[angus-prune]

Feynman had a party trick where he could time a minute in his head by counting the seconds and count up the number of lines in a newspaper article.

A friend of his tried and couldn't do it, but was able to hold a conversation while timing a minute, which Feynman couldn't do.

They realised that while Feynman was counting the minute, he was counting verbally (but silently), while the friend was visualising a counter - or Feynman was using the speech centre, so could do a visual task at the same time, while the friend was using the visual centre, so could do a verbal task.

Something as simple as counting in their head was done completely differently.

[ddrdrck_]

That is an extremely interesting experiment, I had never heard about it before. Searching for it, I found the original article by Feynam (.pdf scan) : http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf

[ontouchstart]

His visual thinker friend is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tukey