Weird things your brain does that you don't understand.

[litechick]

I can identify with a few of the issues related here but my number 1 brain complaint is that I can get a particular phrase stuck in my head for years.  Once the phrase manifests itself, it will be triggered by a particular situation and I feel helpless to eradicate it.  Once I did eradicate one of these phrases and even as I type, I resist recalling it to mind for fear that it will get stuck there again.

[Silverstar]

 
About 12% of the population has it, apparently.
 
I have it with numbers and letters. And the interesting part is then when the letters combine in a word, and fight it out to determine the appropriate colouring of the word. Usually the first letter tends to have greater significance, especially if it is a capital letter. But for long words the colour can change as the syllables progress, or else they all blur into a kind of merged colour that I can see in my mind, but can't easily describe.

That's exactly it. Every letter in a word has its own colour, but the word has a sort of mishmash aura around it.

Do you have any letters that change between upper and lower case? All mine are the same except for B, which for some unknown reason is navy blue in lower case, but becomes bright pink as soon as it switches to upper case.

Yes, I realise I just said "for some unknown reason" like all the rest of it makes sense.

[Which Tyler]

Do any of you synaesthetics have auditory-visual synaesthesia? Visuak-visual seems to make more sense, and seems to be more common from what I can tell.

I'd love to see the results you get from fMRI scans versus a non-syn. control group.

[Silverstar]

I don't, but I remember there was someone on the board a few years ago who did. She'd register music as swirls of colour, from what I recall.

Some scents have colours for me, but not all of them.

[karaddin]

Do any of you synaesthetics have auditory-visual synaesthesia? Visuak-visual seems to make more sense, and seems to be more common from what I can tell.

I'd love to see the results you get from fMRI scans versus a non-syn. control group.

I've seen speculated (and find it somewhat compelling) that what Theda and I have which we are calling ASMR is actually another form of synesthesia and is a sense->pleasure mapping rather than a sense->sense mapping, and I'd love for a good amount of fMRI studies to be done on it. Although I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the reaction while having it done.

[williamjm]

The conversation a few of us had yesterday about not being able to remember anything about Syriana reminded me of the odd fact that my brain appears physically incapable of retaining any information about the music of The Smiths. Like, I listened to There Is a Light That Never Goes Out (something I've done more than once for this very reason) just to check if this is still the case and yep, while listening I got a headachey sort of feeling and within half an hour I'd forgotten every detail of the song apart from the line 'if a double decker bus, should crash into us' and that the opening chords remind me vaguely of 'That's Entertainment'. This happens with all their songs I've heard.

It's doubly odd because Morissey's solo stuff doesn't have this effect on me. And nor does any other music or indeed anything else at all.

 

And I have no idea why.

What happens for something like Noel Gallagher covering There Is A Light That Never Goes Out?
 

Occasional vivid memories of random events. I don't mean events that are traumatic or otherwise important (those happen too, but at least they make sense) nor those which are triggered by something about the current situation (again, that also happens), but things that are completely out of the blue.

 

I get this as well, completely random memories from decades ago that I suddenly remember despite them having nothing to do with what I was doing or thinking about. I guess it's possible my brain is making some connection that's so obscure I can't see it.

[deleted01]

I have synaesthesia, so my brain thinks every letter and number has it's very own colour. These colours are non-negotiable. 
 
That's weird. And I have no clue why it does that. 

I think we've discussed this before. I have this weird thing where everybody's face is either a strong or a weak face. What I mean by this, because I struggle to describe it, is that some faces stand out more to me. I still don't get it :dunno:

[Theda Baratheon]

I've seen speculated (and find it somewhat compelling) that what Theda and I have which we are calling ASMR is actually another form of synesthesia and is a sense->pleasure mapping rather than a sense->sense mapping, and I'd love for a good amount of fMRI studies to be done on it. Although I'm not sure how easy it would be to get the reaction while having it done.

This is an interesting argument. Have read there is no scientific evidence to back it, only lots of anecdotal evidence. Would be nice if there were studies able to 'prove' it I guess. 

[Wise Fool]

ASMR, I've always gotten that. I dated a girl once who would indulge my weird need with lightly stroking my neck and ears  Before youtube and ASMR as a 'thing,' I would watch and rewind/rewatch certain scenes of movies where people were whispering, or speaking softly in a way that would cause "chills" the same way.

[Which Tyler]

I was think that with karaddin's ASMR, I'd personally treat that by buying a campavan and touring areas with lots of different accents.

[Theda Baratheon]

ASMR, I've always gotten that. I dated a girl once who would indulge my weird need with lightly stroking my neck and ears  Before youtube and ASMR as a 'thing,' I would watch and rewind/rewatch certain scenes of movies where people were whispering, or speaking softly in a way that would cause "chills" the same way.

Yeah I did the same thing :) or if there was a scene with someone brushing someones hair I would re watch that. loads of things trigger it for me, whispering, hairplay, certain hand movements, certain accents and ways of speaking, light touches. i don't always get the ''tingles'' though a lot of the time i get this really weird feeling in my lower back it's almost uncomfortable like i'm being tickled (am v ticklish) but also nice. hahha v weird.

[HexMachina]

Sometimes I can have a full conversation with someone that goes on for quite some time. I'll be responding to them, so I've obviously been listening. Then I'll walk away and think to myself: wait, what have I just been talking about?

I used to have a curious obsession with doing everything in sevens. I'd count my steps in sevens (looking at the pavement and counting my steps onto seven paving stones/cracks between paving stones), tap seven of my fingers against my leg one after the other as I walked, stir things (on the stove top) seven times, brush my teeth in sevens (counting to seven for each little bit of my mou as I brushed), counting out things like grapes, strawberries, mushrooms etc in sevens if I was going to eat them, organising anything like loose change into piles of seven. It was really weird. I don't do it now, apart from the counting my steps thing.

I also remember weird snippets of stuff too. It could be some really significant thing that happened and I'll have forgotten the important stuff, but I'll remember stupid specific stuff like "Oh, I kept looking at your shoes. They were red and high heeled. And there was a poster on the wall. It had a pin missing in one corner."

[polishgenius]

What happens for something like Noel Gallagher covering There Is A Light That Never Goes Out?

I remember it a little bit better, though not much. In a weird mish-mash of Noel's voice and Morrisey's for some odd reason.

Time will tell if it sticks any...

[TrueMetis]

Sometimes when I imagine something happening that thing will loop continuously until I think of something else. Specifically thinking about someone walking up a ramp, they'll slide down and then walk back up repeatedly though it happens with other things. I wonder if this has anything to do with my inability to walk up things in my dreams.

[aceluby]

I can learn things in my sleep, which I find really weird.  Two different situations where this happened.  The first is when I taught myself to snowboard in my sleep.  The physics of it just 'clicked' and the next time I went out I went from falling every 5 min to just cruising down the slopes.

 

The 2nd time this happened is when I was really into playing guitar.  I would dream about scales and chords, and after a few days of this I began to 'search out' new shapes and would wake up to get them under my fingers.

 

I also have a tendency to have lucid dreams.  I feel like my brain is super weird....

[nedfart]

I hate when I am driving and I come to a complete stop. Then if the car next to me starts backing up, I feel like my car is still moving forward and I freak out. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

So glad I don't have one of.these brainthingys because frankly this all sounds terrifying.

[Pecan]

I have synaesthesia, so my brain thinks every letter and number has it's very own colour. These colours are non-negotiable. 

 

That's weird. And I have no clue why it does that. 

 

My Mom has that with numbers. I've never heard her say anything about letters. 

[Wise Fool]

There's this thing for me that happens, rarely, and more often when I was a child. But there would be moments where I would forget... everything. Where my thoughts would stop being in language and words. Where names and numbers and facts became nothing, the unknown. And then there was just the visual and other sensory data, but it was an unknown world - even though it was just (for example) a hallway in a house. Sometimes, at first especially, this was very frightening; fear would set in, bordering on panic. A desperate scrambling for answers when the questions literally could not be formed. But then it would come back, if I willed it - my name, where I lived, where I was, what color was the wall in front of me, etc. And later I could sometimes intentionally make this phenomenon happen, this forgetting of knowledge and unthought in the mind.

 

There was this other thing that happened. At night, when sleeping - or trying to sleep, or having just work up into pitch blackness from a restless sleep, as a child, with the dramatic horrors of the coming days (tests! girls! games!) preoccupying my mind, uneasy dreams. Sometimes I would look up into the ceiling - and it'd be that sort of popcorn white ceiling, you know, the kind that will flake off if you touch it and who knows what it's made of, but it's probably extremely toxic and flammable but it brings back so many memories, who can really get rid of it, you know? - and there would be blackness, but... something, some non-thing... could be seen. Some indefinable, indescribable shape, made out of indefinable, unknown colors, and changing, and always changing. Growing larger, rotating, its borders repeating like fractals, and always fuzzy. It gave me a headache, a migraine actually (as I would learn only much, much later) and was a migraine aura - and it is also that phenomenon, perhaps [related to?] the [Ganzfield effect? apophenia?] where a lack of sensory data can produce ghostly, hallucinatory imagery or sounds.

 

But you never know, or at least I don't. Sometimes, particularly late at night, I might see this non-thing in the ceiling. Growing. And a pressure building in my mind. And a churning gut. The world turning upside down. The screaming of millions. Blood. And that's when I question the scientific explanation. And my sanity.

 

In any case I don't understand these things my brain does.

[TerraPrime]

I don't, but I remember there was someone on the board a few years ago who did. She'd register music as swirls of colour, from what I recall.

 

I believe you're thinking of Toby.