[jgrahamc]

Yes, but I have a strange ability to see certain patterns in data very quickly. I almost instantly saw without thinking that it contained Paul Graham.

This ability manifests itself on a daily basis in one useful fashion. I can look at an entire screen of text (say a log file) and almost immediately take the whole thing in and spot something 'odd' or 'interesting' to examine.

Drives me nuts watching people using computers though. I can find the button or icon they are slowly searching for in a flash.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Really!!

Up till now I'm the only one I know who was like that. But mine only works for proofreading -- and it seems to be declining with age :-( I used to be able to glance at a page and immediately get a feeling that "something is wrong." Then when looking more carefully I can see the misspelled words.

[whacked_new]

If possible, please answer the questions I posted alongside your post as well. This is very interesting :-)

As an aside, spotting spelling errors is not the same process as solving anagrams. Did you decrypt the anagram in the OP instantly as well? I would consider these two different things.

[pingswept]

That happens to me too. It's actually annoying. If I could dedicate the mental effort I unavoidably spend on background spell- and grammar-checking to something useful, I'd be a freaking genius.

[whacked_new]

Do you play "spot the difference" puzzles? Are they too easy for you? How about sudoku?

Sorry... I'm adding on more questions! Hope they aren't too cumbersome:

are normal anagram puzzles all trivial for you?

is "where's waldo" equally easy?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

I don't play puzzles much, but anagrams are usually easy. It doesn't seem to work as well with pictures. I don't know what "where's waldo" is.

Words to me often look like what they mean. My favorite example is "eager." It just looks like it's barely restrained, waiting to leap forward: a kind of "visual onomatopoeia" I guess. I used to think everyone was like this when I was a kid, but asking a few people about it soon pointed out that I was just a weirdo :-)

I think the reason it's declined with age is that as a child I read constantly - I always had my nose in a book - so words became associated with mental pictures. As an adult I read much less.

[pmjordan]

This sounds a little like Synaesthesia - which is common enough, and wouldn't exactly make you a weirdo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaesthesia

[whacked_new]

From his description I doubt it's synaesthesia. Usually it's a crossover in a fundamental perception (taste, smell, etc.), rather than an elaborate sensation "feeling as if it is jumping out." Also, it varies per-individual, suggesting that "eager" could have just as well seemed to, for example, "a monster that eats everything in its path."

My feeling is this is just a very strong "coupling" of vocabulary to the emotional centers. Fast activation, in other words. If this is the case, I also suspect it wouldn't correlate very much to anagram-solving ability.

[Angostura]

Judge Wapner's on in 15 minutes.

[joshu]

I can do this too.

I remember once figuring out that dataset was bad just from the way it scrolled by; everyone was baffled.

Same issues with watching people do stuff, too.

[whacked_new]

Would you mind looking at the questions I raised for the OP?

I heard a story about one of the pioneers in genetics around Watson's time; a woman, forgot her name, who once walked into a room where two researchers (also forgot name) were building a physical model of the double helix. It was at least a couple thousand plastic molecules. She took a look, said that there was one mistake, and turned around and left.

After studying the brain for years I still can't tell why this happens.