Comment by soulofmischief

Comment by soulofmischief 2 days ago

This is easily corroborated by taking hallucinogens. Your subjective experience is a simulation, augmented by your senses.

Personally I often catch myself making reading mistakes and knowing for a fact that the mistake wasn't just conceptual, but an actual visual error where my brain renders the wrong word. Sometimes it's very obvious because the effect will last for seconds before my vision "snaps" back into reality and the word/phrase changes.

I first noticed this phenomenon in my subjective experience whenever I was 5 and started playing Pokémon. For many months, I thought Geodude was spelled and pronounced Gordude, until my neighbor said the name correctly one day and it "unlocked" my brain's ability to see the word spelled correctly.

The effect is so strong sometimes that I can close my eyes and imagine a few different moments in my life, even as a child, where my brain suddenly "saw" the right word while reading and it changed before my eyes.

thoughtpeddler 2 days ago

Just want to say this is a really good description of our brain's simulation, and I have experienced the same catching-the-misread-word phenomenon, and it's a subtle reminder about how this is all working. But does this mean our wires are crossed in a particular way that is uncommon? I haven't heard others share a similar experience.

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soulofmischief 2 days ago

I'm not sure. At times I've wondered if I have something similar to dyslexia. There are few common failure modes with me such as flipping consonants or vowels between adjacent words, or writing down a word and it being the wrong one.
My brain seems to store/recall words phonetically, possibly because I taught myself to read at age 3 with my own phonetic approach, but also possibly due to how I trained myself out of a long spell of aphasia during high school by consciously relearning how to speak in a way that engaged the opposite hemisphere of my brain; thinking in pitches, intonation, rhyme, rhythm, etc. and turning speaking into a musical expression. I'd read about this technique and after months of work I managed to make it work for me. So in that aspect, there really might be some crossed wires out of necessity.
I was homeless in high school and thus too poor to visit doctors and get scans done, so I'm really not sure if the assumed damage to my left hemisphere which I experienced was temporary or permanent, or even detectable. The aphasia was coupled with years of intense depersonalization and derealization as well. The brain is a very strange thing and many events in my life such as the ones described above have only reinforced to me how subjective my experience really is.

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