Inform: A Language for Interactive Fiction

Wow, the Galton paper is amazing, thank you. To be honest I'm like the scientists that he questioned first... until I read this today, I always thought that the whole "mental imagery" concept was mainly a figure of speech, as when people say they feel butterflies in their stomach, and things like that. I can picture my breakfast table, but it's more of a conceptual sketch than an actual image. I can only focus my thoughts on one thing at a time, and e.g. I know what the colors are but I'm not really "seeing" them in my mind - the fact that people can report a "brightness" value in relation to reality makes me think that my mind really works different from that of those people, for me the brightness question doesn't even make sense.

Now I feel handicapped, although I suppose that maybe if I could conjure up these mental images, I wouldn't be so good at symbolic processing. I guess this is why I have always preferred text to diagrams and such...

By the way, what I can do is hear music in my mind - and yes, this comes with pitch, volume, timbre, polyphony and everything. In fact if I'm at a place with a constant background noise - as in a plane, or near an air conditioning machine - I sometimes think I'm actually hearing it in reality (although I have learned that I'm not). I wonder if other people also experience this.

That is fascinating, thanks.

> Do other people see actual images when they imagine something?

Pretty much.

In my case the image is not very clear around the edges, but it's very sharp where my mind eye is directly looking at. The rest is a bit blurry and fluid, but the general spatial structure is still clear. I do see color too.

It doesn't actually feel like literally seeing. It feels more like the post-processing your brain does after the real sight is processed. I can even mind-see with my eyes open and it feels different, which suggests they're separate mechanisms. It feels kind of like a projection in the back of my mind.

I'd compare it more to remembering sight, with the ability to mix those memories and imagining them (e.g. I've never seen a pink elephant but I can mix elephant and pink color).

For more intricate shapes like people's faces everything is fluid and not very sharp though. I get the rough shape of their heads and obvious details like the hair and then I can focus on specific parts of their face but not the whole picture. I've never been very good at remembering faces, but I'm very good at recognizing faces (even strangers which I just happen to cross on the street), which also suggests those are different brain mechanisms too.

Memorable faces like Angelina Jolie's are easier to picture as a whole, but common faces are harder to picture, no matter how much I've seen them (it's easier to picture Jolie than my own mother).

Yes. I used to be very bad at imagination, but then needed to learn it when I was learning how to paint.

I've started with drawing a dot on the piece of white paper, and was closing my eyes for a few seconds, trying to imagine it.

After that - moved onto simple shapes and colors. Then practiced imagining cars or people's faces. Sometimes you can take a car and "rotate" it in your imagination, or change colors and details.

Or walk down the street and mentally replace buildings with a nuclear wasteland or a jungle with dinosaurs =)

Now I can close my eyes and imagine flying around a city, or enact some cool action scenes, car chases, anything.

I strongly suspect that it's not a limit, Tesla wrote in his autobiography that he could imagine things so vividly that they were like hallucinations, and invented/simulated whole mechanisms in his mind.

> Can you draw pictures of things without consulting a present example?

On a scale of 1-10, my drawing ability is, generously, a 1.

> If only slightly or very abstractly, have you ever tried improving this skill?

"Improve drawing ability" is sort of on my back burner of things I should do - think, "I should buy a boat" cat meme. Even if I were consulting a present example, though, my ability to draw something would be very poor, so maybe it's just lack of training?

> If I were to ask you what's the color of Santa Claus's outfit, I suspect you could answer. Is that simply because you remember written or verbal communication naming that color?

I know it's red, but it's a purely verbal phenomenon. Thinking about it now it does sound strange - I know red when I see it, but I honestly cannot conjure up an image of "red", or any other color besides black, if I close my eyes.

> Do any other aspects of Santa's usual depiction come to mind at the same time, simply as a side effect of being asked about the outfit color?

Not unbidden, but if I think about it - grandfatherly, big white beard, ruddy cheeks, white-fur fringed red suit, black boots, portly. It's not necessarily from remembering written or spoken descriptions, though - it's more like my visual memories get encoded verbally.

FWIW I've always done exceptionally well on tests of verbal ability (perfect score on SAT and GRE verbal sections, for example) so maybe the part of my brain that should be doing visualizations is doing word stuff instead? Or, maybe since I lack that component I've had to make up for it by becoming better at language? I'm not sure.

Wouldn't that have been with a different language? Inform 7 is a vastly different language from Inform 1-6 (which were relatively Algol-like), and only came out in 2006.

Cornerstone was a menu-driven database application, it wasn't programmable. It would probably have sold better if it was.

Yup. I don't know about excellent, but here's one I like:

The lady is in the lake,

The lady is holding her breath...

When the lady is sad and the window is plaid

Then end the game in death.

More: http://slesinsky.org/brian/code/i7_poetry.html