Conversation

Feynman's experience is, I suspect, not that unusual. Not as strong as this for me (& I think less of the actual graphemes), but related.

Ah, yes, seeing notation in color is common. Also integers. (My spouse does this; you can say “what color is 536” and they’ll answer immediately. I think they just see it, they’re not working it out.) I was thinking of abstract objects like a non-abelian group or something

Oh, in that case: me. Though it's too strong. When I've been thinking hard about some type of objects, I start to get slight color (and other) associations with them. It's not chosen, and (I think) fairly repeated, i.e., the color doesn't change.

Hard to describe because it's often _not_ especially visual (more spatial / kinesthetic, a kind of felt sense). And I rarely think much seriously about mathematics these days.

Thanks! “Slightly colored but not really visual” is really interesting, and I think I know what you mean. It’s probably been decades longer since I’ve thought seriously about mathematics than since you have! I’m running off of distant memories of experience here

It's just an evoked sense. For instance, when working on this paper (arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0 ) I thought pretty hard for a while about some of the central objects. Enough that much of the core work was done on long walks.

All hard core thinking is done on long walks [why?]

For people who seem to have a kinesthetic aspect to their thinking, I wonder if they are actually literally thinking more. I sometimes wonder if working while stationary, in a chair, is a way of artificially reducing the quality of your thinking.