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Mind Games

  1. Apr 17, 2008 #1
    Sorry I couldn't come up with a more creative or descriptive title for this topic.

    Anyway, since a very young age (probably 5 or 6), I have been playing complex games in my mind with letters. It's a lot like a form of mathematics in some ways, and when I try to explain it to most people they think I'm crazy and have no idea how it works. It has very strict rules, but the thing about it is I never wrote them down until last August when I wrote a paper about it to try to make it easier to explain to my friends. I never spoke the rules out loud, they just developed gradually through playing the games and got locked in my memory, so I was able to recall each one and write them down in that paper. If anyone wants to read it I can toss it up here but it's several pages.

    I've noticed recently that this game has also helped my memory and ability to work with numbers and letters. For example, I can almost instantly say how many letters a given word contains because I can "see" it in my brain.

    I realize this probably isn't making any sense and I haven't explained it very well, so here's an example of an equation of letters:


    This equation was solved almost instantly in my head using the rules I mentioned before. It's a subconscious process that occurs constantly within my brain; I've probably solved about 20 or 30 equations since I began writing this post a few minutes ago. The equations come from all sorts of places - people speaking to me, reading things, even random words or phrases just popping into my brain. Being a subconscious process, it doesn't at all interfere with my normal activities and doesn't hinder my ability to carry on a conversation or solve a math problem.

    So, I guess my question is: what's going on? Is there some sort of disorder or something that causes things like this or what? I don't quite know what to Google this time because what I do doesn't have a name.

    Thanks to whomever can help me with this.

    EDIT: I forgot to mention, I'm 16 so this has been going on for 10+ years.
  2. jcsd

Can you offer guidance or do you also need help?
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