my own personal Phineas Gage-style "figuring out how the brain works by seeing how it can go wrong" thing is noticing that I get worse about mixing up homophones if I haven't had enough sleep. Has anyone else noticed that happening to them?

my theory for why that happens is that my brain basically is remembering words phonetically (so words like "there"/"they're"/"their" are all the same at that level) and then there's a higher-level correction process that figures out which one I mean when I type it

and if I'm not running at 100% because of the sleepiness, that correction doesn't work or is running slowly so I don't notice in time that I typed "there" when I meant "they're"

I'm pretty sure my brain stores words phonetically because I'm pretty terrible at spelling, and the ways I have trouble spelling seem to align pretty directly to how English isn't phonetically spelled

this is why words like "necessary" are such legendarily unspellable. it's a mix of Cs and Ses and they can be pronounced the same, because English Is Weird.

and I definitely catch myself doing the thing where I internally re-pronounce a word in order to remember how to spell it.
Wednesday? Unspellable.

Wed-ness-day? EASY-PEASY!

so I think my brains model for spelling is basically:
Base level: phonetic (a terrible match for english)
Second level: a sort of "that looks wrong" sense from lots of reading. There's lots of words I can't remember how to spell, but I can identify some spellings look wrong.

then finally:
third level: explicit memorization for some hard words.
like I can spell "hypothesis" but I hear myself reading each letter one by one in my head when I do, from when I memorized it back in 1994.

I don't know how the brains of people who can spell work, but I'm kinda assuming it's differently to this, given that I've read that spelling ability is one of those things where you either have it or you don't by the time you're like 10

which makes me think that it's a thing where it's determined by how you think about spelling, which is basically how you learned to spell in the first place. If you learn the "wrong way" like I did, or maybe if you just have the wrong kind of brain, you're never getting it.

the best you can do is get better at noticing specific common misspellings or jamming more explicit memorizations into your final-spelling-layer.

which is both harder to do, and less efficient than how "good spellers" work.

another thing about my brain and spelling which might be related: I have like NO working memory for people telling me letters.
Like, if you try to spell something out loud? I'm worse than most young children at understanding what you mean.

like if you go "They're named 'Megan', but that's spelled M-E-G-H-A-N-N-E" I have about 2-3 letters worth of memory
I get MEG and then you keep talking and I'm like "fuck I don't know, M something something N N E?"

Maybe that's just something inherent about how my brain works, like I don't have a lot of visual memory for letters, and maybe that directly causes my inability to spell.

Like, maybe good-spellers have a better ability to imagine the word in their head, and can see how it's spelled?
Like, I have (or had) a pretty good visual memory... if I could see words in my head easily I could probably visually memorize their spelling.

another amusing (especially to others) but less illustrative to how my brain works problem I have with speaking/spelling when I'm sleep deprived: my vocabulary totally goes, and it's specifically the Proper Noun part of my vocabulary.

like you can tell I'm running on no sleep when I'm making a perfectly coherent argument about movies and say things like "compared to... you know, the guy who directed Pulp Fiction"

because my Proper Nouns vocabulary just gets so patchy so I'll often use that kind of phrasing because I'm completely blanking on the name of person X but I can still remember what they did and the names of those things

when this gets really bad I start making weird analogies that only make sense in my head.
like I can't remember "horse" so I'll create pseudo-german-like terms like "flesh motorcycle"

my wife likes to remind me of the ultimate case of this happening (which probably should have been told to my doctor):
the time when I referred to the "hotdog juice toaster thrower" .

That's the shower head.

because, you know, "hotdog juice" is water.
"toaster" is an appliance/device, like a shower head, and "thrower" because it throws it at your body, in the shower.

Someone mentioned dyslexia, and I was thinking about it and it makes me think that this might be another of those cases where a mental condition is hard to diagnose because people naturally build coping mechanisms, and then we only actually diagnose them when they can't cope.

so maybe what I'm describing is that I have a actual condition that causes problems with spelling, but I developed a way to cope with it that I don't usually realize I'm doing:
I have trouble spelling, but then I do these fixes to make it work

and while that means I can cope and seem like I have some more normal level of spelling ability, it means it takes more mental effort for me to spell than someone who doesn't have those underlying conditions.
And that really only become apparent when they fail

when I'm sleep deprived, my brain doesn't have the processing power to do the coping mechanisms I've built around my spelling problems, so I suddenly start hitting homophone problems and such.

another easy way to see the difference between someone like me and someone who "can spell" is take away my spellcheck. I might seem kinda like I can spell just fine... because I'm only ever using things that do instant spellchecking on everything I type.

let me type into an old-school text editor with no spellcheck, or worse, write on paper?

good lord, it's a mess.

so really spellcheckers are assistive devices for me!
like a wheelchair or a prosthetic limb.
because I definitely fall over without one

I also wonder how much this has to do with the particular nature of english. It's a particularly hard language to spell, so it's possible that if I was a native speaker of some other language, I wouldn't even notice this problem with my brain.

I also don't know how much it's just "a brain thing" vs. "a learning thing".
Do I have a brain that's just not good at spelling, because genes or whatever?
or did I learn in a way that means I'm not good at spelling?

Someone mentioned being a good speller and it possibly being related to reading a lot as a kid, and that's the weird thing:
I read SO MUCH as a kid. we had to get a special exception to the library rules because you're not normally allowed to check out more than 75 books at once!

but it didn't help, apparently.

I actually had one optometrist suggest that because of my vision problems, I've actually got better-than-normal eyesight for reading.
Basically I was nearsighted in one eye, with pretty much no ability to change my focus

but this means that my left eye was pretty much permanently focused at about one foot away.
So it didn't get tired from changing focus to look at close up vs far things. It was always focused there.

so I basically read using my left eye and did everything else with my right eye, but since my left eye was "specialized" I could read very quickly and easily.

this has changed as I got older and got glasses, but until I was like 15, I basically only used my right eye, except when I was reading.