Stein Strindhaug

My imagination ability is certainly very varied across the different domains... Visually, I think I have hypophantasia; I can imagine pretty much anything visual I want though I have very little control of exactly what I se, I just see very short half second glimpses of what I imagine in any random configuration. I can only consciously control very abstract things like simple geometric shapes and faces which I'm very good at recognising and remembering, anything else is just brief random "stock photos" with very little detail or colour information which is pretty annoying when I paint or draw, because I always need to find a perfect reference photo, and I have to paint with a colour to figure out if it looks good (which is fortunately easy to undo or modify afterwards when I work digitally) But with music, I probably have hyperphantasia: I can hear music very clearly in my mind, not just the melody but pretty much the whole polyphonic experience of music I know well. Though not the lyrics, because I don't really hear lyrics when it's sung; it just is mumbling to my ears (probably because I have auditory processing disorder). I can also make the instruments play the "wrong notes" isolate a handful of instruments in my mind and only hear it (requires that I've heard it a few times, or it's my own invented music) and I can make the instruments play a different song entirely. In fact most of the time unless I'm extremely focused on a different task or currently listening to (external) music; my mind is almost always filled with music, kind of what people call an ear worm, but it's not annoying to me because it's not simple loops of a melody but full compositions and it's normally pretty varied; and it's no effort at all to just mentally switch to a new song if I start to get tired of the one that is playing. It's only ever annoying when my mind keeps defaulting to a genre I don't like that much for several days; like that one time during the lockdowns when I was hearing waltz and marches in the style of The New Year's Concert for about a week. With smell and taste; I can't really experience them from memory; but since I'm an experienced home cook; I can reason about taste and smell and figure out combinations that will taste good together without actually "mentally tasting it". But when choosing between things I already know (like teas, spices, perfumes) for what I'm in the mood for I have to smell every option to know what I want. Not sure if that's above or below normal ability. I can also "visualise" large codebases in my work; I'm a programmer; and mentally search for things in the code and mentally debug without even looking at the code. But it's not exactly "visual" information; it feels more like some sort of fractal in space of connected ideas and logic that I can zoom and out of or fold out sub dimensions or whatever... very hard to explain; but I think I'm somehow utilising my spatial navigation ability (way more than visual or language ability) to navigate the code in my mind. Whatever it is, it makes me extremely fast at debugging and generally very productive compared to most of my colleagues... well as long as the problem is interesting enough to stimulate me (I have ADHD and autism, so I'm not that good with boring trivial tasks).