I had a friend who could do this. It was remarkable how easy it was for him. I asked him how he did it, he said it was easy. When he thought of the word, the visual image of the word would appear right in front of him in his mind, and he would just scan the letters backwards. It made me realize that some people's "default" mental powers can be significantly different.
You might be alluding to this by putting "default" in quotes, but I think things like are pretty much always learned skills.
The various memory competitions are probably the best example of this. It's not there are people who can just pick up a deck of cards and naturally remember the order they were in. Everybody learns, and uses, extensive tricks to do so. The most typical for memory competitions is to associate each card with some vivid image in your mind. And so when you memorize the cards, you're not really memorizing the cards but instead creating a story in your mind of how those images interacted, and then reciting that story back.
Language itself is another example of this. The above paragraph is 94 words, yet you could probably recite it pretty much verbatim in terms of what was said, even if using different words. Think about how absurdly remarkable that is. You just "memorized" 94 words without even trying. So I guess it begs the question of why some guy would spend a bunch of time teaching himself to reverse phonemes. The linked YouTube channel is called Alone Time Club, and features videos of him in the wilderness alone, and now he's cashing in his skill to some quirky 15 seconds and a few dollars. Probably a better expenditure of free time than what most of us do, all things considered!
> but I think things like are pretty much always learned skills.
What if it isnt? What if there is a zoo out there, with loads of different people with different skills just because the brain-maturation took a entirely different turn when they were a baby/child or the genetics did play out strange? Why is such a world of mental diversity so threatening to even just imagine? I find the thought of a alien mind just waiting for a coffe right next-to-me exhilarting and fascinating. Not to look at the sky, just to listen and find out that not everyone is a carbon copy of me (as my lazy flat copy mirror-neurons default implies) is a great adventure.
I don't find it threatening, just contradicted by life experience. My background includes chess at a reasonably high level, and it's always always the same: just an absolutely obscene amount of work that gradually yields emergent skills, that includes things that many people think are "natural" like visualization and memory.
For instance the 'trick' of casually memorizing games you play isn't a feat of some super-human memory. It's, inadvertently, the exact same 'trick' that memory competitors use. When a reasonably strong player looks at a chess board, it begins to tell an often vivid story of what's happened and what will happen. And stories are really easy to remember for everybody. So memorizing your games isn't really like memorizing a series of arcane moves, but instead more like recounting a familiar tale.
We can even cheat, because so long as you remember all the key points of a game, you can generally reconstruct the filler in between - again, just like telling a story. It's why it can be much harder to remember games against weaker players than your peers - their moves, and thus stories, often don't make as much sense, and so it gets pretty fuzzy pretty quickly. This is also why you might often notice things like strong players able to relatively easily replay 80 distinct moves of an arbitrary game, but have difficulty remembering the exact date the game was played.
'Talent'/genetics obviously plays a role, but mostly only in determining what your peak potential is. But the fact that the overwhelming majority of people (including e.g. grandmasters) will never get anywhere remotely near to their genetic potential in anything makes it largely inconsequential in practice. In any case, we certainly aren't carbon copies. These 'tricks' I'm mentioning here only really emerge after many years of concerted and dedicated study of something. The overwhelming majority of people will never do anything like this, so whether ones brain is an 'alien mind' or not becomes largely a matter of semantics.
Although you're correct that this occurs (and is likely the case of those with these abilities greater than 9/10 if I had to guess without any data), there are definitely savants out there like Kim Peek unusual brains that allow them to do all kinds of things. I think that's all the other commenter was talking about.
Agreed, and research agrees also, that the largest determining factor in skills is the time and effective work put into developing that skill. Unknown factors are a much smaller component and can give someone an edge at the highest performance levels.
But for some reason people don’t want think that the largest component is lots of work.
It is only contradicted by your perception of the life experience of others, which is guided by what you are already familiar with. You are also not psychic, but you draw conclusions about the minds of others that you cannot know.
The human mind is ambiguous, and you have created a comforting narrative to explain it. This is a very human response to the threat of ambiguity.
It is not clear which part 'this' refers to. We as humans know very little about our brains.
The original commenter assumes there is little variation in the human mind based on a narrow observation about memory feats in chess, then generalized that idea to the entirety of humanity.
I was mostly referring to the "you have created a comforting narrative to explain it" (but also, a little bit, as a joke, kind of referring to the "you are also not psychic" part, but only as a joke)
It may not be so much threatening as much as knowledge is also a lot like this innate capability:
> Language itself is another example of this. The above paragraph is 94 words, yet you could probably recite it pretty much verbatim in terms of what was said, even if using different words. Think about how absurdly remarkable that is. You just "memorized" 94 words without even trying.
I just recently watched a YouTube video about how someone known for her bad memory taught herself to memorize 3141 digits of pi. Took her about 2 hours just to recite it. It's really impressive what the mind can do if you train it. (Search YouTube for Answer in Progress pi)
It's like the people who can see the calendar in their heads. You ask them about an exact date from 1969 and they'll say, oh yeah, it was Monday.
Or people who don't have an internal dialogue. This is probably the most weird to me because it is common and I can't comprehend how they manage their thoughts.
I can think in dialog, or I can think in 'no-words' which is language-less thought. I tend to program while thinking in 'no-words' or when I'm speaking my non-native language (English). When I think in 'no-words,' I sometimes find ideas that cannot be translated and can get stuck. A pretty common one is the idea of 'this-here' and 'this-there' when comparing two things that are currently unlabeled. I have to remember to back up and label the things with language, then compare them.
Another common one is when trying to explain complex interactions that are quite simple in 'no-words' and I have to start diagramming things, then explain the diagram in language.
This happens to me a lot when writing fiction; I can see the action or feel the emotion I want, but finding the words to describe can sometimes be very difficult. (Also depends on what time it is, I'm particularly bad at it in the morning.)
Related is when you forget a word. You've got the specific meaning in your mind, and you know there exists a word for it, and it's in your brain somewhere, but you just can't get the appropriate neurons to fire to give it to your conscious mind. (And then it might randomly appear to your during some other random task.)
While to some degree I think I’ve had somewhat similar experiences,
at other times (when I was a teen) when I’ve specifically tried to think-without-words, I thought I had, and then shortly afterwards either realized or thought I had realized, that I had been thinking with words, and had just been hiding the words from myself?
When I was a teen, I discovered some people didn't have an internal monologue and so I experimented in doing that (under the very misguided impression that it would allow me to think faster, to my defense I was a teen...). It's actually possible to switch to that way of thinking relatively quickly if you make the effort, feels strange though.
Thoughts just appear- its like the subconcious just lets them float upwards into you. Which is funny, because when asked how you did arrive at the solution, you just do not have any answer, and then your subconcious makes up a whole story.
>Or people who don't have an internal dialogue. This is probably the most weird to me because it is common and I can't comprehend how they manage their thoughts
Lol, I am someone with no such internal dialog. The idea that you self-narrate every thought in your brain seems utterly baffling to me. And... It sounds absolutely maddening, and really inefficient. Like that must be SO annoying?
I think largely in the form of something I call "thought-shapes".
I think these people are all around us and we just don't always recognize it.
I have a friend who, in his youth, decided one day that he was going to be left handed because a teacher he admired was left handed and he wanted to be like them. He is genuinely left handed now. I'd heard of the opposite - often with severe treatment - with asian parents, but never that.
On that note, I had a left handed teacher who could write sentences in kanji in full mirror mode two handed (both swapping left and right and double-swapping left-right/up-down). His parents had beaten him and taped down his disobedient left hand.
I can read at full speed upside down. It makes absolutely no difference. It's a good party trick, and one had a practical purpose where someone was presenting an offer letter to me which had all the wrong values, which I knew because it was on the desk in front of them and I simply read it, so I pre-empted them and told them to go get a new letter made, much to their confusion.
If you've ever known someone who was an expert non-digital artist, yes, it is true that they do typically practice a ton to hone their skills, but the ability to simply capture an object, person, animal or scene at a glance is uncanny.
I know someone who has that skill, but for politics. They look at the situation and see exactly the players, the motives, etc. As far as I can tell, their entire career is based on this. A weird talent I've never heard anyone else describe.
A lot of people simply don't have a dominant hand. They're typically grouped with the people for the hand they write with, but that's a pretty incomplete picture. I suspect your friend who "switched" never had a dominant hand in the first place.
I'm one of those folks. I write left handed, but other stuff tends to be mostly, but not completely, right handed. This is mainly since there's a small advantage to right handedness (baseball gloves fit, mouses are there, guitars are right handed by default, etc.). There's a lot of randomness: I eat right handed, except when using chopsticks (left-handed), including long cooking chopsticks, but tongs (which have a similar purpose) are with the right hand.
Assumed unrelated, but responding to a different part of your post: I can also read and write in mirror image with little loss of speed. I've never thought of that being particularly special. I just started randomly taking notes in mirror image in high school out of boredom (and right-to-left is slightly more comfortable for lefties).
Switching hand to right hand only was definitely forced in the Irish education system back in the 50s/60s, I have older relatives who were forced to switch hand.
There are also people who completely ambidextrous, look at the professional snooker player Ronnie O'Sullivan on YouTube. He plays against people who would have put in equal amount of time tin the 10s of thousands of hours and no other professional player can play as fluently on either hand.
> the word would appear right in front of him in his mind
Could that be somehow related to synesthesia? Not long ago I've read: "Wednesday is indigo blue" by Richard E. Cytowic and David M. Eagleman. Super interesting book and topic even if you're not into cognitive sciences. The book goes in depth how synesthetes radically perceive one or more features (sound, vision, taste) in "strange" ways compared to non-synesthetes. Highly recommended read though.
That might be his conscious experience when performing the skill, but doesn't really explain it. The real skill is in quickly reversing the appropriate phonemes. And then the question is why does that, controlling for practice time, come easier to some than others.
That's really crazy. I mean spelling words backwards in your minds eye seems like something you could pick up rather easily, but then deconstructing the associated sounds and reconstructing what they'd sound in reverse on-the-fly is really something.
I'd guess one would use a voice recorder to practice the skill, that way you get pretty fast feedback on how to make the right sounds in reverse. As a child I practiced to say my name in reverse, as the voice recorder in Windows 3.1 (or 95?) was an obvious invitation to play around with. It could reverse, slow-down or speed-up (Mickey mouse voice!), and gave you a visual feedback.
I used to sing hymns in church backwards under my breath. I'm not fast, but I can talk backwards too if it's just word by word. Thinking of and saying an entire sentence back to front is significantly harder.
I'm not fluent at it, but I think that might be because I overthink it. Often my first gut instinct is pretty close though. I can do it at what you might call a halting speed.
I blame Amadeus of course. Gniklat sdrawkcab si nuf!
um, are we talking about English? because most words spelled backwards would be ambiguous how to read. With amount of different reading "rules" in English, it arguably close to being ideographic.
I don’t think they mean reversing the spelling and pronouncing that as a new word. I think they mean taking the pronounced word and reversing the waveform. Ie what you would hear if you were playing an audio recording in reverse.
2/ play the recording in reverse and imitate it (this can take a couple of tries)
3/ then record yourself speaking backwards
It's more fun if in step 3 you do something that would seem weird in reverse, like pouring a glass.
Then you play that video in reverse, and you have something strange: you saying things in a weird but intelligible voice, while the liquid goes back to the bottle.
A coworker and myself were interviewing a candidate once for an iOS position and one of the things on his resume was an app that just reversed video. My coworker says "Oh that's neat, record me!" The guy pulls out his phone and starts up the app.
My coworker says what sounds like "Rih koff ra dom" and then the candidate plays it back. In the middle of our pretty crowded office, during a weird silent lull, this candidates phone just yells out "Motherfucker!"
For some reason that coworker had memorized how to say motherfucker backwards. He must have been waiting for that moment for a long time because it was perfect (if not quite work appropriate) timing.
The Muffs (the band) had a song with the ol' reverse vocal studio gimmick [1]. On a lark I pulled it into Audacity and reversed it to confirm that it was in fact one of the lines from the chorus in reverse.
Hilariously, she would sing the line in reverse when live on stage [2] as well. (No doubt she memorized the line from the studio recording.)
Sorry if this sounds like a humblebrag, but I would sing songs backwards as a kid but then stopped after some time. Surprisingly it all came back few years ago and I can still hum the songs with some minor efforts. Human brains are fascinating.
I think this happened when I was learning Devanagari script which is an Abugida and it makes it (relatively) easy to talk backwards just by reversing the syllable order.
E.g. "मेरा जूता है जापानी" can be reversed pretty easily by just switching the syllables "रामे ताजू है नीपाजा"
An abugida (often also referred to as an alphasyllabary) is a writing system that combines consonants and vowels into a singular unit, with the consonant being the primary element, and the vowel secondary.
I am familiar with subreddit helper bots.
I wonder if there have been any such helper bots written for HN.
Eg: A dictionary bot.
The TV show Twin Peaks (with a huge cult following) had a "Red Room" scene shot with everyone walking/talking in reverse. The result is pretty amazing in creating a surreal out-of-the-world environment.
I had two classmates in school who could converse this way. It can't be that uncommon. They had independently learned how to do it and one was showing off and the other started talking back to him. We were 13 or 14.
The "I thought everyone could" stream of comments remind me of the Feynman story were he can count and read at the same time, while others can't (or something to that effect).
Somewhat related, my sister was a medical transcriber. For the younger crowd who may not realize what this is, doctors used to dictate their medical notes to tape recordings and the tapes were sent to services that would listen to the tape and type in the notes. So these recordings were full of all kinds of crazy medical terms, drug names, and non-native English speakers with thick accents.
My sister could put the tape playback headphone in one ear, type the doctor's notes, and carry on a normal conversation on speakerphone. The whole time she was having the normal conversation, she's typing away medical notes like a madman! It sounded like someone just beating the hell out of a keyboard.
I can do this as well. I thought everyone could do it, and just realised it's not the case.
I think it has to do with how you represent the words in your mind. For me there is no difference between "a word" and "a stream of letters". I can also speak fluently spelling out letters of words forward or backward without thinking.
"hello" and [h,e,l,l,o] is the same to me, and it requires no effort to switch from one to the other. I also picture the full [h,e,l,l,o] at once, it seems others have to rebuild the spelling from left to right in their head.
> Does it also come naturally to you to prononce "tuohguorht" as the reverse of "throughout"?
I'm not a native English speaker so the pronunciation of that kind of word (with gh and th) is not immediate to me. I know how to pronounce "throughout" more by tongue memory than by actual thinking.
I can picture "tuohguorht" clearly in my head but most likely don't pronounce it how it should if it were a real word.
But you highlight a good point here. I can very easily picture the forward and backward spelling, though I'm just "reading out loud the reversed word", I'm not actually reversing the sound as the person in the article,so it's a different form of visualisation, based on letters rather than sounds.
I am able to do this. I can also write upside down and backwards. The interesting thing is, I am left handed, as was da Vinci. I wonder if the man who can speak backwards is left handed.
I also find it easier to read right-to-left. I wonder if it has to do with reversed brain wiring somewhere.
I also know someone who could do this, with arbitrary sentences. According to his story, he was fascinated with talking backwards as a child, and apparently that practice was enough to make it natural for him.
One of my favorite memories from theater was a production of City of Angels in SF. A character walked forward and said something, then somehow or other (memory failure) someone said "let's undo that." So he walked backwards and said the same thing, backwards.
Wonder if/how people could do this before sound recording devices existed that could prove you did it correctly. I can imagine intellectuals in wigs: "sdrawkcab gnikaeps ma I! Did I do it right?" "Hmmm, I suppose we'll never know..."
My sister can do this— when she was learning to read she would figure out what words would sound like backwards, and over time learning both pronunciations just became the way she learned new words. She was amazed not everyone can do it.
Trivia reference: Kenneth Branagh refused to dub himself in the scenes in Tenet filmed backwards, so he learned to talk backwards the dialogue in these.
As far as I understand it, you can't grow out of dyslexia. As someone who is dyslexic, I've spent a lot of time following research to understand it more, the best paper imo is Lyon, Shaywitz, & Shaywitz, 2003:
"Dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurobiological in origin"
There is some debate about dyslexia being over-diagnosed, it is very likely that different forms (some of which can be cured or that simply pass growing up) of other cognitive impairments are improperly categorized as dyslexia.
