[hinkley]

I had idetic memory until sixteen or seventeen, which is quite late. But over time my ability to visualize things in my head has almost entirely shifted from pictures to shapes. I barely picture things anymore, but I know the space they occupy down practically to the millimeter. I am absolutely the guy you want to pack your car for you when you have to move, because I will get three more boxes into your car.

My kid moved recently, and I looked at his backpack, said this will fit behind the driver’s seat. It did, with about the thickness of a magazine to spare.

I have ADHD, which most people will tell you generally comes with a slight reduction in working memory. Up until ten years ago I would have sworn in court that I had an excellent working memory. Early in my career I was known for tackling big architectural shifts and managing to complete them with only one or two regressions. That’s a hell of a lot of plates to keep spinning, even if you can enter flow state practically on demand like I could.

I know now that I have normal ADHD brain, so how the hell was I doing this? It was a watching of Sherlock Holmes that finally cracked the code. I finally realized that I build mind palaces every time I work a difficult problem - but without pictures, which is why I didn’t know I was doing them. I build them the way a person who was blind from birth would do it. The same way I avoid bumping into walls going through my house in the dark. The same way I know there’s a truck in my blind spot. Each “object” occupies space that I can recall or turn around in my head.

And that’s how I used to shred code into pieces and then reassemble them like making the second build in a set of LEGO.