Comment by SuoDuanDao | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SuoDuanDao | Hacker News Reader

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The limits to what I can visualise? Well, I'd put it this way - there definitely are limits, but what they are is a matter of training. There are traditions of mental training that challenge the practitioner to visualise increasingly complex things, so I've run into them.

A standard example of such visualisation is 'in bluish-white light on a dark background, imagine a line. from the same light, imagine drawing a circle using the line as a diameter. Now draw an equilateral triangle touching the boundary of the circle. Then a square around the triangle. Finally, draw another circle around the square, and hold the resulting image stable in your mind' (yes, this shape probably inspired Rowling's description of the deathly Hallows. It's a very old exercise).

I can visualise the line and the first circle easily. I can add the triangle, but at this point it already takes some effort, I can't do it if I'm even a little distracted. Typically, adding the square makes me 'lose' an earlier detail, usually the line, from my visualization.

That's probably not very informative to your question though, because visualization doesn't have the same sorts of rules around complexity a graphics screen does, the brain definitely uses some form of internal shorthand. I can picture a particular celebrity as easily as I can picture a circle, and picturing her holding an item from my grocery list in each hand is if anything somewhat easier than picturing two other elementary shapes connected to the circle. Maybe because humans are used to imagining other humans holding things, I'm not sure.

In any case, there are definitely limits to what a person can visualize, and they're pretty modest for the untrained mind, but it's quite unlike a graphics program where one could simply count the number of pixels required. Not sure if that helps or not...

> A standard example of such visualisation is 'in bluish-white light on a dark background, imagine a line. from the same light, imagine drawing a circle using the line as a diameter. Now draw an equilateral triangle touching the boundary of the circle. Then a square around the triangle. Finally, draw another circle around the square, and hold the resulting image stable in your mind' (yes, this shape probably inspired Rowling's description of the deathly Hallows. It's a very old exercise).

I can't even visualise the dark background or the light.

When you look at a photograph and then look away but try to recall details, how is your memory of it encoded? Do you immediately have a verbal description of it in your head?

I can’t see the light in your example either. If I shut my eyes, and try to see it, I just see blackness though I have no problems with the concept of a blue light (or even the entire scene) - I just don’t see it. To answer the photo question, I don’t have a verbal definition of a photo, I have a relational one. I can still describe the photo reasonably well, but I don’t “see” anything.

I’ve thought quite a bit on how my mind works once I discovered that “the mind’s eye” wasn’t just a euphemism for other people. I think my mind works with rules rather than visuals, and it constructs/deconstructs a lot of them as needed to describe something it can work with.

I’m a software engineer, an ICT5, working at Apple. I tell people my primary skill is “solving problems”, and that’s accurate as a 10k-foot view. I’m good at mentally modeling the intricacies of how a system works, what the dependencies are, what the interactions are between sub-parts, how that effects corner-cases. I can “run” this mental simulation in my head forwards and backwards a bit (not too far) and get a grasp of how it fits together. But there’s no visual to any of this, whether I’m thinking about a bicycle or server-side cryptographic mail storage and transport. It’s all just interacting rules. I’m often the one to point out a flaw in a systems model well before we get to implementation, and I’m good at “breaking new ground” when it comes to implementing something, even for a different group - I get “loaned out” a fair bit.

So I think there are upsides to not having a mind’s eye - I chose physics at college, and found it easier than most I think; equally there are upsides to having the ability to visualise things, I expect. It’s probably a species-optimization to have the capacity for both…

This fits me very well as well. It did not connect with me that people weren't talking figuratively when talking about seeing stuff until I read an article saying some people didn't, and I realised I was the outlier.

I don't know how it is encoded, but I certainly can verbally describe things relatively easily, but I also tends to have a mental spatial understanding of what I see, so I can move through a model of what I've seen and describe element by element on the basis of e.g. that I know how elements of what I've seen is connected.

If I were to try to remember code, or try to remember a photograph, or try to remember how to get to the closest Super-Market, it's all structured in my mind in the same way. I might remember details, but only if I have paid attention to those details and understand why those things are important to remember. If those details happened to be based on visual details, I would use that, but it is no way close to the same amount of details of a photograph.

I think the best way to answer this might be for you to imagine what a blind person imagines when they take a trip.

I'm fairly sure I fall on the aphantasia side of things (or at least mostly - I've had what I'd consider "flashes" occasionally over a couple decades, which serve as a contrast to what I normally experience), but I don't really have any trouble "knowing" what a triangle-in-a-circle-in-a-square-in-a-circle looks like. I can even draw intersections and segments in isolation, or rotate the thing (or the square and circle in opposite directions) and basically immediately tell you how the edges / corners will align with each other.

But I don't "see" any of that. In any way. You tell me it's drawn in a blue light, or the square is an inch thick piece of plaid: sure. now it's plaid. I already have colors picked out and I'm remembering how the threads in the fabric produce patterns when viewed up close, especially where the stripes overlap. I'm not seeing anything though.

It's closer to how I deal with math - 5x7 is 35 because I know it is. I memorized single-digit multiplication long ago, and if I ever want to reassure myself I can just do repeated addition. It's not accompanied by literally any metaphor or mnemonic or whatever, it's just equal to thirty five, and 35 is 三十五 is ٣٥ regardless of where it comes from. Similarly, rotating the deathly hallows by 90 degrees is just a rotated deathly hallows - the line is now sideways, the triangle has a vertical edge on the left, the green stripes in the plaid are now sideways and the diagonal-hashed intersections at the overlaps are in the opposite direction, etc.

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Maybe also oddly, I have a very good visual memory in practical terms. I disassemble and reassemble stuff with no trouble, and when I'm looking for a phrase in a book I read a year ago I can generally find it within an inch of where I remember it on a page (but not usually what page it is). When I'm looking for things I lost, I generally hunt by looking for colors or textures that were adjacent to where I last remember it. I'd never describe how I remember that or how I look for it as seeing though - there's just a wadded up blanket near it with a big fold that tangents with the far right corner of my phone, so I go looking for wadded up blankets.

I feel like this is probably mostly a sensory-qualia thing, almost totally orthogonal to what is being thought about / done. People who can see things in their mind's eye can't necessarily do anything with it beyond having the experience, and people who are totally internally blind can do things that seem to be based on sight. And to some degree both of those are train-able.

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