Reticulating Splines vs Spoon Theory

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Ha ha ha, good luck with that wozeree.

My inner mind multi-tasks very well. While reading your text I was watching you running around in your head like a kid running, yelling and playing, while I was thinking of what I do and how I enjoy myself.

Then you say you want to spend more time outside your head? are you crazy or something? (you don't have to answer that ).

JSBACHlover; it's a matter of practice. I'm sure you know how fast the mind learns a new thing (a new instrument for example). You spend half an hour per day trying something you've never done before. Day one you can't get it at all. Day two you can suddenly play it slowly first go. Over night you're mind worked on it and rerouted some nurons to the task. Day three and you can play it faster, day four you can play it with rythm and melody and it suddenly sounds fluent. I'm constantly amaized at my own mind.

Hehe I love my brain too!

On Twitter today someone shared this link to me because it reminded them of my splines post:

http://m.imgur.com/xvNRKIT

That captures the multimedia aspect and the hyperfocus involved, and I'm sure many of you will relate.

Wozeree, it's also rewarding, for different reasons, when you can get that creative life in your head also out on paper (or in whatever form you prefer). It's a little more work, but half the work is already don't. :)

Greg, I saw a documentary on NetFlix about dream science... In NREM sleep, we actually practice the new things we're learning or tasks we're focused in. We also relive old experiences to see if we can learn anything about our current task. That's why people can often "sleep on it" and have the answer the next morning, or why we're better at something we're learning the next day. It's also why sometimes we dream about the annoying project we've been working hard on, and seem to not get any rest even when we sleep. :) I think it was a Nova special called Why We Dream or something like that.

I totally missed this post - very interesting. So you see this while you are talking to someone and you can still concentrate on the conversation? Wow, that's amazing! It also sounds like what JSB was telling us, he described lines connecting things also. I'm guessing there has to be some similarity in the way your brains are wired.

It all makes sense in a way - I've done some extensive work with flow charts and I guess in the same way that a flow chart helps your eye follow a process or navigate through an organization or whatever it is, these symbols help your minds process through your outside world but they seem to be strongly connected to your emotions also. Quite fascinating.

I actively use this as a solution technique. Particularly with my programming work. If you can define the problem clearly, the mind will find a solution. I know my brain only sleeps for a couple hours each night. My body sleeps most of the night, but I know my brain is active.

I've tested and experimented with various subjects and approaches.

The best I've found: If you want to learn something, or figure out some difficult subject no matter how difficult it is. The evening before, simply read in a relaxed form. Put some music on, read everything while being concious of what you're reading. (Ie, don't get distracted and read pages without noticeing what is being read). Sleep on it.

*edited out stuff that sounded like boasting*

Last edited by GregCav on 29 Oct 2013, 3:49 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I've never solved anything by means of a dream. My dreams are usually very strange and often frightening.

It's not in the dreams JSBACHlover. It's just the mind thinking about a subject while the body sleeps.

You say you arn't a visula thinker? What happens in your mind when you read you're bible?

I visualise everything. Many locations and encounters that I read in the bible are based on movies like The Ten Commandments or Jesus Christ Superstar. It givles me visualisations of the place that I can place the story in while i'm reading. What do you do?

If the feeling of colour is automatic, unconscious, and present every time you hear music, with the same instruments evoking the same colours every time, then it's synesthesia. Using your imagination is a deliberate and conscious effort, but synesthesthetic responses happen to you without you even thinking about them. They are also almost impossible to turn off. I have grapheme-colour synesthesia, and even on the days when my coloured letters and words are so ubiquitous as to give me a headache (such as the days I'm studying synesthesia!) I still can't turn the colours off, and have to focus my attention on things that aren't graphemes, because even seeing letters in my mind's eye evokes coloured perception.

Well, then I guess it is synesthesia. The colors are just "there." When I hear an entire symphony, however, the colors are not as clear, kind of muddied together. That may be why (I compose music) I've never been good at orchestration.

Honestly, I don't know what happens when I read the Bible. I can't visualize anything at all. But when I have to preach, a word or two catches me in the readings, I "get" a "pattern" in a flash that relates Scripture to the practicalities of life, and then I preach on it, briefly, for about 3-4 minutes. People hate long sermons, so I have only one point and keep in brief. The people really like my sermons.

StarTrekker, I'm curious. Do symbols and kanjii characters (japanese writting) evoke colours too?

What happens when you see a symbol that you've never encountered before, does it automaticly have a colour, does it gain a colour over time?

Do shapes, cartoons and line doodles also evoke the same effect?

Do similar symols or kanjii characters have the same or similar colour?

Sorry jamgrrl, we seem to have gotten distracted from the oringal thread subject

Sorry for the slow reply. I was hyperfocusing on my project for a couple of days. Got lots done. :)

It's actually super easy. Unless I can't think of the words to describe stuff that's more pure-sensory and less verbal. Then I struggle. But that's stuggling to verbalize, not to follow everything that's going on. :) That's easy unless there are external distractions, like a barking dog. Then I'm finished. haha.

Actually, JSBACHlover's dreams are REM dreams, which are the abstract ones that don't have much to do with learning. Greg, you are likely doing your thinking in nREM sleep (I think the "n" stands for "not"), which are reality-based dreams in which you practice things you're learning and make connections to older experiences.

In the documentary, they show the experiment where a guy tries a new skiing video game right before sleeping. The game actually simulates skiing with skies and poles. Then they have him sleep. One group gets a full night sleep. The other group, they wake them up every time they start to enter nREM. (Your eyes don't move in nREM like they do in REM.) The people who were allowed to have nREM sleep performed much better on the video game than they had the night before. Those who got no nREM sleep did just as poorly.

They asked participants what kinds of dreams they could remember. One guy described walking through the snow, trying to match someone's footprints, a memory he had from childhood. The dream went on a long time. Researchers concluded that these types of nREM dreams are you comparing past experiences to see if there is anything you learned then you can use now.

I know when I used to do intense technical work for hours at a time, I'd do it in my sleep, too. I didn't get much rest those nights. :)

On a semi-related side-tangent.. I've been doing alot of jigsaw puzzles on my iPad. As I was trying to fall asleep last night, in the "twilight" phase, I noticed I kept doing puzzles in my head, and it was keeping me awake. I decided to see if I could mentally stim... so I imagined putting the last piece in a completed puzzle, and then running my fingers over the ridges between all the pieces. It instantly calmed me down and I was able to fall asleep.

It's left me wondering about mental stims, and if I can use that idea more often and more effectively, and how that relates to dreams, since my puzzle-working was involuntary and bothersome...

Hey StarTrekker! I have grapheme-color associator synesthesia too! I've also noticed that when I'm thinking about and reading about synesthesia, it gets more powerful. Sometimes, it gets close to projector synesthesia, where the color *almost* (but not quite), pops off the page. Fortunately I don't get the headaches. Ouch. :(

You might be interested in seeing my color map: http://www.lunalindsey.com/2012/10/grap ... a-map.html

I also had a scifi story published in Crossed Genres, where the main character has touch-color projector synesthesia and uses it in her research while exploring life on Jupiter's moon Europa. :)

I can totally relate to that. Usually for me it happens when I'm writing, reading, or having an interesting conversation. A whole topic will open up in my mind, either a memory or a new idea, sparked by a single word or sentence. Often, I get several at a time, and they're hard to remember because they interrupt one another. I have to rush to write them down or say them, or they're gone forever.

BTW, someone tweeted this image to me, about the creative process, but it totally reminded me of splines theory, and all the things going on in my head all at once. I left the tab open to pay closer attention to later, because my head was filled with writing-splines, and I knew if I looked, the splines in the image would push out all my writing splines. hehe.

http://www.viruscomix.com/page523.html

Lol no problem.. I love talking about how brains work and comparing perceptions. And synesthesia is something I'm also interested in.



I can answer these questions, too, for myself. Non-Latin character sets do not have colors, unless they are similar to Latin letters (like characters with umlauts and Latin-similar Cyrillic characters). Symbols I use commonly have colors. So ? and * and & etc. (None of the synesthesia questionnaires I've completed for studies ever ask about those!)

I did a crowd-source project of transcribing Greek characters off of old parchments, and in doing so, some of the Greek characters began to take on colors. Now when I see them, they have color. I don't remember which ones or what their colors are. :)

For now, Kanji is all black, including the characters for "Dreamer" I have tattooed on my arm. I suspect that if I learned to read Kanji, they'd take on color. But I'm not sure.

The question about shapes is interesting. I've never seen it asked before. Random shapes do not, but now that you ask, it's possible that the basic shapes have a color association (square, circle, triangle, etc.) For some reason I feel rectangle should be green, and when I picture a rectangle it slips into green naturally.. but the word "Rectangle" is also green, so who knows? The triangle wants to be orange but the word is brown. The square and circle seem to not want to be pinned down.

That is so cool, I'm almost jellous. I've watched some Utube vids of people demonstrating Syneshesia where sounds represent objects. They are wild and fun to watch.

I notice your letter colours are very different to those demonstrated on wiki.

You've answered all of my questions, thanks. I so wish I could experience it, even if for a littil while.

I believe I have this to some extent:
I can't watch any medical show (there may be many more mundain reasons for this too, so this isn't conclusive).
I'm lucky enough to massage two girl friends on occasion. They say I'm very good. I've mentioned befor to Sandy that I simply feel the massage that I give to her, so I work the muscles and I feel it at the same time. This is the main reason for saying I may have it.

Injuries to others don't bother me too much, blood is immaterial to me (my own as well). I also have a high pain tollerance. It's the massages I can feel.
Curiously; Sandy had Ross-River-Feaver last year. A very painful condition cought from mosquitoes. Massage was the best relief fromthe pain for her. I could find the pain in her body, though I'm not sure just how I did that.

People are far more fascinating than I ever would have imagined just a couple years ago.