A friend of mine has this neat trick where for any word, she can very quickly provide a count of how many keys on a QWERTY keyboard would be pressed with the left hand and the right hand to type that word. For example, ‘example’ is 4L - 3R (exae vs mpl). For me to figure that out, I had to type each word very slowly. For my friend, she would know it almost immediately upon hearing the word, and sometimes can do whole sentences. It’s not something that she rehearses or memorizes (and honestly why would she?) - as far as I know it’s just a unique inherent association she has with language.
Synesthesia, in addition to being a great word for a Friday+ crossword, is when people perceive things differently. For example some synesthetes associate letters in the alphabet with specific colors, others experience sounds as sudden strong emotions. There is some speculation that ASMR experiences are a kind of synesthesia. People with similar types of synesthesia still experience things differently from each other - one person’s F might look/feel like another person’s Q - but there are some common trends - the letter A is usually perceived as red, and that kind of almost makes sense to me.
I don’t have any idea what it’s like to experience synesthesia, and I think it underlines a very simple fact: people think differently from each other. It goes against what we typically think about intelligence: that it’s competitive and comparable, that someone can be smarter than someone else. But that model doesn’t really work because there’s no real comparison. In order for my brain to even get the smallest hint of what is going on in your brain, we need to use a translator, often in the form of words.
I’ve been gradually improving at crosswords ever since I got hold of someone’s online login to the New York Times. Now, each time it plays the (gratuitously elitist) chime of victory, I feel a strong sense of self-satisfaction. I did it. I solved something. I’m smart. Honestly, through my job search, I’ve held onto my ability to solve crosswords as a source of personal esteem. I’m probably in the top five percent of humans at solving crosswords and any company would be lucky to have me.
It’s easier to see when you fail at one, but a crossword is a deeply flawed assessment of intelligence for a number of reasons. First of all, you need a pretty strong grasp of English to even have a chance - so I already land in my ‘top 5%’ due to factors of my birth and beyond my control. Not only is spelling tested, but synonyms, antonyms, idioms, anagrams, etc. Trivia is a huge part as well: cultural, historical, scientific, and almost always inane. Crosswords are a rigorous assessment of a set of skills, but not skills that are, on their own, useful.
How am I supposed to know who was on the cover of TIME in 1936? Well, I’m not. But if I know that an OKAPI is a cousin of a giraffe, a MELEE is a free for all, and EDITS are text tweaks, I have most of the ‘fill’ to learn that the 1936 TIME cover was DALI. This is what I love about the crossword- it’s a literal and figurative *intersection* of my knowledge and my ignorance, my strengths and weaknesses, a repeated unnatural exercise in combining the clues inside my brain to find something that was never there.
I’m probably never going to know what it’s like to taste a sound or to see a number as a colorful shape, but I love making mental connections between unusual things. It’s a huge reason why I’m writing this newsletter. My belief is that trying to bring together different ideas is an interesting way to look at the world, and might lead to perceptions that would not occur organically.
Tomorrow I will attempt the Thursday NYT crossword puzzle, but this time instead of thinking about how superior I am, I’ll be trying very hard (and likely failing) to count how many keys I tap with my left hand versus my right.
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