Ask Slashdot: Can You Picture Things in Your Mind? (theguardian.com) 243
"It never occurred to me that having no visual imagery was unusual..." writes a science journalist at the Guardian.
"It's not that I forget what I look like, but I am sometimes a little surprised, and don't feel connected to my outward appearance as a matter of identity." There's been a surge of research on how aphantasia affects our lives... [F]or some it affects images alone; some can't imagine other sensory information, like sounds. Some people with aphantasia have visualizations when they dream (I do), and others don't. There's evidence that it can make it harder for people to recall visual details, though other studies show that aphants perform better on some memory tests unrelated to imagery... But overall, people with aphantasia don't seem to have serious problems navigating their day-to-day lives, unlike those with more severe memory conditions like episodic amnesia...
Some people consider aphantasia to be a deficit and wish they could reverse it. People have claimed they can train their way out of aphantasia, or use psychedelics to regain some sense of mental imagery (the jury is out on whether that works). I have no desire for this — my mind is plenty busy without a stream of imagery. If I was born with imagery, it would be commonplace for me, and I'm sure I'd enjoy it. But I already can find myself overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings that have no visual aspects to them.
Long-time Slashdot reader whoever57 writes that "Personally, I never realized before reading this article that people could create mental images." (And they also wonder if people with the condition tend to go into STEM fields.) There's what's known as the "red apple test," where you rate your own ability to visualize an apple on a scale of 1 to 5.
Any Slashdot readers want to share their own experiences in the comments?
"It's not that I forget what I look like, but I am sometimes a little surprised, and don't feel connected to my outward appearance as a matter of identity." There's been a surge of research on how aphantasia affects our lives... [F]or some it affects images alone; some can't imagine other sensory information, like sounds. Some people with aphantasia have visualizations when they dream (I do), and others don't. There's evidence that it can make it harder for people to recall visual details, though other studies show that aphants perform better on some memory tests unrelated to imagery... But overall, people with aphantasia don't seem to have serious problems navigating their day-to-day lives, unlike those with more severe memory conditions like episodic amnesia...
Some people consider aphantasia to be a deficit and wish they could reverse it. People have claimed they can train their way out of aphantasia, or use psychedelics to regain some sense of mental imagery (the jury is out on whether that works). I have no desire for this — my mind is plenty busy without a stream of imagery. If I was born with imagery, it would be commonplace for me, and I'm sure I'd enjoy it. But I already can find myself overwhelmed with thoughts and feelings that have no visual aspects to them.
Long-time Slashdot reader whoever57 writes that "Personally, I never realized before reading this article that people could create mental images." (And they also wonder if people with the condition tend to go into STEM fields.) There's what's known as the "red apple test," where you rate your own ability to visualize an apple on a scale of 1 to 5.
Any Slashdot readers want to share their own experiences in the comments?
Nope, can't (Score:5, Interesting)
I know what things look like, but I don't see any "pictures". If I try, I can call up a very vague and fleeting visual impression, but it takes a specific effort, and is gone in a fraction of a second. I do dream visually, sometimes with more detail, sometimes with less.
The author writes "I can remember visual details, just not visually." Exactly. But that probably makes zero sense to people who can see images.
Re:Nope, can't (Score:5, Interesting)
What you're describing is the difference between "thinking with objects" and "thinking with concepts".
If "apple" to you is an object first, you'll have a picture. If it's a concept first, you'll have the concept of an apple, what it's useful for and so on in its stead.
This is actually easy to explain by providing an example of something that has a specific useful purpose. For example, "imagine a chair". For people who see an image, it will typically generate an image in their head of "a chair as an object with four legs that can support your weight that you can sit on". It may have other details like backrest.
But what if chair has 3 legs? Still a chair. What if it's just a rock you can sit on with a comfortable pillow that you can sit on? Still a chair. But if you imagined a chair with 4 legs as an image, that doesn't match. But you still understand that "concept of a chair" and if you picture it as an image, you have to adjust. Whereas someone who imagines it as a concept doesn't need to do that extra cognitive work, because they have merely a concept, and add details as their are specified.
So there are probably benefits to both approaches of imagining things, which is why evolution hasn't selected one of them out of our gene pool.
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I suspect that's a jest, but I think this is worth addressing. This is about memorization and feature assigning to objects, not about imagining objects themselves.
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I do not need to visualize an image, no one except an artist in pictures, needs that.
Need to? No. Would benefit from? Yes. People around me frequently remember things by seeing an image of the thing. They can remember what the word was written somewhere by sight. I have to remember what the word was by what it means, or how it sounded. I do "hear" things when I remember them, and I can remember smells, too... just not sights. But with visual memories what I'm really storing and recalling is something I thought about them, not an actual image. Sometimes I remember a specific visual impressio
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I do not need to visualize an image, no one except an artist in pictures, needs that.
That is literally one of the most ridiculously ignorant things I've heard someone say, and I've heard a lot of people say a lot of stupid things over the last 50 years or so.
But no shit, your comment shot to the top of the "Dumb Comment" list, so give yourself a pat on the back.
Re:Nope, can't (Score:5, Interesting)
This is exactly my experience. I was just talking to my lady about it. In order to remember things I have to understand them because I can't just bring up a picture like she can. She's an artist. I'm a techie. I understand how things work at a level that confuses her, she can see stuff and draw it from memory.
The confounding thing is that so many people think all of our brains work just the same and refuse to accept that others may have different experiences. People expect you to be able to do things because they find them easy, even though they can't do all of the things you can do. It's almost unbelievably stupid.
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My family and I had a "pink elephant" conversation a while back where everyone described what they could "see" if you say "think of a pink elephant".
My own case, I know there's a pink elephant there, but I can't really see it. If you ask me about its trunk, I can sort of 'zoom in', and I know there's a trunk there, but I can't really see it. I can describe it having wrinkles or whatever because I know them to be there, and I can sort of see them as I'm describing them, but then the rest of the elephant is l
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I'm the same way. If I do have a quick visual memory, it fades fast if I try to focus on it.
I think if the police ever questioned me and I had to provide details of the suspect, I'd look like I was being on purpose unhelpful. I wouldn't be able to provide any real details other then gender. "Yes, I cannot describe at all what he looked like. I know he was in his 30s to 60s, believe he had hair, and was 'regular' height."
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that's a cool ability; i possess it to an extent but not anywhere as comprehensive as you describe.
What's your profession? Are you an artist? Can you draw from memory?
Nope (Score:4, Interesting)
I certainly have aphantasia, and I have a fairly strong hypothesis that itâ(TM)s led to me being much more practiced in thinking about abstract concepts, and connecting them. So yes, I do think it had some bearing on going into software engineering.
Re: Nope (Score:2)
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I was drawn into software engineering, but not due to anything related to visualization...
I can see an apple, I can spin it in 3d and see the imperfections in the color and/or the skin, I can see a bite out of the apple and drops of juice running away from it, ...
I don't think that helps or hurts me as a software engineer. It might have made me good at other types of jobs (i.e. a mechanical engineer) had I been interested in those.
For me, the weird part was figuring out that others didn't have this ability
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I found out in 5th grade.
We had a test of spatial reasoning. There were flat diagrams of squares with numbers and dots. We were told to match them to the image of the 3D shape they would create when folded.
It was laughably easy.
My teacher later told me I was the only one who got them all correct, and no one else was even close.
That's when I learned that I "think in pictures" while most people "think in words".
Thinking in Pictures [wikipedia.org]
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This was a concept that I learned as a teen by reading (and practicing) The Art and Practice of Astral Projection by Ophiel [amazon.com]
In the book, they have you meditate at several different spots, and combine that 'experience' with a particular color and smell for each location
You are then to practice remembering those places as you fall asleep, resulting in dreams where you are first, able to visit those spots, then later to be able to travel other places in your dreams
This has also been called lucid dreaming, and i
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Now I don't have it. I very much visualize things and always have, and now I'm wondering if this is why I was and am so drawn to the UI side of software. Not that I can't do databases or deal with server side code (did full-stack J2EE for 8 years). Just that I was drawn to user interfaces (and video games) even before I started my career and stayed there the whole way through. Even when doing DB code, i tend to 'think' visually, almost a form of UML.
So it isn't necessarily that aphantasia is a blocker to de
Old and funny subject (Score:2)
For those not in the know, this is generally described as five stages. The most famous internet example is the following query:
"Imagine an apple"
1: Fully 3D rotatable apple with color. Often with additional unspecified details such as color of the apple, apple being in a specific location (also unspecified in a query) and so on.
2: 3D apple that isn't properly manipulatable. It just is. Often has unspecified details such as color of the apple, but no unspecified location.
3 : 2D apple. Has color, but probably
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For those not in the know, this is generally described as five stages. The most famous internet example is the following query:
"Imagine an apple"
1: Fully 3D rotatable apple with color. Often with additional unspecified details such as color of the apple, apple being in a specific location (also unspecified in a query) and so on. 2: 3D apple that isn't properly manipulatable. It just is. Often has unspecified details such as color of the apple, but no unspecified location. 3 : 2D apple. Has color, but probably not specified. No background, no location. 4. 2D apple. No color. Nothing but the apple. 5. No image of an apple. Concept of an apple.
Pretty much all of the assumptions about this being linked to "artistry, creativity" etc are projections of the writer. You can be a good artist that draws as 1, 3 or 5. You can be utterly incapable of being an artist as 1, 3 and 5. Same for IQ, same for imagination, etc. This appears to be simply a difference in that some people think in concepts, some in images. And main difference between 3 and 1 seems to be in how prone person is in making stereotypical assumptions about individual things. I.e. nothing but object (apple) is specified, there should be no color assumed, yet 1 and 2 will generate a specific color in the image they imagine in their head, while 3, 4 and 5 will not. Even though 3 is capable of imagining color if it's specified (i.e. query: "green apple"). 4 and 5 cannot.
And some of us can think in both concepts and images. I always have done that, and I have a suspicion that is a big part of what makes my noggin work a little differently than most people's.
And simultaneously as well. Someone brings up a concept, and I've internally processed about 20 iterations of it, and the visualizations of each result by the time they've finished their sentence. It can be a bit of a curse. Until people get used to me - or are forewarned - I can be a bit of a Cassandra.
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This is specifically not about thinking (goal oriented mental processing) but imagining (mental processing of an object with no specified goal for said object).
Negative. I am visualizing you as an apple right at this moment. No imagination needed. It is an exceptionally difficult concept to get across to people.
You are an apple at this moment. Now yes, that is a ridiculous visualization, and I avoid those except for illustration.
But I can mentally drill down through layers of process to come up with pluses and minuses of design.
Some examples of the visualization process added to the concept of a process:
When I was in Junior High, I really sucked at math
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Artists usually have to separate their concept of an apple from the image of an apple in order to draw an apple that other people can recognize
One method to develop this ability is to draw the object upside down. According to Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain [amazon.com] , this confuses (or delays) the normal recognition of the apple and gives yourself a chance to draw the apple without your normal conceptualization of the apple to override what you are seeing
In many cases there are clear benefits in separating th
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Neural Linguistic Programming often refers to is as VAK Modalities [inlpcenter.org]
BECAUSE people are different and often respond to one modality over another, NLP practitioners have to learn to message across Visual Auditory and Kinesthetic experiences
It is OK if you are not a visual person, just do not try to deny that of others
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Interesting. I seem to be in "1", but but just about and I need to keep moving it or it degrades fast. Movement is kind of jerky and the color has a tendency to shift. More abstract 3D is easier. As to "artistry", I basically have zero artistic talent. So yes, definitely projection, and a simplistic one at that. I do not think there is any connection to IQ or skill in applying that IQ (sometimes called "wisdom") either.
Oh, and on a related subject, I do not have an "inner voice". I can talk to myself in my
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Easily 1. But my artistic skills max out at simple stick drawings. My Apple has leaves, a stem, optionally a bite and worn spots. It easily rotates in all 3d with zoom. My stick drawing could be an Apple, a lollipop, or anything else vaguely circular with a stick attached.
Anecdotally there is no connection between internal vision ability and artistic skills. :-)
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Can confirm. I'm definitely a 1. I can rotate the apple, make it any color I choose, divide it into slices, and watch them teeter on the surface... or in mid air.
I have the same ability with sound, too. I can hear the sound of my little brother's voice from when he was very young, or present day. I can play entire songs in my head, and even isolate instruments -- I often have a song playing in the background as
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We should form a band. I can do air guitar. We just need a couple more people with this skill set and we're going to be rich and famous!
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I'm definitely the first one: I can easily imagine all sorts of apples and when I do, I tend to imagine all sorts of details as well, like specular highlights, depth-of-field, lens effects, dust/rain/snow/something else entirely, I can rotate it all in my mind and e.g. the specular highlight I mentioned react accordingly, as if there was a light source and so on. I've always been good at visualizing geometric objects as well, including multiple ones simultaneously and I can rotate everything in my mind easi
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There was a very long twitter thread on this topic about a year ago when it blew up for n+1st time where n is a pretty large number. This topic seems to come about every couple of years as new batch of people discover that we humans differ even in how we imagine things.
That time was interesting for me because it had a lot of artists that draw things that were 1-2 and 5 and they were trying to compare their experiences in how they processed things like image generation in their mind. A lot of artists who cla
How confident are we.. (Score:5, Interesting)
We are talking about qualia here and people may just have different opinions of what they think 'visualization' is. Some people may be more confident than others that they are 'visualizing'.
Since we are talking about some internal subjective representation, we have no mechanism to objectively know what "visualization" is toward one another. We can express how confident we feel that we are 'visualizing' versus others experience, but it's all ultimately guesswork.
For example: "make it harder for people to recall visual details," may have the "causation" backwards. People who forget the detail and/or are not confident about their recall of the detail are not able to on-demand describe the scene. So the person who thinks they visualized merely remembered some details and could recount them. The person who didn't bother to retain details and gets called on it enough becomes keenly aware of the limits and presumes it's fundamental to "staying visual" or not.
Our subjective experience of reality may be impossibly different from one another and we'd have no way of finding that out. The way we synthesize the inputs from our senses into a working model of the world is not really feasible to compare, and I think this extends to whether one person "visualizes" or not.
Re:How confident are we.. (Score:5, Informative)
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+1
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We are talking about qualia here and people may just have different opinions of what they think 'visualization' is. Some people may be more confident than others that they are 'visualizing'.
Since we are talking about some internal subjective representation, we have no mechanism to objectively know what "visualization" is toward one another. We can express how confident we feel that we are 'visualizing' versus others experience, but it's all ultimately guesswork.
True. As humans, we do have a bit of a solipsism built in to varying degrees, so a person is likely to think that others thought processes are the same as theirs. I did for years, but eventually figured out that I had an ability to process concepts and visualization virtually simultaneously. It makes for a certain ability to troubleshoot situations, processes and devices very quickly.
It can be frustrating in a group setting. An example is from just last week. A zoom meeting with a group had a person havin
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Oh my, the agony of teaching basic concepts to other adults like they're angry 6 year olds.
I had to learn to stfu early in my career and let them work through things at their own pace only occasionally hinting at the right answer or risk being labeled the pushy bad guy which is career killing.
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Oh my, the agony of teaching basic concepts to other adults like they're angry 6 year olds.
I had to learn to stfu early in my career and let them work through things at their own pace only occasionally hinting at the right answer or risk being labeled the pushy bad guy which is career killing.
It's when people can accept that the asshole is being a positive influence if they just listen to him or her.
And it has been fun too. After saving some important peoples asses and saving a lot of money, I was called into situations that weren't even in my field. I loved that since I am naturally curious. They were warned that I wasn't a yes man, and I step on toes with hyper analysis. But my goal was seeing the project succeed, not suck up to personalities and egos. So if I saw a problem, I reported it.
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Only once did that happen to me but it was a huge career boost and gave me great self confidence I didn't have before.
One of the other non technical teams was completely fucking up and the CEO (small company) asked me to take over and run them and my current group. I told him I know literally nothing about their field. He said he didn't care, just told me to go in there and fix it however I felt best. Holy shit. Scary. But I learned a lot, fixed the group, got a raise and promotion which followed me th
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telling the truth about some super fuck up disaster project that was already $10m in the hole and would never work.
Ah yes. The key is knowing that if it was allowed to get that bad and it hadn't already been canned, someone very "important" cares deeply about it and best you can do is stay away from it. You may deeply hope that one of that person's peers or superiors brings the hammer down, but if you are vaguely subordinate to them, then stay out.
I remember an executive who was absolutely 100% at fault for an overwhelming financial disaster of a project. Who had hard documented evidence that the scenarios that would ru
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It has been my experience there are at least two main types of creatives- those that have a unified vision and the process is transcribing this as faithfully as possible, and others who are seemingly translating an alien transmission, filled with gaps and misunderstandings, which ultimately leads to much experimentation as they try to make sense of it themselves.
I've never heard of aphantasia, but it perfectly describes the phenomena I'd dealt with.
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There will of course be some grey area where it is subjective, but there are also the extremes where it is much more clear.
I listened to a podcast that touched on this, and one person there had NO image of what they were thinking about. She hated talking on the phone, because she had to go sit at the computer and bring up a picture of the other person so she could see who she was talking to.
And the other extreme was a guy with so "vivid imagery", that it completely took over what he was looking at. If he s
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There is actually a test you can (have people) do:
Picture a 3x3 grid with three words written horizontally, then read out what is written in the columns. If you can visualize the grid, you can just read from the mental image. Otherwise you'll need to mentally reorder the letters, which is generally a slower process. It is definitely something where you know which of the two approaches you are using (there is a third approach, which is remembering what the answer was for a specific set of words, so use new w
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There's always a degree of subjectivity, but do you really think people have trouble visualizing a red apple because they have trouble remembering what a red apple might look like?
I mean there's a whole field of research on aphantasia with multiple groups doing multiple studies. I'm sure they've put some thought into how to handle the subjectivity of reported experiences.
it does (Score:3)
or use psychedelics to regain some sense of mental imagery (the jury is out on whether that works)
no need for jury, it does. normally i can't "see" a red apple for the life of me, just blackness. but with psychedelics i can construct cathedrals of light with detail you wouldn't believe, more real than real. then again i can't really control what i see, and the ability lingers a bit afterwards but soon subsides. it can recur sporadically, though.
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or use psychedelics to regain some sense of mental imagery (the jury is out on whether that works)
no need for jury, it does. normally i can't "see" a red apple for the life of me, just blackness. but with psychedelics i can construct cathedrals of light with detail you wouldn't believe, more real than real. then again i can't really control what i see, and the ability lingers a bit afterwards but soon subsides. it can recur sporadically, though.
And that is pretty fascinating to me. I can easily "see" a red apple, or a multicolored one, or one with a face or legs. What your post makes me think is that maybe I'm tripping 24/7! 8^)
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... then again i can't really control what i see,
That is a kind of visual hallucination, and isn't what is normally meant by mental imagery. Mental imagery is under more-or-less complete control. Think of X, remember Y, imagine Z, and the image appears. Occasionally images will pop into one's mind, often when distracted -- these events are nominally called daydreaming. Just as your hand doesn't (typically) move on its own, neither does your mind's eye, although, again, there are exceptions. We sometimes hear of solutions to problems just popping int
Not code (Score:3)
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I can with code, often when I go to bed, I can continue to code, a little bit like if I was in an IDE. I can write code, follow code, run/trace code. The next morning I type it in the IDE, and sometimes it works first try with handled corner cases and all.
I'm not all that as a coder. But I do my best coding when I get away from everyone. My offroading fun removes the "white noise" that I get when around people, and while negotiaing rocks, mud and streams, the answer will suddenly pop up. Now I have to remember it until I get home.
Dealing with more visual things, I dream answers to problems. The last dream of the night, and boom!. SO is always amused when I bolt upright in the morning, she knows I figured something out.
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I once dreamed about matrix multiplication after hand unrolling the inner loop in a fixed size multiply operation to get the compiler to vectorize the loop... That was pretty trippy.
You're in a desert... (Score:3)
You're in a desert [youtu.be], walking along in the sand when all of a sudden...
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Pot farmers.
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Did you at least get a t-shirt?
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not even a little bit (Score:4, Insightful)
I was always confused when someone told me to "visualize" something. The only time it ever works is if I'm helping someone over the phone and need to walk them through steps. At that point, I seem to be able to pull up images of what they're seeing and can walk them through it. (usually computer screens) Unfortunately, this seems to be almost purely conceptual, I don't actually "see a picture" of anything in my head, ever.
And if someone asks me to try to picture something I haven't seen before, I can't just "imagine it" into my head.
On the other hand, I have a very strong "internal dialog" and always "think with my voice". I don't have anything even remotely approaching a "photographic memory", but learned very early on to spell words by "remembering hearing someone spell them out aloud" and literally writing down the letters as I hear them being read back to me in my head. I've never ran into anyone else that experiences this though.
On the plus side, those "I before E, except after C" sort of memory tricks work extremely well for me. As long as I never hear it wrong, even once. Or else I'm doomed to never forget it wrong, and then I have to keep track of which was the "right way".
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The trick is, as in all learning that deals with how things function or what makes them work (i.e. not just memorizing facts), to have a moment of insight, which is a custom-tailored model for you that you intuitively understand. Then hold on to that. It can basically take any form from the full mental spectrum humans can do. The difficult thing is to find it, and when a good teacher helps you, they will run through a variety of different things in the hope that one of them is close enough to how you think
Re:not even a little bit (Score:4, Funny)
It's c-i-e-l-i-n-g because it's always "I before E, especially after C".
Just keep looking at "cieling" until it normalizes in your brain as the correct spelling. You'll be fine.
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Truth. When my nieghbor Kieth recieved his slieghs, the biege ones not the rogue ones, it was wierd how many fiesty caffienated wieghtighters it took to store them in the space above the cieling.
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just google it... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
The game "Memory" seems to be a good test (Score:3)
I knew I wasn't like others when they played the game "memory" where you flipped over matching cards. I've never been able to do that. People who can visualize can remember the card placements even flipped over. I'm lost after 2.
STEM?? (Score:4, Insightful)
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I'm an EE, and visualizing things is a really important tool for my work. Circuit diagrams, circuit board layout / routing, how a board fits in an enclosure, transformer design, etc.
Modalities (Score:4, Interesting)
That's fine, and no doubt it's powerful, but it doesn't mean there aren't other ways to approach the same kinds of work. I've been doing hardware design for a bit over 50 years now, and have quite a collection of successful original projects, many quite complex. I've been writing software since the early 1970's as well, and again, lots of completed projects in that domain. For some systems, I did both the hardware design and the supporting software.
WRT schematics and other diagrams, I'm comfortable and effective on a drafting table at putting together complex ones; but, being lazy, I've also written both schematic capture and PCB layout software, including auto-routing and auto-placement. In assembler. :)
I'm a "5" — I can't visualize anything at all. But I can juggle concepts as both words and abstractions just fine, and I find it a comfortable process to realize them as concrete products.
Likely related, I really enjoy photography; it serves as visual memory for me. It's how I can "know" how my mother and father looked, old flames, places, pets, etc. I also take pictures of my hardware projects both under development and at completion. There's definitely a worthy aspect to being able to access that information. Also, some of my most complex software products have been image manipulation systems.
The bottom line is there are definitely multiple highly functional modalities to dealing with most creative tasks.
Dyslexia (Score:3)
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I still can‘t figure it out if I have it or (Score:3)
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This is only one dimention of Nueral Diversity (Score:3)
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Makes me wonder. (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who can picture things in his mind to some extent, I'd describe it as having another framebuffer that's separate from vision that I can shift attention to to see glimpses of images if I put some effort into it, or something like a story triggers it.
As someone who's worked as a visual designer, I don't remember ever explicitly using it as a tool, but it probably helps having a vague draft in my head to work towards.
So it makes me wonder if it's possible to train control over it, or if someone people have much greater control over it.
I used to paint from live models, so if someone could just consistently hold on to an imaginary view the painting part wouldn't be too difficult.
There was this artist named King Jung Gi who would start from a blank piece of paper and fill it with intricate details without seeming doing any planning, I wonder if he just had the whole thing held in his mind.
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This youtube video about such exercises was somewhat us
If you close your eyes, how long can you remember? (Score:3)
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It's difficult to tell (Score:2)
I can certainly form the concept of an object in my mind, but while I dream in full colour and 3D I wouldn't say the same about trying to visualize something deliberately. It's not like a picture, animation, or video in my mind, but all the details are there regardless.
Yes, I can. (Score:2)
Depending on my mode and mood I can envision quite an amount of detail. Add to that my creativity that has ideas queueing up around the block each day and you understand why I'm not just an IT expert but also have a diploma in performing arts and once upon a time even considered studying fashion design.
I'm one of those (apparently rather) rare cases that are good at coding but also quite good at visual design. I can appreciate good design and with my verbal precision trained by software development I can be
Motionless (Score:2)
I can visualize images in my mind. I can "see" an apple, or even "read" a page of words from an image of it in my head, which is distinctly different from reciting words from memory without the visualization for me. What I can't do is generate moving images in my mind. If I try and think of a person walking, I can visualize some individual frames but not the full motion. Slideshow yes, movie no. This has always bothered me. I do dream with full motion, though.
All in the mind... (Score:2)
What about an inner voice? (Score:2)
Can you have monologues/conversation with yourself inside your head?
Do you have to read out loud/move your lips while reading something?
I was surprised to learn that there are people out there that does not have an inner voice.
if you ever feel dumb, just know that when my friend was 14 she went to a psychiatrist bc she ”had a voice in her head". it was her brain. like literallyjust her thoughts. she thought that she was the only person who had the ability to think. for 14 years
I always could, as far as I remember (Score:2)
I have full 3D visualization internally, I can rotate or deform and transform objects and change colors or textures and even picture sounds and smells temperature and even add some subjective feel to the scene (like dread or happiness), but kind of muted down a bit.
I can also turn it off completely and move away from the sensorial and think on the conceptual, but it's harder to hold for long, images pop up every once in a while if they're strongly associated to what I'm thinking.
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similar 'gaps' exist in the other senses (Score:2)
In sound/music, there can be similar 'gaps'. Some people have literally no sense of pitch, or at least no sense of hearing themselves and determining their relative pitch to others. Others no sense of metrical rhythm (can't tell if a tune is in 2s or 3s, never mind braking down a complex 11/9 pattern like a particular King Crimson track or some Eastern European musics) or no sense of tempo control.
One friend has no sense of (western tonal) harmonic resolution - he can't listen to a simple 16 bar tune and re
Yes, both audio and video, on demand (Score:4, Insightful)
I've long believed that musicians have a specific type of memory for music and can play back a memorized piece on demand. What's being played back is not the actual sound, of course, but the memory of how it was perceived. I can jump forward or backward, skip sections, and make individual parts playback louder or softer in the "mix".
My memory for lyrics, on the other hand, is comparatively undeveloped. I will almost always misremember a lyric line, moving a phrase from one part of the song into another, or replacing individual words.
Ditto for video clips, I can replay them in my mind. But not dialog! That, like lyrics, are frequently mis-remembered.
Go figure.
Can You Picture That? (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Fantasia (Score:2)
I'll be the first to admit that I just realized that the Disney movie Fantasia is related to the term aphantasia. I looked it up and while fantasia is an actual musical term, it relates to music directly springing to mind. In the case of Fantasia, it's visual images that spring to mind when hearing the music and put to animated form. It's odd that fantasia and aphantasia both come from the same Greek but for different unrelated reasons and different spellings.
Picture this... (Score:3)
I've Always Been able to Visualize (Score:2)
I've always been able to strongly visualize with detail and it amazes me that other people can't. I just thought it was something that everyone had. As a R&D Mechanical engineer, comes in very handy and it's how I design things. Compared to other design engineers, I believe I have less written down notes because many times I can mentally go through the design process in my head and come up with a close to finished design without ever having to put mechanical pencil to paper. Many times when I'm searchin
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As a R&D Mechanical engineer, comes in very handy and it's how I design things.
^^^THIS
For 3D printing and repairing/designing/building things, I do 99% of the 'modeling' in my head. I never realized that there were people who couldn't do this and it freaks me out a little bit TBH.
When working on customer support (Score:2)
...there's nothing like being able to picture - mentally what's going on in someone else's computer. At least, that's my idea of what "visual imagery" is, because it's a hard thing to diagnose.
"I hear radio waves in my head." (Score:2)
[Jim Ladd:] "You and I are listening to KAOS in Los Angeles. Let's go to the telephones now and take a request."
[Billy:] "Hello, I'm Billy."
[Jim:] "Yes?"
[Billy:] "I hear radio waves in my head."
[Jim:] "You hear radio waves in your head?
. . .
The Roger Waters song Radio Waves https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m99xnFekZww [youtube.com]
3D (Score:2)
And I didn't realize people couldn't do this.
Tested very high on 3D questions. I thought others just had gimpy legs, not that they were wheelchair bound in 3D mental modeling.
Then again I don't have perfect pitch. "What is that note?" "It's a C." "Why?" It's apparently like asking why orange is orange.
My ability to visualize things in my mind (Score:2)
Has always been natural to me.
My mind adapts to visual stimuli very easily since a very young age in the 80s, I always had an insanely vivid imagination.
When I learned to draw (went to Animation School) and first learned how to draw 3D by hand, it came very naturally to me.
Then I quickly went to using 3Dmax (also known as 3D studio max later)
And my mind quickly adapted that way of visualising things, I often had fun with my internal visualisation powers, and powerful it is.
You may not believe this (I've tot
Childhood cognitive self-programming priorities (Score:4, Interesting)
Wow, disturbing. I'm hypervisual. (Score:2)
Yes...is this unusual? (Score:2)
Yes, and like a lot of people I can "see" something in my mind's eye.
It's as if it was projected on a floating 3x5 card just above my normal line of sight, and I can rotate whatever the object is, move it, change it, etc.
I don't think this is anything unusual or exotic; it's just visualizing something as if it were in front of me on a screen.
I was very surprised to find out that there are people who can't do this and/or who can't visualize objects abstractly.
How to know if a loved one has aphantasia (Score:4, Interesting)
I ran across a YouTube video about aphantasia a few years ago and during lunch with my wife afterward I told her about it. Her reaction was not what I expected. She asked if I could visual things, and I told her I could. I discovered that she thought when people talked about visualizing or imagining or picturing something in their minds was (not to be ironic) a figure of speech. Turns out, she has aphantasia and we found out during that lunch. She called her mother and her sister and some other family members, and she's the only one who cannot form mental images.
And then I realized aphantasia was the reason why she could never understand why certain furniture arrangements would not work in the rooms in our house, that I would have to move the couch and the chairs and disconnect the TV and shift everything else so that we could confirm that this new configuration was much worse than leaving everything were it was. (And no, this was not a one-time thing.)
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At the very least this hypothetical person must find the concept of Tetris -mystifying-!
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My GF, who is an artist, says she can close her eyes and literally "see" a picture in her mind, just like I can hear voices in my mind when I read a book. However, I am incapable of "seeing" anything in my mind.
I cannot visualize a copy of the laptop. I can estimate the space it takes up. I can "feel" the movements of mentally placing a laptop and opening the lid. But I don't "see" it.
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It's true. I would (pun regrettably unavoidable) be unable to visualise that too.
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I have difficulties pronouncing other languages well, since I can't recall what they sound like
This is definitely on topic. I definitely have a mental model of the shape of someone's mouth and throat as they speak phonemes. Visual cortex processing I'm sure, but not a literal picture at all. I can watch a GIF and can roughly identify what accent they are speaking with.
While many people figure out translations in their heads before they speak, I never had that step.
Definitely the proper way to learn a new language is to learn it natively rather than by translating individual words and phrases. You pair the new word directly with the concept in your mind rather than the word you already have fo