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Comment by antihipocrat | Hacker News Reader

When you read a word relating to something you've seen or regularly experienced, how is that processed by your mind?

For example if you were asked to draw and color a basketball, how would you approach the task without 'seeing' something in your mind?

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For me it's an analytical process: I start by a round object ("ball") and try to figure out how the lines should be so that it can fit together. I remember (barely in my case, but that's because I'm not that into sport) that there is a difference between a football and a basketball, the football has pentagons and hexagons and the basketball has bigger shapes. I also remember the color, but not as picture, but as word, say "brown".

All this together and a bunch of more subconscious processing will result in a very bad picture of a basketball which wouldn't win a prize and probably would fail us another round of "guessing the picture".

OTOH, tell me about the structure of a house and how long something is, I can probably wind up a good 3d picture and even tell you how to walk around in the house. Maybe best described as "blueprint recognition".

Same way I remember somebody's name.

Do you picture name tags on people? It just comes out of nothing in my head.

I always see a face together with the name, yes. The name is mostly audible but I also visualize the text in a white font.

That's entirely alien to me. I cannot picture faces nor text in my head.

One of the ways I make myself relax and fall asleep is visualizing a countdown from 1000 to 0. Actually visualizing the shapes of the numbers, to occupy that part of my brain, and then mentally saying the numbers as well.

I'm absolutely terrible with faces and names, though, but I think that's mostly due to poor social conditioning.

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