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Comment by defen | Hacker News Reader

> I'm one of those people that has a real mental picture of what I read

It's always interesting to me when I hear people say this, because I can't understand it at all. If you ask me to close my eyes and visualize a car, I don't actually see anything. I can recall what a car or a specific car looks like, but I don't actually "see" it in any sense. Same with reading - I don't (can't) actually visualize the characters, settings, etc. I'm always momentarily confused when someone complains about a film/TV adaptation with "such and such actor is really good, but that character is supposed to have GREEN eyes!". To me it's an incidental fact, whereas to some people it's central to their conception of the character (as if a real-life person had suddenly changed eye color for no apparent reason).

I've always wondered whether my condition is the norm, or if most people are capable of visual recall.

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You'll probably get a chuckle out of the first five-or-so paragraphs of:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

The referenced paper can be found here: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm

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.

> By the way, what I can do is hear music in my mind [...] I wonder if other people also experience this.

I remember when I was a kid I told my older brother I could play music in my head just like if I had pressed play in a tape deck. He was really puzzled.

I still can do it and it is definitely accurate. I lack perfect pitch recognition but for some reason when I play music in my head it's played in its original pitch. I use this to my advantage to replace perfect pitch: I just play a song with a known pitch in my head and use that imagined pitch as a relative. This works wonders for interval identification too (e.g. the first two notes in The Simpsons are a tritone apart).

That is fascinating, thanks.

Yeah ... I'm not sure whether it's a good trait or not! When I was young, I could entirely live in my mind if I was bored (or being bullied) and if I hadn't got a job that required me to "play the extrovert", I'd probably be writing fiction. At a minimum I'd be the introverted engineer that looked at his own shoes when I talked to you.

I still have a fondness for books that I might not otherwise have. Some movies seem to be plucked right out of my mental images (The Hobbit and LoTR movies) but others are really disappointing (Ender's Game was way better as visualized in my head).

It's interesting to hear from someone else who also doesn't form mental pictures.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand what other people mean when they say mental pictures. If I close my eyes and try to imagine an elephant, I find myself describing the elephant essentially with words. There's nothing like an "image" in my mind, though I do sometimes have mental ideas without sentences (for example, I could easily imagine a flow chart right now).

Do other people see actual images when they imagine something?

> 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.

I don't think it's fair to call this "imagination."

I have a very active imagination and can easily come up with entire stories, cities, and ideas in my mind. They're just encoded textually.

This is fascinating to me; as is the Galton reference ~gwillen points out, which suggests about 3% of people don't form mental images at all. I haven't previously met anyone who disclaims all such mental visualization, so may I ask a few questions?

Can you draw pictures of things without consulting a present example? (If only slightly or very abstractly, have you ever tried improving this skill?)

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? 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?

> 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.

Thanks! Definitely agree what may seem a 'gap' from one perspective may fuel advantages in other dimensions. By analogy to software data, it's almost as if you're 'serializing' memories differently.

One last thing I wonder may be correlated: do you have a good sense of direction/navigation?

I'm about average in that regard, I think. I have friends who are definitely worse, and friends who are definitely better.

If someone gives me spoken directions, or I read them ahead of time and then don't reference them, I generally do fine. But if I walk around in an unfamiliar area I tend to get turned around.

Out of curiosity, is it different if you read a book aloud with someone? I don't usually form mental pictures that much when reading, but I found sometimes a few months or a year after reading a book aloud with my wife, I would be sure I was remembering the movie, only to realize I'd never watched it! :-)

You're not at all alone, many people describe the same experience.

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