The subjective experience of my brain

I’m at a 3 on this. I can do visualization at a 2 but it requires an enormous effort (paradoxically) of relaxation beforehand, so that I may as well be asleep. Extremely familiar things like my grocery store or my mom’s face I can recall at a 2 if I concentrate. My dreams are at a 2. Presumably if I followed through on the fairly intense desire to learn how to draw, this would improve.

Curiously, I also don’t have much of an internal monologue. Maybe 2% of the time my thinking is in the form of words, and it’s usually when I’m imagining the way to communicate something. According to the internet, I’d be among the worst NPCs in terms of lacking original thought. But when it comes to the actual business of communicating in spoken or verbal form, I’m a high-end outlier. This level of skill comes equally from practice and from obsessive reading (and in the last few years, listening to podcasts).

The subjective experience of my mind 95% of the time would be best described as racing through a maze in the dark with occasional words and pictures and stops every 10 seconds or so to feel out the subjective weights of things before making a judgment. Except the color matches the level of daylight, so it’s not dark per se, it’s just that imagining the maze to be dark gives the right impression.

About 15% of the time there’s background music playing, equally likely to be something that’s stuck in my head, something I picked to listen to, or something I’m making up as it goes. 80% of the time it’s metal, because that’s what I listen to and write. 10% of the time it’s classical, and 10% of the time it’s something a bit off-the-wall. Right now I have that first part of The Four Seasons stuck on repeat, unfortunately. I don’t listen to music very often, maybe once a week, so it’s pretty easy to put a finger on the scale.

See, now that I thought about that I remembered I listened to this song last week, so now it’s the one playing: