What is something you thought you knew your whole life and only just recently found out you were wrong the whole time?
Mine is that at my age (barely made it into Gen Z on the old end) I just found out today that a Bo Weevil is an insect (beetle) and not some kind of mole or similar rodent.
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The way we use our brain. I thought that everybody's brain was used similarly to hire I use mine. But I'm fact everybody did it differently.
For instance, some people use more of their visual cortex to do maths, and assign colors to different numbers. For some maths takes place more in the language part, or timekeeping part.
Richard Feynman did some experimenting with this: https://youtu.be/lr8sVailoLw ( from 2.08)
But it makes sense, in school nobody tells you how to use your brain, they just give assignments and look at the outcome, also you don't really control how your brain works, you can train it to do some things more efficient, but you can't learn to do maths in your visual cortex.
I recently saw a video of a girl being able to spell words backwards really fast and the way it was described is that she just saw the text of the word in her mind and just read the letters backwards. That is so fascinating to me because that is just so so far from how my brain works, I don't see shit.
That sounds like aphantasia.
Until maybe 10 years ago, I thought that was some exceptionally rare condition, and that I'd be instantly able to tell who had that by how they acted because that person would be so weird or different than everyone else.
Turns out lots of people have it, including my mother.
It was so weird to me, because I have an inner monologue and it's pretty much always going. And I can "hear" it inside my mind. I can visualize anything I can think about, even watch "movies" with a "soundtrack" in my own mind. It's so omnipresent in my life, and that's just not how everyone's brain can work.
And of course, people who don't have that in their mind are no less intelligent or anything. Maybe it's easier for them to focus than it is for me! Lol
But when I first heard about it, I wondered things like, "How can they read?" or "How can they know what something looks like from a description, or how can they understand how something would be moved in a 3D space without actually moving it?" Lol
I do have an inner monologue and when I try to visualise something the closest thing I can get is my inner monologue describing the features of the thing I'm trying to see. But no picture appears. It's like my brain only saves the concepts of things, like an apple is round, red, has a little brown stem etc.
Yeah, there are two kinds (probably with different names). Aphantasia is where there's no "mental video/images". I think there's a different name for "no internal monologue" and/or "no mental sound".
A person can have one or the other, or both, or neither
Fuck me, I just tried that and it's so much easier. She's on to something.