Can you form Mental Images?

I can do mental images, but only with enormous effort, and even then, they're pretty sketch. So I generally skip images. If I forced myself to imagine a tiger, I wouldn't possibly be able to count stripes.

Along these lines, I've also noticed that I read differently from most people. I never visualize what I'm reading. I read the words, but don't imagine the action or the people or places. The question "What does Hamlet look like?" makes pretty much no sense to me. In fact, I tend to skim quickly over highly descriptive passages (if they're long). In addition, although I'm a fluent reader of a few foreign languages, passages describing movement in space (say a drive or sail), completely lose me every time.

When I talk to people about reading, most think I'm weird, but every now and again, I find someone who is equally non-visual as a reader.

Thinking about this even a bit more, I realize that I probably could not give a coherent or useful description of anyone, no matter how well I know the person. Apparently, I use my eyes only to avoid oncoming objects. Weird.

There are so many subtleties to this concept that it actually far more disturbing/fascinating (depending on your viewpoint) than this article briefly surveys.

Even when we are looking at a real tiger with our real eyes, we cannot likely count the stripes unless our eyes are looking directly at the stripes. But when we are looking directly at the stripes, we are no longer seeing the whole tiger, even though it is there. People have no idea how selective human vision actually is even when looking at real objects.

Now moving this into the realm of a mental picture, I indeed see a tiger, head-on and from the side in my mind. But because mental constructions are more of a visualized gestalt than a detailed image, when I move from seeing the tiger itself, I no longer have a real tiger there at all. In fact, you have nothing at all. When I focus on the stripes in my mental picture, the tiger of my mind (how's that for a philosophical concept?) ceases to exist as anything but a peripheral concept with a not so clear form or substance, and there are only stripes.

I suspect this is true of most visual thinkers because it also happens to be how we see! We may be aware of other things besides what we are directly observing, but our mind does not deal with them except as an approximation. Our brain literally filters out of our visio-spacial conception that which is not relevant to our current point of attention. But in the real world, at least, what we are not focusing on remains what it is, even when our attention is not on it. Not so with mental pictures. I may convince myself the tiger is still there, until I realize that with my mental tiger, I can make it have as many or as few stripes as the parameters of my mental concept of a tiger allows.

Obviously, the point of the article is that this is different for different people. Everything I think about is visual, sometimes in vivid detail. Even when I am thinking about abstract concepts, I do so visually, although for the life of me I couldn't describe what I see to you.

It's strange. I tend to do a lot of reasoning with image components, even if they are abstract to the point of not really being a metaphor anymore -- and when brain storming sometimes will say "No it needs to be rounder" about a DB schema, or use hand motions to place items "where they go" as I describe them. (Oddly, if I put something that "goes" top left in say, bottom left, it doesn't feel right). This flabbergasts and confuses people. To the point that I almost can't communicate w/out a whiteboard sometimes. Other people totally get it and even "put things" in the right place, and we'll mutually "rearrange" them as we talk.

Anyway I digress, the article reminds me of this bit by Feynman actually: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf