My view on neurodivergence is manifold: It can be severely disabling in our neurotypical world and comes with massive health risks, depending on your support network and needs. But it often also brings positive or quirky things.
Today I’m having a particular bad day and would like to help everyone who is in a not so great mood to focus on the good things for a moment. When life can seem harsh, we can decide to focus on the good things, just for a moment and deal with hardships later.
My personal superpower is building things. I have very strong spacial thinking and love to build things, be that computers, Minecraft stuff or machines. I get a lot of positive feedback for this and i consider this my greatest skill.
What is your superpower, your favorite skill, the thing that makes you unique or just different?
My brain is hyperspatial – I literally sort all of my memories spatially. It means when I return to a location (or look at photos or just think of a location), I get a memory cascade. Useful when trying to recall some things, navigate, work with spatial tools, visualize higher order datasets, etc. When studying math (some at the grad school level), it means things like spatial transformations (like the Reimann sphere) are wholly intuitive.
It comes with the tradeoff that I have almost no temporal recall. I cannot remember the order in which events occurred – simple examples might be the order in which a conversation proceeded. I’ll remember all the details of the conversation, but it’s jumbled together. I feel like I’m one of the aliens in the movie Arrival, trying to have a conversation with someone linear. Conversely, this lack of temporal awareness drives some people around me nuts and I apologize all the time.
This sounds like me but more pronounced. Do you want to elaborate what situations this comes in especially handy or is otherwise interesting? I would love to hear it.
So I’m not sure if it’s atypical or just an outlier. Decades ago, when I was in junior high and they’d give you those fill-in-the-bubble aptitude tests, to try to help give you an idea of what courses you should focus on in high school, they would have a category for spatial relations – and I would score in the 99th percentile. Do schools still do these sorts of things? Probably on computer now.
Digression: spatial memory kicking in while remembering those tests. I remembered the desk I was sitting in while filling in that test, the room, the context of the school relative to the streets in the town. It’s like starting all the way zoomed in on something in Google Earth and then the memory causes you to rapidly zoom out grabbing contexts all the way. End digression.
I ended up pursuing a career in geophysics. One of the fun things in geophysics is applying electromagnetic field theory to the earth – basically figuring out how electrical and magnetic fields interact with the materials in the earth. Sometimes this is with natural fields (like the earth’s magnetic field), or through artificially created sources (like injecting electricity into the ground). I’ve built my own devices to do mineral exploration using electromagnetic fields – but I didn’t always do the math for it to start, rather I started with my own intuition (visualizing 3D field lines). From there I’d plug my expected geometry into software that did the calculations (sometimes software I’d have to write) to verify that my intuition was correct. And it usually is.
So my brain goes something like: assume we’re looking for an object of this geometry, and we have a transmitter geometry like this, then over here we’d need a receiver with this geometry to maximize the information density… Ah, let’s plot that up. Okay, not crazy. Let’s build it.
Things like this (not my image):
Thats awesome! Maybe I should have thought of geophysics as well.
The awareness of buildings is something peeps usually look at me funny for. I cant tell you the names of my teachers or classmates from high school or elementary school but I can tell you what each room looked like, where it was in the building and probably how thick the walls were.
Have you ever tried minecraft? It’s kind of my go to thing to get my brain worked out a bit in that department. Building complicated structures and machines.
I‘m thinking what other hobbies might benefit from this type of thinking.
I have an immaculately sorted Lego collection. It’s like Minecraft, but older ;)
I don’t play Minecraft but I understand the appeal. I spent far too much time basebuilding in No Man’s Sky, which has a similar gameplay loop. :)
I used to play a lot of Descent. I don’t think anything like it truly exists in modern gameplay, where you’d have zero reference directions – not even up or down – when entering a level. Figuring out how to map the levels was always my favourite. In Descent 3 online multiplayer, I’d run spiral patterns around people in dogfights using the flightstick, and they could never keep me targetted. Six degrees of spatial freedom of movement and you can create the weirdest rollercoaster of a flight pattern. Sure, they could corner me in a tunnel or something, but in an open space dogfight, I was king. I miss that game.
I’ve always wanted to try Portal but don’t have time. Can’t consume all the things and run the business…
That sounds very cool! I loved lego when I was young.
Havent played no mans sky but I can see the appeal as well. I play x4 which is similar but more automation focused afaik. You start by flying your own ship, dogfighting, accumulate more ships and build a fleet, build dozens of space stations that produce stuff, ships that transfer and sell the stuff, have interstellar allegiances, wars etc etc. you basically go from nobody to ruler of the solar system so to speak. Pretty insane. German game, a little jank here and there but I love it.