sunsets look green.

*very informative website