Synesthesia helps me find four-leaf clovers (2023)

The distribution of four-leaf clovers is not uniform; they tend to cluster in certain areas. Many moons ago when I was a small kid, on my walk to school I had to walk a bit under high voltage power lines. Found tons of four-leaf clovers under there. I have no idea if the magnetic field did anything to help the mutation, or if it was just a coincidence, but I've never found a spot like that again.

People claiming that weird unfalsifiable (or often unmeaningful) inner states give them magical powers has got to stop being respected.

Thinking 4 is red doesn't mean that you don't have to count anymore. It's as stupid of a claim as claiming that "hearing colors" allows people to see in the dark.

I'm a very, very fast minesweeper ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game) ) player, and I play in a non-marking style (meaning I just click where mines aren't rather than bothering to mark where mines are.) I realized one day that I subjectively see the spots that I know don't have mines as differently colored than the ones that I know do. That does not mean that I am not doing the calculations in my head, it just means that they are so reflexive that I don't notice them. Because I am trying to clear as fast as I can, I've seen every pattern thousands of times, and my feedback is visual, there's a ghostly sort of visual marking showing the outcome of my calculation.

This is similar to how people echolocate and have no idea that they're echolocating: "How Well Do We Know Our Own Conscious Experience? The Case of Human Echolocation" https://faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzAbs/Echo.htm

We are not necessarily aware of what we are applying complex logic to, even when it requires delicate timing and swings wildly over tiny differences. I'd go even further and say that we are necessarily less aware of calculations that we are making quickly, because being quick does not allow time for reflection.

You've just gotten good at finding 4-leaf clovers because you spend an enormous amount of time looking for 4-leaf clovers.

I used to find a four leaf clover at least once a week during the summer when i was in the midwest. During the peak of summer, I could find 1-3 every time I took a walk.

Since moving to california, I did find some up around the mountains of the bay area (including a 7 leaf clover), but not many elsewhere in town.

In southern california I haven't found one yet.

A case of Solomon Shereshevsky [1] is very relevant here.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_Shereshevsky

He had synesthesia that made him unable to forget things for most of the life. His memory was so good he was able to recite ten and more (10+) years old dialogues word-for-word, some of those included remembering and reciting long arbitrary numbers. How so? Because almost everything he saw, heard or read was fascinating in its' own unique way.

(Shereshevsky had to learn how to forget things at later years of his life, successfully)

I do not have synesthesia, yet I've found that if I have any sort of strong feeling - direct, or through association, - about any subject, I remember everything about that subject better. Also, these strong feelings allow me to find analogues relatively easier, enriching my reasoning.

Richard Feynman described something like this in his autobiographies: when mathematicians told him to imagine two spheres, he imagined one as orange and the other one as hairy (or something like that). This way he was able to discover non-constructiveness of proofs, as non-constructive proofs have less use in physics.

So, in my experience, one can use (or learn to use) rich feelings about many things to make memory better and to find better solutions to problems faster.

> I'm getting subconscious hints from the author's framing of the photos.

This is what I attributed my finding them so quickly as well. Unless the author was taking pictures intently to not prominently frame them for use in such an article, the nature of photography will make this a likely result.