It’s just really quiet I guess, but it’s normal to me. I only first thought about it as being different when someone told me their inner voice was being mean to them and wouldn’t shut up, which just completely baffled me. It led to my discovery that others actually really do have voices in their head, it’s not a metaphor or mental illness like I previously thought from TV.

I think it’s fundamentally similar to everyone else’s experience though. If I relax my brain, it will cycle through thoughts and memories as a train of thought, but there’s no sound or visuals. To me I just get the emotions and the concept. Using the famous apple example, I remember the experience of holding and eating an apple, the taste, smell, texture, shape, weight, physics, geometry, the emotions of eating it, it’s all there, but I feel it rather than see it.

Benefits

I’m really good at programming, maths, physics, science, that kind of thing, because I can “feel” the rules and intuitively solve things without even thinking about it logically. I tend to notice things other people miss just because they feel out of place, with almost nothing to go on. An example would be if I’m given an error message, I don’t even have to debug to find the problem, because it feels like the bug is over there in that function. I’m usually correct, but I can’t explain how I got there, which made school… difficult haha.

Sometimes I like to just sit down and close my eyes, and think about the concept of nothing, and just have a completely blank mind for a while. It’s really relaxing and restful, and it feels like time goes by 10x faster. It’s probably some kind of meditation but I don’t know the names of stuff like that. I’ve been told I’m very patient and calm.

Downsides

I’m extremely bad at learning second-hand. Either by reading or being shown or talked to. The only way I can ever learn anything is if I experience it first-hand, which made university… difficult haha. Jump in completely unprepared and fuck up kind of learner.

Visual descriptions in books are boring to me for obvious reasons. I skip those parts completely and only read the social and action parts. Poetry makes no sense at all to me, except haikus and rhymes. I get lost very frequently, and I struggle with visual logic puzzles. I struggle to remember the name of colours and distinguish them, but I have no colour blindness at all.

I’m extremely bad at explaining and describing things to other people, and also struggle to understand others’ explanations. When people are talking to me in a conversation, I don’t remember the exact words they said, only the emotional gist and meaning. When I’m talking to someone, I can’t really plan ahead what I’m going to say, and I can’t remember what I’ve already said, so if I’m interrupted at all I have to start again like a broken NPC in a video game. People get really frustrated with me, but I can’t really blame them lol

Drawing pictures is extremely challenging, I have to do it “mathematically” by ratio. Like ok the hair goes down 60% of their face, the curvature of their jaw it’s like almost straight, and angles more aggressively about half way to mildly curved then their chin comes out of nowhere at 80% to the bottom… I have no talent at all for drawing, it’s crazy hard for me, but I still do it anyway for fun. People are like just practice and you’ll improve! There’s no amount practice to replace something that’s completely missing haha

Anyway, proud of you if you actually read all that wild ride