Not sure whether you talk about the uranium yellow/green color, or the brief hallucination of a light spot (happened to me just a few minutes ago, hadn't had one in a long time).
I don't have such an hyperbolic mental palace, and this doesn't really give me the ability to establish a global map but I relate a lot to what you wrote. Sometimes as I reach the climax of a long deep thought, I'm thinking via vision exclusively to the extent I don't even pay attention to what my outer eye sees and I stumble upon some insight that is sometimes almost impossible to convey in language, not because it lies beyond, but because the intrusion of language causes the idea to collapse: words points to dangling shapes that mean barely anything because the rest of the painting has gone away.
To those that have read this far and can't relate to this way of thinking, this isn't a superpower, those are rather rare experiences of altered states.
Talking about this is a kind of taboo and may cause some smiles, and indeed if there is a deeper truth to these experiences about the computational or geometric nature of the mind, maybe in the same way synaesthesia mirrors spectrograms, it won't help people working in machine learning a lot (even though some like Lecun seem to use their own visual introspective abilities as a source of inspiration).
However they may prove to be crucial in conceiving what kind of use brain chips should be put too. For now it seems we're walking through a thick fog in that direction with envisioned application being confined to interfacing to external computers or increasing cognitive abilities quantitatively, such as perfect memory and so on. If I could sustain such experiences durably, with a high level of control and enhanced geometric/mathematical understanding, I believe this would be akin to a superpower, yes.
Not sure whether you talk about the uranium yellow/green color, or the brief hallucination of a light spot (happened to me just a few minutes ago, hadn't had one in a long time).
I don't have such an hyperbolic mental palace, and this doesn't really give me the ability to establish a global map but I relate a lot to what you wrote. Sometimes as I reach the climax of a long deep thought, I'm thinking via vision exclusively to the extent I don't even pay attention to what my outer eye sees and I stumble upon some insight that is sometimes almost impossible to convey in language, not because it lies beyond, but because the intrusion of language causes the idea to collapse: words points to dangling shapes that mean barely anything because the rest of the painting has gone away.
To those that have read this far and can't relate to this way of thinking, this isn't a superpower, those are rather rare experiences of altered states.
Talking about this is a kind of taboo and may cause some smiles, and indeed if there is a deeper truth to these experiences about the computational or geometric nature of the mind, maybe in the same way synaesthesia mirrors spectrograms, it won't help people working in machine learning a lot (even though some like Lecun seem to use their own visual introspective abilities as a source of inspiration).
However they may prove to be crucial in conceiving what kind of use brain chips should be put too. For now it seems we're walking through a thick fog in that direction with envisioned application being confined to interfacing to external computers or increasing cognitive abilities quantitatively, such as perfect memory and so on. If I could sustain such experiences durably, with a high level of control and enhanced geometric/mathematical understanding, I believe this would be akin to a superpower, yes.