Working with AI the way I have been has got me thinking about the way my own brain and cognition works. Just sort of reflecting on the way I process things. Some of the things that have happened with my career over the last year.
I'm good at seeing patterns in things. I think. I have an instinct for it. I do weird math in my head, but can't explain how I did it. I can't do it on command. I see lateral connections other people don't between topics. I can hold and reason through huge amounts of information that normal people struggle with. It's not unusual for me to have four thoughts that I'm aware of going on at once.
I don't remember facts. Not easily. But I remember details about facts that point to things that point to clouds of other things, which relate to things I either know or can infer. It's a visual process, designed spatially.
I'm good at calculating vectors and geometry and the velocity or animation of things. I can catch absolutely anything in my mouth, for example.
I've always been this way. It's just way more pronounced as I get older.
Learning around the straight line
I suck at linear thinking. And the kind of thinking most people are good at. I'm incapable of reading social signals naturally, so I wrote a script in my brain to translate smells and pauses into social cues that I can process.
I do that kind of thing a lot. I wrote another one to convert dyslexia into speed reading. And one day, after trying to make sense of a pile of technical manuals in French for three months, I figured out that I had absorbed a practical understanding of the language by analyzing the delta between French and English, and figuring out the angle of the grammar.
What's funny here, is that reading isn't enough to actually know how to speak it. I also speak Hebrew, but I learned that one by trying to speak it. I still can't read it.
I never did well in school. I went to college three times. By the third time, I said fuck it, I know what's going to happen and took nothing but fun creative courses. That last one, I did incrementally. Did it for years because I was having a good time.
Schools are not designed for people who think like I do.
I've had trouble explaining the way I think.
How that thinking becomes art
I'm attracted to chaotic and non-linear forms of art. For example, I feel like I have a very particular understanding and appreciation of action painting that nobody else seems to share. I like the process of art. It feels less restrictive.
When I code, I have a preference to build the whole application at once. That's how it makes sense to me. There, it's not the order of it, so much as fitting it together like a puzzle or a living system.
Something that breathes.
I go down these long form creative rabbit holes that last for months or years. I forget to eat and sleep. But... they're very satisfying. I enjoy them.
I'm fortunate enough to have friends that keep me grounded, sometimes. When I remember to pop my head up and say hello.
And I have this real, actual problem, when I talk to people. A lot of, "I have no idea what you just said, but I'm into it."
These things aren't good or bad.
They just are.
I usually feel like an alien.