# Letter from an Alien Mind

### *Cause wow what is everyone even doing?! *

* * *

You know how you sometimes hear about people seeing colors when they hear words, or how they memorize thousands of phone numbers on sight, or that some navigate intricate mind palaces full of detailed sensory information?

Ever wonder if you are secretly one of those people that have some highly unusual inner experience that no one else has?

Well. I’ve found mine, guys.

When driving a car, I navigate using *Satellite View*!

So fucking wild, right? 

I’ve polled over 30 people about this now, and I’ve found 3 people that do the same. One is my brother.

Now the part that absolutely blows my fucking mind - with all due respect, speaking as the comparative alien here - but … whyyyyyy?

Satellite view has *more* information. Some of that information can ever be useful. When I’m navigating, I can see I need to take the third left and I can *recognize* the third left coming up cause it’s near that one tree down the road. Trees, bridges, parking lots, high risers, lawns, farmland … they all have shapes on the map that I can use to recognize more quickly where I am, where I’m going, and it looks prettier too!

So I asked people why they use Map view (ha, >90% chance this is the part that feels self-evident to you. Ahum. I, however, am mind-blown, thank you very much!). I’ve heard two main responses.

The first is that Map view is the default and it hadn’t occurred to them to change it. Google Earth was released in 2001. I’m not sure when Satellite view released, but it’s been at least a decade if not two. I’m rather fascinated how Realizing An Action Is Possible works in the brain. Sometimes there is a weird smell coming from the fridge, and it takes me something like 1-3 days to *realize* that I can take physical actions to remedy this. I’ve always found that rather bizarre. How come us humans can *know* a thing is possible, and sometimes even *notice* we would like to resolve the issue, but then not *realize* we can move our bodies to make this happen?

The second reason is that Satellite view makes it harder for many people to get the information they want. The majority of the people who *have* tried it or use it actively in some niche cases, tend to report it’s harder to notice where streets are, and what they are named cause there is *so much else* going on on the screen.

I find this flabbergasting.

To me, this concern sounds like someone walking down a straight road and then *closing their eyes* cause they know where they want to go anyway. Or if you had the ability to turn off color vision, do you imagine you’d do it outside of, say, meals and traffic navigation?

But then I realized I *do* actually habitually put on sound blocking headphones when working. I’m making myself effectively deaf. The car noises and the wind, and the occasional voices around me are distracting and not relevant to my work. Visually I don’t experience anything like this, but I wonder if you made some measure of “preferred sensory load per sense” if you’d end up with a normal distribution where I’m dangling on the low end of auditory sensory load preference and I shot out the top of the distribution for visual sensory load preference[^1948pr1nt8f].

My point being … minds can be surprisingly different and qualia can vary wildly in ways you can’t predict, and then when you want to build a bridge back to empathizing with other people’s experiences, then you have to go and find analogous experiences in yourself or you are just left going “?!” about what the hell it’s like to be that other person.

So I’m wondering how we can notice where our qualia diverge from each other. I’m 38 before anyone commented on me using Satellite view for navigation. Similarly it took ages for aphantasiacs to be “noticed”. And in the same vein, I suspect some people don’t experience “consciousness” in the way most of the rest of us do but they are tremendously hard to notice!

I’d be excited for something like a grand survey of qualia to exist, including all the presumably >100 synethesias that are out there. Or maybe there is some other tool that can be constructed that probes for unique qualia more effectively. The data collection on this would not just let participants notice if they are unique outliers on some experience, but would also allow us to identify clusters of common experiences and possibly relate them to demographics or life outcomes.

I’d be so surprised if we didn’t discover some interesting patterns. Wouldn’t you? :D

[^1948pr1nt8f]: 2 minutes on scholar google and perplexity make it immediately evident that these are actual research areas with actual insights and actual information. I’m not reporting on that cause I’m mostly preoccupied at the moment with the shininess of “oh man, how do minds differ?!”