[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.