Please can some of you chime in. I have never been able to picture things and I don't have a voice in my head. Do you? I assumed my way is the norm, it's weird finding out that it might not be. What does picturing things even look like, is there a floating object in front of you?
On the voice thing I saw a Reddit thread where people were expressing surprise that some people don't have an inner voice when they read or think.
Imagine a videogame rendering engine, which only renders things the player is actively looking at, not just the field of view, but just the smallest possible point of focus.
For example if I say: "it's the same as this (while holding up a production sample), but in blue plastic" I have one person who I work with who will need to see a picture of it to understand that, while others are simply "yep ok", and some people a bit in between.
For me personally, I can visualise an object, change it, rotate it, recolour/reskin parts of it, interact with it etc. all in my mind without any special effort. In terms of my work this means I tend to do it anywhere and not in front of my tools or software.
This kind of visualisation isn't limited to images, a composer friend can "play" and "hear" music, doing nothing more than reading the sheet music and moving his hands on a table - no where near a piano. He can practice while laying on a beach for example.
Also as a trend: I notice people who lack the ability to visualise are more easily fooled by edited imagery. Especially the recent-ish trend of making a body slender or larger by use of "facetune"/"liquify" style tools.
I make it a matter of importance to understand how a person "learns" very quickly as I notice this has a definite effect on their ability to work and follow direction.
And the same applies the other way around, when blind-tasting some sauces or foods. I get a mental imagery of the components from the taste, not 100% obviously but usually it’s pretty accurate.
How did you play imaginary games as a kid?
Voice in your head. What happens when you read a play? Don't see a guy holding a skull, talking about slings and arrows? Like a movie. If there's a sudden sound to one side, you turn your actual head that way.
In fact the movie analogy is the best description. I can see video of everything I imagine, in fact it's pretty much what imagination is to me. You see yourself winning the race? There you are, breaking the rope, Chariots of Fire playing as you slowly push your chest forward.
I do this with math as well. Geometry questions, I can move the lines around. Algebra, I can move the symbols around. To a limited degree of course, I need paper for anything complicated. But it's useful in a way that's hard to describe, because you can't explain it in words, you need to show someone the video with the constrained shape, eg a circle with a diameter and a point that moves on the circle, showing that wherever the point is there's always a 90 degree angle.
Smells, I don't often imagine. Mostly they are stenches and I prefer not to.
I do want to say your writing and prose is so vivid and amazing, the way you're describing what's going on is rich and beautiful.
Those 100 fiction books a year... don't you turn them into a movie in your head? Part of the reason I'm not so keen on fiction is that there's not quite enough to make a movie, or too much. If I get a description of some guy in a book either I have to fill in his costume with some random clothes that aren't described, or I have to remember every little detail. Inevitably I forget something and the movie makes no sense.
Do you dream? That's kinda what movies in my head are like. Stuff has some form but is also partially fluid.
The least realistic dream aspects are also what will invoke lucidity. My motor skills may break down and I start drifting or swimming when I want to walk or run. I might find it impossible to focus and read printed text or computer displays while it is important to do so. Or if I find myself driving, the dream will usually degrade and abort, with the car driving ahead and leaving me behind where I no longer see its path nor control it. If I've recently been playing video games in waking life, I might fumble for controls to walk and engage the surroundings. But otherwise, the dream sensory world is pretty much like real life, just with fictional places, people, and stories.
However, I am one of those folks on the aphantasia end of the spectrum in waking life. I have no inner voice nor inner vision. All my conscious memories and simulations are abstract for every sense. I might liken it to a 2nd or 3rd order derivative. While awake, I can't really picture loved ones or remember their voices in my mind. But I can think about their present or past location and interactions. I can recollect or imagine ideas of shapes, topology, movement, rhythm, melody, intention, or emotional context. But it's nothing like real sensation.
I've been a voracious reader at times in my life, but there is no movie or soundtrack to books. If anything, the literary experience is almost its own visual modality. It can be somewhat blocky, non-linear, or even atemporal. I do not experience reading as if listening to spoken words nor as seeing words in sequence. It is vaguely like looking at the page and feeling parsed grammatical structures and their semantics at the same time. I don't "see" printed words if I think of a book or think about writing. But I feel the rough outline of text and relationships of ideas. I think reading to me is almost like buffering in memories or knowledge. And, there is a meta-experience where I can reflect on and appreciate the written technique while consuming its content. But the literary meta-experience fades faster than the semantic content.
People around me consider me to be very creative and imaginative. But I'd say my imagination is stilted. I don't think I'll ever produce a novel or a play or a music composition. I can easily come up with vignettes or deviations in the context of an existing story, but don't seem to have the capacity to create a whole piece from scratch. I've dabbled in drawing and writing as hobbies, but my output is very representational. I might render a landscape I like by hand, or capture a moment in verse. But I seem to have no inner drive to imagine and create entire landscapes or stories on a blank slate. With my career, I have done large scale and long term work in service of problems presented to me by employers, but I think I'd draw a blank if I tried to just "create software" of my own volition.
Of course the abilities such visualisations give a person are on a scale, but the point is that these abilities have a lot of real world applications beyond play, and they can make work and life a lot easier than those that can't perform them.
For sight, it's a cross between off-screen rendering and overlay rendering. It doesn't feel like part of the world around me and it's not part of the streaming surface my eyes see so to speak. It's like a separate, independent layer that gets "halfway-composed", but with a stencil buffer that tells me it's not real. Bandwidth is restricted by focus, I can imagine and animate visually complex scenes but the more constraints I put in the harder it is to keep track of everything and not have a rendering glitch or artifact.
If I want to picture something specifically as part of my field of view (part of the world I'm seeing with my eyes), it's overlaid, but somewhat glitchy or ghostly and skipping frames, like it doesn't belong there.
For audio, I can replay, remix, compose, "infinite jukebox" and essentially deep-fake anything I've ever heard and it's overlaid on top of what I hear. Unlike for visuals there's no stencil buffer, so I can't tell the difference (except that it doesn't correlate with other senses, like loud noises rumbling your body for example). By default it's in mono, making it stereo or directional takes a significant effort. That processor tends to have a mind of its own sometimes and is vulnerable to earworms, like an infinite jukebox that just won't stop playing. Controls can be a bit iffy, like music seeking having trouble if it's not to a position that's correctly aligned or music "skipping" if I have trouble switching over to the next part of the song.
Finally, the act of imagining something is like ordering my subconscious with an AI prompt, but without text. Sometimes it decides to imagine stuff I didn't order or screws up what I've ordered, which can make me twitch a bit if it's something unexpected and that I don't approve of and need to actively suppress. If I'm particularly tired or stressed out, my brain can have trouble distinguishing between a real stimuli and a fake one, so I guess that's effectively hallucinations, but usually like echoes or corner-of-the-eye stuff rather than full-blown lala-land.
It definitely doesn’t feel like my eyes are seeing whatever I’m picturing, it feels like it’s happening inside my head.
I'm more of an artist than a coder, but do both. I find it harder to code than i find creating 2D or 3D objects in something like blender for instance. But visually i can mental map nodes etc. to assist me in coding.
As for voices, inner monologue or attaching voices to comments i read is pretty much natural thing for myself. I assume we all did that to some degree but clearly not. It's interesting how we see our world and understand it. In your case it must be different. I'm intrigued really how you make sense of things without visually creating associations in the mind etc.
Wait, does this mean daydreaming is people actually seeing things? Do you daydream? When I daydream I like to create 'what if' scenarios and follow them to conclusions.
> and close my eyes and can spin them around like looking at a 3D model in some kind of viewer for instance.
> But visually i can mental map nodes etc. to assist me in coding.
This is amazing! I've daydreamed (ha!) about having an ability to render objects in my head and manipulate them like a computer but you already do that. I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm envious.
I'm not artistic, just a normal software person.
Yes, they are usually seeing similarly to seeing in a dream. Seeing with the minds eye as they say. You don't usually lose awareness of your surroundings, what you are seeing in reality just becomes more of a background process while you visualise a daydream.
Anyway, the middle ground for me is that despite not being able to conjure vivid (or any) mental imagery, I have vivid dreams and daydreams. So it seems that if I am tired or my mind is wandering, some mental canvas unlocks, but not while I am alter and paying attention.
Humanity is already under electromagnetic surveillance and sabotage and our science and tech is hindered so we can't defend ourselves.
Religion is organized fraud to prevent scientific progress, but attacks with radiation are done to scientists also.
Read my posts.
On the picturing things side, I don't know how to describe it. I can just imagine objects, models, layouts etc in my mind and turn around like in modelling software. It's completely separate to my vision, the images are in my "mind's eye" or mental space and it doesn't have anymore impact on my visual awareness than any other kind of thinking. I can take the models from my mind and overlay them on my sight but it takes much more concentration to imagine things that way. It's easier to build/edit in my mind and then check against vision.
I'm also better at certain types of mental picturing than others. Visuospatial thing like floor plans, 3D models, visualising a street route etc are easy and natural for me. Colour I can do to an extent but it's harder and I need to reference reality more. 2D is a little harder than 3D, no idea why. Non technical images like art are harder too. Though that could just be the 2D thing as technical images are easy to imagine 3D. Landscapes and faces are easier too now I think of it which backs that up.
I learned early on not everyone can do it. We had Tech classes in S1-2 of high school (11-13) where we learned 3D technical drawing. It made immediate sense to me, I just turned the object in my head and drew it from different perspectives. But I learned that wasn't something most of my classmates could just naturally do. Lots of them learned it with practise but it took a while and some of them just couldn't do it.
I enjoy cooking for example, and if I really like a meal somewhere, I can slowly start to break down the components that provide the taste, the smell, even the texture (i.e., cooking techniques) for the meal.
Music is a bit easier for me even without a ton of familiarity, but I can hear the notes quite easily in my mind, scale them and find their "friends" (not sure what the real musical term is), I just lack the physical ability to hit some of the notes in my mind.
The point of this is that it's not an omnipresent feature for everyone, and I'm willing to bet it's much more isolated as I'm describing, but I don't insist that I'm accurate in this bet. I don't think that I really trained for this directly, at least not in all subjects -- I did play an instrument as a child, and while I couldn't recite the different scales or tell you which notes to play by name, I could just show you with my instrument because it "sounded" right in my head, and if my teacher corrected me and showed me, it was easy enough after awhile to "hear" the right note in advance.
With visualizing items, again it's nothing that I would train on and it's not something I do all the time, but it does happen; remembering directions to some place in my city I might just give the basic directions without thinking of what it looks like, but if someone is unfamiliar with my city, I can "see" the various places they'll spot on the way, almost to the point it's like going on a walk in my mind through this place.
The visualizations typically start out very amorphous for me unless I'm _very_ familiar with the subject; usually only a few vague aspects of the image appear, and as I remember other details, the picture becomes more clear. It's maybe a bad example, but imagine watching a painting come together one layer at a time, or a Timelapse of an artist doing a painting. Or maybe some game where only part of the image is shown at first with some blurring or distortion, and over time (as I think of more details), it becomes more clear.
For me it’s like switching to another reality.* I can reproduce actual reality in the alt reality of my mind’s eye if necessary.
I have noticed some limitations though. I have trouble imagining altered faces - e.g. it’s hard for me to remove a facial feature; I guess I don’t know what to replace it with and would need to study human faces to determine a replacement. But maybe it’s just me.
* That’s what people do when they are daydreaming.