I'm so much the other way that it's scary, because it's a
vulnerability, one I didn't know about until it happened.
Musical/artistic family, multi-talented all around me. I'd keep my suburban-bicycled paper-route from getting boring by playing back in my head music I'd heard and liked. Stumbled into hardware, then software, as something I could do and do well and get paid to do it. Whatever it was I was doing -- songwriting, drawing, carving, circuitry, code -- I visualized/audialized it first, working it out on the sketchpad viewscreen of my mind before committing the work to physical fact.
And then I found out how easily the whole thing could be shut down. Stressed-out bowstring-taut -- pending divorce,
single-parenting, work stresses -- and it was enough to let
staph take hold, in my elbow of all places -- and suddenly the ibuprofen didn't keep the fevers down and my visualization got fevered and dissolved away and I couldn't code, couldn't create, because I couldn't visualize, until the antibiotics finished killing off the infection.
Yes, although I don't think I was able to "see" things in my head before or after. I got West Nile Virus about 10 years ago, and was physically out-of-commission for most of a year. The particularly disturbing part was that even after I recovered physically, it took several more years before I recovered my mental ability well enough to reason about anything complex -- like math, or code. I just couldn't follow equations that once made sense.
Now after a decade, I think I'm back to about 80-90% of peak. I don't know if the small decline is residual from the West Nile, or to be expected with normal aging from 35 to 45. The experience drove home how little we understand the brain, or viruses. Consider how primitive our understanding of medicine was 100 years ago. I think it's likely that 100 years forward they'll look back at now with similar disdain: "They didn't understand anything --- they just let viruses run their course and do their damage!"
Musical/artistic family, multi-talented all around me. I'd keep my suburban-bicycled paper-route from getting boring by playing back in my head music I'd heard and liked. Stumbled into hardware, then software, as something I could do and do well and get paid to do it. Whatever it was I was doing -- songwriting, drawing, carving, circuitry, code -- I visualized/audialized it first, working it out on the sketchpad viewscreen of my mind before committing the work to physical fact.
And then I found out how easily the whole thing could be shut down. Stressed-out bowstring-taut -- pending divorce, single-parenting, work stresses -- and it was enough to let staph take hold, in my elbow of all places -- and suddenly the ibuprofen didn't keep the fevers down and my visualization got fevered and dissolved away and I couldn't code, couldn't create, because I couldn't visualize, until the antibiotics finished killing off the infection.
Anybody else gone through this?