This feature really is a bug for Chinese speakers. The same phenomenon as people being unable to accurately draw a bicycle, an object you're pretty familiar with, is called "character amnesia" when you're unable to write a Chinese character that you probably see every day and can read and understand with no problems. The meaning of the character is definitely abstracted away somewhere in your brain, but there might be hundreds or thousands of characters you're simply unable to reproduce on paper.

The Chinese characters are composed of a specific order of strokes, and sometimes it's like you can't bring a clear enough picture of it into your mind's eye to be able to reverse engineer it with a pen on paper. I probably experience this a lot more as a learner of Chinese as a foreign language, so I'm pretty familiar with the feeling of "Character amnesia". It happened to me the other day with 牙 (tooth) a pretty simple character that you'd think would be easy to remember. Once you get the first two to or so strokes down though muscle memory seems to take over and you finish it almost subconsciously.

From anecdotal examples, this is actually pretty common, and in mainland Chinese sources I've read they seem to put it down to people using pinyin (romanised pronunciation) input on phone and PC keyboards instead which gets people out of the habit of remembering stroke orders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia

Not just Chinese characters:

https://www.bustle.com/p/how-do-you-write-the-letter-g-a-new...

If you ask me to draw an ampersand and a G-Clef (𝄞), I'll probably render more or less the same thing.

Possibly because in childhood I've drawn several G-Clefs but never ampersands (that I recall), while the opposite has been true later on. I suppose I've just re-purposed whatever motor memory I had for "a kind of infinite-loop G".

Neat!

Is your experience similar to spelling errors in written English?

I choose English because it's the primary (only?) language for this site, and while there are definite rules for the correct sequence of letters for a word, the rules for the language overall are not especially consistent. And it seems to me that English has a bazillion words in common use.

I have from time to time experienced that very weird sensation, as I look at an English word I've used in written language for fifty years, and it suddenly for a time it seems totally wrong and incomprehensible. I recall staring at the word "Our", thinking it could not possibly mean anything in English. This is rare, and doesn't last long. So far.

But it gives me some insight into aphasia, perhaps.

And we need spell-checkers for our writing, because in a stream of words we have written by pushing buttons, the brain elides the misplaced letters, it's almost impossible to spot them all, much less work to simply hand to someone else to read it fresh, then the errors seem obvious to them.

But it's the temporary, isolated dyslexia I find bizarre.

Yeah, you got it right, I'm a native English speaker. I wouldn't say the first-person experience is entirely the same as forgetting a spelling, when I misspell a word I usually get most of it right and mix one or two letters up like piece/peice.

With a Chinese character, it's like you can't get the first stroke down and you're unable to reproduce anything. But once you've worked out the first two or three strokes, maybe by getting a dictionary, for me at least muscle memory seems to just take over and you can kind of just finish it automatically.

It's interesting though, these little quirks definitely give some insight into how the brain's underlying OS works. Funnily enough talking about dyslexia I often wonder if Chinese dyslexia and English dyslexia is the same condition, or if they're both completely different. Would an English kid be as dyslexic in Chinese if they were bilingual, or would they find reading one language easier?

It's called semantic satiation and it's awesome and weird.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation

That page also links to one of my favourite phrases: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!

Having fixed my bike so many times over the years, I can easily sketch a correct bike - if not in terms of proportions (at least without any corrections), but in how the frame is constructed and how all the moving parts come together. I guess someone who doesn't need this knowledge will just use a more abstract model.

I, too, can correctly draw a bike. I think anyone who's spent any time fixing bikes will be able to do this; if you know that it's called a "diamond framed bike", and you know why it's called that, it'd be pretty hard to not know how to draw it.

I've always wondered -- is there something I can read/see that compares the drawings from savants like Stephen to actual photographs? I'd like to dig into the specifics.

When I tried drawing portraits I really had to relearn how to look. In my mind eyes were positioned at the top of the head while in reality they are in the middle.

But when you draw cartoons it looks a kind if silly when eyes are drawn at the accurate location. And maybe this is the feature you mentioned. It's fun to play with it.