Weird things about your brain

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Like for me,
I can untie all kinds of knots, but I can only remember how to tie a few with huge amounts of practice.

When I am looking at famous works of art (or pictures resembling them) I hear sounds, voices and stuff.

When I watch a video like the one Krabo posted of the Caminito del Rey I get visual to sensory synesthesia and feel like I am on a roller-coster.

My brain literally composes original production-quality music which I "hear" in my "mind's ear", whenever I am just waking up or just falling asleep. Occasionally in the middle of the day. Sometimes I hear human voices spontaneously saying things now too.

It's so detailed that I would think I was schizophrenic, except for one very important difference... all the music, sounds and voices seem to me to be occurring in my own thoughts, so I can tell I'm not schizophrenic. I'm not hallucinating, I'm spontaneously-producing. I think Synesthesia is involved in my case too.

As Mooms has heard me say before, this phenomenon is what I take my WP user name from. "Theta" refers to the type of brain waves your brain is making when you're falling asleep (when the spontaneous music is generated) and the "3D" part of my name refers to my spatial ability or alternately to how vivid the theta-wave phenomena are for me.

The music that gets composed is often unusual, and emphasizes strange and novel chord structures and progressions.

This sample (from a band I like, no surprise) comes very close to what it's actually like.
Zoom to 2:14 for the part I really want to show you.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iESc2QU71A0&feature=youtu.be&t=2m14s[/youtube]

Thank you Theta. This kind of music I like. Excellent band.

I'm so glad you enjoyed them! There's no greater privilege than being able to share something you love, and find that someone else enjoys it just as much. Thank you Krabo!

This is so fascinating! Thank you, and I like the music and can see what you like at 2:14. Do you write this down or play music also? What you say above also seems to solve the mystery of schizophrenia. Or is the latest science onto this?

It is not just this time. You have posted several things I like. But it is extremely difficult for me to say Thank you.

Sometimes when I watch the traffic outside, I can hear like people's voices talking to me. And when I redirect my mind, the effect disappears. This is strange.

That means even more to me then. I think I understand what you mean about saying thanks; certain things like that are hard for me too. Taking praise and criticism for example, I think because both make me feel unsafe. If someone criticizes me, I become afraid I've failed them or that I'm not good enough to do what needs to be done. If someone praises me, I feel unsafe because it puts me up on a pedestal I'm afraid to fall from.

I nearly always know what the time is, to the nearest five or ten minutes, even if I haven't looked at a clock or watch, or anything else which might indicate the time, for several hours.

Furthermore, even though I have had serious problems with insomnia and sleep-cycle patterns all my life, I can almost always wake up on time, whatever the circumstances and without the assistance of an alarm or anything else, whenever necessary.

I've no idea how common or uncommon these phenomena are, or how they might relate to AS issues, if indeed they do.

Thank you!
I got really excited when I saw this thread had been made, by the way. It's a great idea. I bet a lot of people have things they want to say about this or stories to tell, and it's fascinating to see all the different brain-things that people are experiencing.

Actually, I'm beginning to wonder if it's nearly impossible for me to be a musician, because I have such a strong emotional response to good music that it would interrupt whatever I was doing. For instance, there are lots of songs that I want to sing along to, but I can't ever finish certain lines because either the music or the lyrics or both move me to tears. I need to learn musical notation better, but I don't have a great grasp of it yet, to where I could just identify a note by sound and jot it down. So the music remains only in my head. Anything I wrote down would be multiple parts, too, so it would take a long time and since it came to me while snoozing, I might rapidly forget parts of it before I could write them down.

I'm not sure if my experience sheds light on schizophrenia or not, or if this reflects the latest science exactly... very interesting thought though. I know that basically, schizophrenia often causes auditory or even visual hallucinations. There are researchers who have wondered if there is common pathology shared between schizophrenia and ASD, but as far as I know, the research is leaning away from that. Schizophrenia falls into the category of mental illness, and ASD is neurologically-based (has to do with the neurons themselves physically, rather than what the neurons are doing).

I'm not a scientist; I do read about neurological issues though whenever I come across new information. Maybe, if I can be permitted to non-scientifically muse about these issues, I can share some thoughts and ponderances though:

If there was a relationship between ASD and schizophrenia, my first guess it would be that both might be reactions that different brains have to extreme strain of some kind. Schizophrenia literally means "split mind", and I've had conversations with a few people who are familiar with it which make it sound like in an effort to cope, a brain which is becoming schizophrenic divides into two parallel networks; one healthy and one unhealthy, and the two aren't consciously aware of what each other are doing/thinking. Perhaps there are places where the two networks interconnect such as the audio and visual-processing regions of the brain which allows information from the unhealthy network to cross over into the conscious / healthy part of the mind... and maybe this is what produces hallucinations? I'm sure I'm butchering all of this and making a mockery of real science... sorry.

Now for the ASD part, to continue this line of pseudoscientific imagination. Maybe brains mature with ASD neurology due to stress and strain as well, but the difference is that with ASD, the brain remains one network, healthy or not. People with ASD brains often seem to have over-sensitive or "over-clocked", hyperactive mental processing. This can result in strange and unusually-gifted forms of intelligence and oversensitivity to sensory stimuli. I am wondering if this is the attempt of a brain under stress as it matures into adulthood to adapt to all the demands or information being thrown at it... we're expected to learn and know so much, so fast nowadays. Maybe some of us become a little too good at it.

So to tie this all together, maybe, just maybe, what I'm experiencing is perfectly possible in a healthy ASD brain. Researchers have found that ASD brains "produce more information at rest" than non-ASD brains; that is, they're always active and processing something. Which could be what the unconscious parallel network of a schizophrenic brain is doing, only since an ASD brain is fully connected, it remains aware and "in possession" of all the extra cognitive content taking place. It could be that I'm experiencing healthy, well-adjusted, single-neural-network "schizophrenia"... but I remain aware of all the input from my brain, so it's not true schizophrenia because I can sense where the input is coming from in my brain and I remain sane and healthy.

And while I'm falling asleep or waking up and having lucid dream time, it's even easier for my dreaming mind to play around with musical input I've heard before and imagine new melodies and harmonies, just like how when you dream it's often of places that don't really exist or that you've never seen before. So I get input from my unconscious mind into my conscious in the form of new songs, and I'm unaware of *how* I'm making the music since it's coming from my unconscious. That's the thing about it... the music I "hear" is involuntary and just happens, and I'm not aware of consciously or intentionally producing the sound I hear, but I can still tell that it's not coming from outside myself.

And I'm a person who is at least somewhat anxious most of the time, and there were lots of times when I was little where I thought I had to try harder to force my mind to do certain things... so maybe that's part of what lead to me developing some kind of ASD? ...Along with the genetic causes, of course, because while there seem to have to be some environmental factors to trigger ASD, it has especially strong basis in genes. And all of my brain-straining experiences were difficult, and it's no fun being anxious, but at the same time, maybe my brain paid me back by giving me something really beautiful to enjoy which has taken on a life of its own. A sort of musical augmented-reality.

Thetain3D: You say so many interesting things, I don't know where to start, and it is the end of the day, so here's what is from what is left of my brain for today.

My thoughts on schizophrenia come from observations of a person close to me who had auditory, sensory, and "idea" hallucinations. This person also seem very AS to me. It has occurred to me that what has happened is that she does not realize that certain thoughts are the mind speaking to itself. Because of AS, is misinterperiting the neural process. Then I see that there are people here with diagnosed schizophrenia or other phenomenea of the mind that seem to me, (probably wrong, am usually), connected.

I have sometimes had mild auditory things, like hearing music, or very super-realistic, hypnogogic kinds of experience involving sound or visuals. More so when younger.

I look forward to hearing more from all or any.

I am exactly the same, except fairly regular sleep cycle.

I find this very interesting. Thanks for posting your phenomena.