Alex Rosenthal

That has a big effect on my memory, and it's also not just my mind's eye, it's also my mind's ear.

I think I have a little bit of a mind's ear, but I don't have a mind's nose or a mind's mouth.

I can't, for example, imagine the taste of peanut butter.

And what's it like to think in the absence of the mind's eye?

That's a really tough question that's not that far off from asking, what's it like to be a dolphin or a spider?

And in the absence of being able to inhabit each other's consciousnesses, we can communicate about them.

So for me, I'm generally much more aware of something's skeleton than its skin.

I'm very attuned to structure.

When I'm creating a game or a puzzle, I'm first dreaming up the mechanics and figuring out how they relate to each other, how they map to a story structure, and the details come later, often in collaboration with other artists.

I realize there's a leap of faith here in this idea that our minds can be so alien to each other, and I struggle with that too.

I can't understand what it's like to visualize any more than I can see the dress as white and gold.

But what's become increasingly apparent is that the mind's eye is just one of many constellations we're starting to draw in a night sky full of neurological diversity.

That includes having or not having an interior monologue,

It includes the autism spectrum, ADHD, dyslexia and a lot more, probably a lot of things we have yet to even give a name to because we're just figuring all this out.

The norm is to pathologize these experiences into a list of conditions that depart from a so-called normal functioning of the mind.

I think we're thinking about this completely wrong.

There is no true normal out there, and difference is not deviance.

Rather, these are all clues towards a vast and profound star field we're each individually blinded to because we only have our one cozy, inescapable mind as a single reference point.

It's no secret that different people think differently.

Many people on the autism spectrum excel at pattern recognition and logical deduction.