Something you're just good at with minimal effort and/or you learned much more quickly than average.
For me, it's paper snowflakes. My brain just seems to effortlessly figure out what cuts to make to the paper wedge to make it turn out exactly how I want it. Largely useless, but good fun and was a much-needed ego boost when I was a kid :]
my two special snowflake things:
i can stop my own hiccups at will 100% of the time
i have always lucid dreamed since as far back as i can remember, i genuinely believed that everyone experienced sleep like that until i was in my mid-twenties
Same here on the lucid dreams, I didn't even know it had a name, and I was surprised when people said that they don't control their dreams.
But the hiccups... Mate, you're a wizard.
I'm great with mechanical puzzles. I apparently have a really good intuition about how things interact.
I only know that I'm unique about it because of a military test my highschool made us take where I scored higher than 99% of people who took the test. I just thought it was the "easy" portion. I'm also pretty good at logic puzzles, but it definitely doesn't feel as "natural" as mechanical puzzles.
If you're wondering, no, I didn't go into engineering because it turns out I'm not really good at math.
With math, is it arithmetic that gives you trouble or the actual symbolic manipulation of mathematics?
I am hot garbage at keeping track of numbers but turn those fuckers into letters and (at least for me) it's off to the races. Then I just convert everything back to numbers in the last step before jamming it all into a calculator. This method saved my ass in 400-level biochemistry courses. (Annoyed the shit out of the grad students grading my exams, I'm sure...)
You may be better at "math" than you think :]
I assure you, I'm really just not good at math. It just doesn't click with me the same way physical systems do.
Being bad at math was the short explanation; the long explanation is because pure math is super unintuitive to me, I got low grades in it throughout public school and therefore never pursued a college that would go into it heavily, even though I love the sciences. I ended up just going to my mom's Alma Mater, which is a liberal art school and therefore didn't have an engineering department. I actually did end up getting a computational physics degree because I loved my intro to physics class so much. When I could actually relate the formulae to physical systems, I was good. Did great in my upper level calculus classes, too, because I took them in parallel to the physics classes that directly used them. However, the more theoretical classes like linear algebra I barely passed and when it got to really complicated particle/quantum stuff I suffered greatly. Wave functions are a blight upon this world and my electricity and magnetism final made me cry.
Good on you for just casually getting a computational physics degree without inherent math talent... like holy shit that's impressive!
I have also cried over coursework on linear algebra as well as electricity and magnetism :') Brutal stuff.
Please could you explain a bit more about the process you describe, above? Maybe with some simple examples? I'm woeful at maths but really good with mechanical and physical problems. If there's a way I can improve upon the former, I'd love to try.
Thanks in advance!
C = BxA
Move A underneath C and swap the equality
B = C/A
A lot of algebra is spatial manipulation.
Mechanical adept here too. I am very good at holding and manipulating 3d objects in my brain, so I can kinda always just tell how something goes together to work.
I lived in Canada for 6 months surviving on nothing but being a medical Guinea pig (I had no working permit and due to anonymity, very little was asked of people participating in medical trials, plus they paid a decent amount especially if pain or discomfort was involved); as part of this I went through a raft of IQ tests (there was always some gambling addiction trial going at UofT for some reason) and found out that, like you, I have exceptional visual intelligence - rotating objects in my head, and figuring out if something would fit together was super skills of mine. In every other way I’m decidedly average.
Wow we're actually very different there. My visualization skills suck. Like, I've tried that thing where you imagine an apple in your head and rotate it, but I can't even fully visualize a 2d apple. If I'm looking at a system though, I can just understand how it works without visualizing anything about it. Because of that, I did have to draw out some diagrams from the word problems on the aformentioned military test...
Probably a major part to why I'm still not fully convinced I'm actually doing anything out of the ordinary. I'm not using any special skills or anything - the questions on that test felt to me about the same as asking "what would happen if you pushed this wheel from the top of this hill".
Chess. I’ve been playing since I was a kid, and sometimes I’ll create new accounts on chess websites to see how quickly I’ll get them rated to 2000+. I’m living proof that chess players aren’t that smart though because I’m a dumbass when it comes to literally anything else.
I can move my eyes independently and it looks freaky as hell lmao
I saw a website once that taught me how to cross one eye. Now I'm teaching kids how to freak out their parents and teachers with this.
Writing sestinas. A lot of people tell me it's the hardest form of poetry, but for me it's always been the go-to.
I'll link to one I'll make in a bit, Lemmy's layout/format isn't great for something layout-specific.
I have really good hand-eye coordination, move very quietly, have fast reflexes, and am good at solving riddles.
I think it sets me up to be talented at a profession which pays very well but is very illegal so it shall go nameless.
Im really good at throwing balled up napkins into the trashcan.
I'm told I'm a talented public speaker and that I look calm on stage. Honestly I think I'm just better at hiding how nervous I am
I'm pretty good at sensing the emotions of people around me. It's not magic like some people think, but an obsessive awareness of small facial and body movements.
Oh, and writing dialogue is super easy for me, not sure why some people have a hard time with it.
These are possibly related. I am absolutely terrible at sensing people's emotions around me and understanding body language, and not so coincidentally, I am absolutely terrible at writing dialogue.
Understanding maths and remembering things in school, just don't ask me what you told me a second ago because it's already out my head.
I have unusual muscle control - I can make my eyebrows and knees dance, plus I am a regurgitator. Not as good as Stevie Starr but enough to have a disgusting party piece. I am disappointed that I never mastered the art of the flatulist.
Oh yeah, that too. I'll sometimes do it when standing wait for something, like a lift. Hopefully it isn't obvious from outside my trousers.
I'm polarizing, both in a good and a bad way, and I always have been.
No matter where I've been or what I've been doing, people tend to remember me. I've ran into teachers decades after I was in their classrooms and they instantly called me by name and remembered something I said or did in class. Same thing with old jobs. When I started teaching, some of the office staff instantly said "welcome back!"
Even casual acquaintances seem to pick me out quickly. Last week a random person I admittedly didn't remember myself said "I remember you at Borders" (back when that bookstore chain existed) and remembered an argument I made and how heated it got about what was (at the time) my controversial opinion that refinancing mortgages was a very bad idea and the fact they were so aggressively pushed on TV was a sign that the entire thing was going to go tits-up. That person remembered my opinion because they were mad at me for saying they were making a mistake... and they wound up being between one house they couldn't sell when the recession started and another house they could no longer afford to pay for that they were trying to move in to.
I didn't hold that over their head; actually I was glad they crawled out of that mess and were doing better. It's harder to be mad at people in person.
