Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
IMO, the only caveat here, and it may be a big one, is that of perception and imagination shaped by experience. I started learning music in my late 20s. Now, in my mid 30s, I can understand lyrics to songs when I couldn't before, identify chord progressions (a concept I had no knowledge of beforehand) and imagine entire arranged songs in my head. It's not that I didn't have a "mind's ear" before, it's just that I hadn't built a bunch of useful skills and conceptual frameworks to work with. Whether my music education developed new neural networks that might be detected or analyzed is another question.
This has to be the same way it works for visual artists. Obviously a skilled illustrator, painter or sculptor is going to be better at visualizing imagery than someone who doesn't do those things. If that's the case, just thinking about images a lot makes you better at visualizing images. Ultimately, that's not much of a shocker and isn't very interesting.
On the other hand, I am almost completely unable to imagine anything with my minds eye willingly. I have been drawing for 15 years now, and i did not notice any improvement in being able to visualize things in my mind.
So, at least from my standpoint, it does not seem like a skill that you can easily train.
There's no way to prove what you're saying is true in any useful sense.
Yes, if someone imagines red, we can't be sure it's the same, but this is about how some people can do something, and some people can't.
I participated in a study about aphantasia a while ago, and it's pretty clear that I'm pretty much at the end of a spectrum there. There are indeed people who can imagine extremely vivid imagery. I happen to be able to perfectly imagine sounds and music, as well as compose music in my head, which I assume might be something not everyone else can do. With images, it's the complete opposite for me.
What you say seems intuitive, but (and this is just a digression) I also think being able to imagine something and recreate it in the real world are two separate (though related) skills. Imagining something means the brain only has to, say, recreate some of the "effects" of incoming sensory data. On the other hand, creating something in the real world as an artist does, whether with paint or a musical instrument, involves a feedback loop. The artist must identify the real-world color or proportion or sound he imagines, which is a skill in itself, then must participate in a feedback loop of: percieve what you just created, compare to imagined goal (which may now change), edit creation. This requires both the mental skill to do so, plus the motor skill to pull it off (as far as the artistic creation depends on muscle movements).
In this way, someone could have a vivid "mind's eye" but be a lousy artist. Or remember musical structures (such as chord progressions) without being able to identify or recreate them (at least not without a ton of trial and error as the skill is developed).
I had conversations on this subject with a friend who has no mental monologue, I don't think you're correct. I think we get by through making use of the thinking processes we have available, but that doesn't mean that there's no major differences in how we find out our answers, just that we tend to get to roughly the same answers no matter which route we take.
For one thing that doesn't take into account how long it takes for your thought process to reach conclusion, if you're incapable of creating mental imagery and have to solve a spatial problem through mental monologue alone might that not take longer to intuit?
The question of whether someone "has" a mental monologue is also complex. Is your friend saying they don't usually talk to themselves when solving problems, or that they never do? Are they saying they can't talk to themselves? If they don't do it often, and you do it more often out of habit, that's a different thing than "not having a mental monologue". The problem with these articles is that people conflate all of these concepts.
Also, a lot of data supports the idea that people aren't very good authorities on how their own minds work. Decades of research on psychology and consciousness can attest to that.
My friend cannot create a mental voice at all, so not only does he not usually talk to himself mentally, he never does it. He also can't recall voices. If someone is describing a process in steps he has to stop them frequently to write down the parts. This doesn't apply to a process he's seen, he can recall imagery fine.
The end of the very last comment I made contained a possible method for comparing these different thought processes, giving someone with poor mental imagery a spatial task and comparing with someone who claims strong mental imagery, the idea being that intuition should be faster under one set of conditions than the other. Funnily enough there's also others in this thread who have mentioned using imagined images to navigate spatial tasks.
Getting older in general is scary, but inevitable. Work as hard as you can each day and minimize BS. Also take time to appreciate the people around you, though.
E.g. there are a few IQ puzzles with cubes where you have to picture which side would be the one with the 6 or other puzzles where you have to say whether the last cog in a cog machine turns right or left, I never did these puzzles in "picture mode", always only logically. Also, chess, I was always one of the worst chess players in my school chess club and I guess this is why. However, I started playing Go and although I was (for the longest time) not able to really think ahead (in Go it's even of much more importance to picture the next steps ahead than in chess; in chess at least you can say in your head I do this-then-that-then-that without needing to picture it in detail [for very amateurish play :)]; in Go you have to picture the new stones otherwise you cannot really judge the positions at all), gradually I had more and more moments where I could do it.
Also, e.g. picturing the way from A to B (like the way from your home to the shopping centre), for the longest time I couldn't do it because my mind wouldn't let me think more than a split second about pictures (as I said: my tinnitus was quite the killer) but nowadays I can do it. So, there certainly are ways to improve. Although I like to think that all these years not thinking in pictures have helped me improve my intuition and logical thinking, but who knows :)
I have no artistic ability but I can imagine images very vividly.
> On the other hand, people with aphantasia don’t do as well as others at remembering details of their own lives. It’s possible that recalling our own experiences — known as episodic memory — depends more on the mind’s eye than does remembering facts about the world.
This is true for me as well. I know that I've been to Italy several times from ages 10 to 15 with my family, but I couldn't tell you much more than fragments or how often that was, etc.
"It was an average sized room with orange carpet and white walls, entirely empty except for a small circular table with a telephone on top in the middle."
When you read something like that do you not form a coherent mental image of this room?
Especially if the text adds details later, I won't be able to add those in most of the time.
For example, for the fragment you quoted, there is no carpet in my room no matter how hard I try to add it. And the walls are made of wood.
So like, hearing that the character got out of a car and is at the beach now is enough for me, reading about the white sands, wooden chairs, and crystal clear water is just stuff I ignore, my brain just says 'ok - store fact that character is now at beach. engage mental / factual associations about what beaches are like / what your emotions are around beaches'. But there's not a step where I think 'let's picture that beach'. I'd rather just think about it.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK11007/ [1] https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.58...
One of the example skills that blew me away, that put a pin on a set of ideas & thoughts that were floating about but un-named, was "Inland Empire". I struggle to describe it, but it's kind of the inner reserve of imagination, resounds very much with the hyperphantasia extreme described in this article. The game's full skill set is semi-viewable from here[1], & Inland Empire is a psyche skill on it. There's a lot of other fun amazing good skills, most a bit more classic in nature, but Inland Empire shored up & defined how I think of the Mind's Eye in a big way.
[1] https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/disco-elysium-skills-charac...
I can visualize building an engine in my head step by step. Even going to get the parts if I want to. My girlfriend can’t even visualize the car. Or the garage, or anything. She thinks in concepts, and understanding stuff like abstract things is much easier for her than for me.
If I don’t see the process or make some visual analogy, it’s hard for me to get it.
One Twitter thread in particular messed with me: visualize a bright red star. Do you actually see the color?
Are you sure?
For me, it felt (and feels) like I can’t actually picture a red star. This is highly disconcerting because I used to be able to, I think. However, if I picture a red star next to a blue star, it’s clearly distinguishable in my mind.
Maybe the mind’s eye operates in YCrCb, and the CrCb can get kinda crappy. :)
By contrast, as seen in an article mentioned here on HN previously (5 years back?), and trialed any number of times since, you can ask them to “picture” or “visualize” something then surprise ask a different attribute that would have to exist if pictured literally.
If someone isn’t expecting this, asking most people “picture a red triangle” … “ok?” … “which way is it pointing?” will elicit an immediate direction (up, down, left right).
In a small subset of people, when not expecting it, the second question gets a long pause, a “What?”, or some other manifestation of not having a literal triangle envisioned with a preexisting direction.
Those metaphorically “picturing” the concept of a red triangle seem to be taking time to decide and layer into their model what concept of direction it should have, while those with aphantasia seem to come back with “what, literally?” or similar indications that “picture” is a figure of speech.
For myself, that HN discussion is the first time I gathered that for other folks “counting sheep” when they were kids wasn’t a metaphor.