One of the psychiatrists I work for recently gave a lecture on hallucinations and delusions that tangentially included the mention of imaginary friends and provided a statistic I’ve heard before: 60% of children have imaginary friends.
This statistic has always seemed like BS to me, but what do I know? I didn’t have one. My little brother didn’t. I can’t think of anyone who seemed to have one as a kid, but they’re apparently out there.
Thinking about this, I began to wonder if there’s a connection between imaginary friends and other types of visualization, two kinds in particular:
a Is a person who visualizes the action in a story “in the mind’s eye” as they read it more likely to have had an imaginary friend?
b. Is a person who is easily able to imagine what an unknown object looks like from hearing a description more likely to have had an imaginary friend?
As will come as no surprise to you, I don’t picture anything when I read, and was completely unaware that anyone did until just after college. I also am super bad at trying to figure out what to look for when people describe an object and ask if I’d seen it/for help finding it. As an added bonus even though I’m not including it in the poll, I cannot follow the action of a radio broadcast of a baseball gave very well either.
Is it just me? Let’s do a poll and find out, shall we?
For polling purposes:
[ul]
[li]If you don’t remember if you had an imaginary friend and no one ever talked about you having one, it seems likely that you did not and should answer no.[/li]
If you can picture that object you were asked to find at least well enough to find it more than 50% of the time, you’re good at it. If your success rate is less than 50% you’re bad at it.[/ul]
I’ve never really thought about it, but I had no idea people didn’t visualize. I can’t even imagine what that’s like; it’s as natural as breathing for me.
An imaginary friend? Are you kidding? I didn’t even have any real ones! I wouldn’t have known how to imagine up a friend if I wanted to.
I am good at visualization, however. Whether or not I have an eidetic memory depends on what you think that means, or if it exists at all, but I have good enough snapshots to go back through a scene and tell you which hand someone was carrying a thing in, or to re-locate a passage in a book I’ve read according to how far along in the text it was, its position on the page, any illustrations nearby. That sort of thing.
I can also “see” things that technically cannot be visualized: a color that is simultaneously orange and green, various things having to do with space or time or other multidimensional graphs, etc. It’s… peculiar. I’m informed that one is actually classified as a form of synaesthesia, which I completely believe, because it’s just as weird as the other ones I know I have.
The ability does fall down on the job sometimes. I’m hopeless at first-person video games. I can see the scenery as well as everyone else, but the experience is missing a physical sense of orientation in space I’d have if I were really there, and without that I am forever lost in the levels.
[ETA: Asking about “seeing” action when reading is actually sort of a strange one. When I write, I don’t always “see” what I’m describing. Quite often, I “see” how the written passage would look on the screen/page instead.]
I had an imaginary friend. Very much so. Her name was Mrs. Beasley. All my family knew about her and if someone was going to sit down next to me they’d ask if it was ok, or if the seat was taken, because they knew Mrs. B. might be there.
On the other hand, I do not visualize very much; I do words. I don’t even remember imagining what my imaginary friend looked like. I pretty much hear words in my head as opposed to seeing pictures.
When surveying this matter, one should probably bear in mind cultural relativism as well. The American media teems with fictitious companions, but such practice is highly discouraged where I come from. There is no actual norm prohibiting one from enjoying an imaginary buddy, but if I confessed about having developed an unreal friend everyone would think I was mentally disturbed. The objects that populate people’s mind and their significance are determined to a large extent by the social context.
I wouldn’t have thought there’s a link between imaginary friends and visualization. I didn’t have imaginary friends as a kid, but my four year old daughter does – tons of them, I know ever detail of their lives – names, ages, likes and dislikes. But she’s very aware that they’re just pretend, and I never get the sense that she thinks she sees them or even pretends to see them – it’s more about making up exciting and fun narratives about the adventures they have together. She’s also an only child (I am not), and I’ve always figured this is a factor.
I didn’t have an imaginary friend, I’m not good at hearing or reading a description of something and visualizing what the thing is correctly (the correctly part is important, because I do visualize them, I’m just usually dead wrong - either reversed or inverted or skewed or otherwise spatially incorrect.)
BUT - I’m very visual in my own mind. I imagine stories in my mind all the time when I’m working on my books, and they are more often actual scenes as if I were watching them on a screen. I have vivid dreams, and daydreams, and lucid dreams. I have a strong visual memory for things I have read or seen myself - things like remembering where on a printed page a phrase was, or remembering details of a costume or pose, or remembering directions only after I’ve driven to the place myself or seen it from Google Streetview.
Oddly enough, I’m like Arabella: I have extreme difficulties in navigating video games - I regularly get lost and turned around in the various levels, and often even can’t see where the path is supposed to be because I’m too overwhelmed by the visual noise of the scenery.
On a related note, apparently I never internalized the concepts of ‘left’ and ‘right’ the way most people do, and that is a strong contributor to my visual/spatial difficulties.
I remember my mother reading bedtime stories to me. I visualized like crazy, long after the stories ended. I still visualize everything, and can’t imagine not being able to do this; it would be like being blind. I also have constant earworms.
I had a very limited imaginary friend. I’d briefly call her on the phone, and have short conversations with her. But I never played with her, or imagined her not on the phone. It’s interesting that my imaginary friend was female . . . and so was my teddy bear.
Never had an imaginary friend but I did have a vivid imaginary world from about age 4 which still exists in a faint form decades later. I was the main person and it was a sort of sci-fi extension of real life.
Weirdly a psychiatrist once mentioned in conversation that such imaginary worlds are often developed by children. He had no idea I had one.
No, I didn’t have an imaginary friend. I am extremely bad at visualization. I don’t even dream in pictures, my dreams are like audio books. I more or less cannot see images in my head at all. I won’t flat out say “cannot”, because very, very rarely I’ll get flashes of something.
I could barely describe my friends to you beyond a couple of features. I haven’t seen my own mom in about a year and I honestly can’t remember what she looks like at all. I literally mean that if a police officer were to ask me to describe my mom, about the best I could get is her hair color, and maybe a ballpark height/weight. That doesn’t mean I have face blindness or can’t recognize people. I can recognize objects and people and match them up just fine. I can even pass some “visual memory” tests, but I can’t see anything in my head.
I had an imaginary kitten. His name was Kit-Kat, and he was brown; he always sat with me on the bus ride home, and we’d chat about life (because if you’re going to imagine a cat, why not make him talk?).
I visualize objects when described, I guess, though my mental picture doesn’t always match up with what the other person’s talking about. The reading question is much easier - I visualize everything and always have. I actually have difficulty understanding how reading fiction would be an enjoyable experience if you couldn’t imagine it all.
Somewhere in the middle of visualizing action and objects. I think it depends on the quality of the story and the writing. When I try to write I’m much better at writing what I can visualize.
I had an imaginary friend, but I don’t recall ever thinking that I could “see” him. I can’t visualise at all, no matter how hard I try or what the thing is. I remember when I was about to be sent away to school (aged 10) trying to work on being able to visualise my mother’s face so I’d be able to “see” her when she was far away. I couldn’t. I haven’t ever been able to. I enjoy reading very much, and have a vivid imagination, but I don’t see things while reading or listening to audio books/radio.
Never had an imaginary friend, but I did have imaginary monsters. One would reach a tentacle up to grab my foot if it wasn’t fully inside my bed. One night, I was so tired that I didn’t move my foot in time to avoid the monster and the tentacle went right through my foot! That was the moment I realized it was entirely imaginary.
Whether I visualize the action in a book kind of depends on how I’m reading it. As I get older - perhaps because so much of my reading is now technical rather than entertaining - I only visualize the action when I want to. (Or, if I’m reading an author who is good enough to be worth visualizing). As a kid, I think it was more of an automatic thing.
Sometimes my visualizations actually cause some issues with reading. If an author gives a very vague description of something (like a tavern the characters just entered) my brain will fill in all the missing details - tables, the bar, patrons, artwork, etc. If later details are revealed, I may have to stop and recreate my mental image. That’s part of why I only visualize it when the author makes it worthwhile. I do a lot of reading of really crap authors (because their stuff is free) and it’s usually not worth the effort.
In a similar vein, whether I can visualize a described object depends more on the person describing it than on me. The ability to visualize is there, but a lot of description are like “It’s the yellowish thing on the side of the other thing with the handle.”
My imaginary friends were real people who I pretended hung out with me (Richard Nixon, Walter Cronkite, Hubert Humphrey). I also sometimes pretended to be another being known as Miss Cat.
As far as visual memory goes, I’m terrible. I can’t visualize anything to save my soul and thus am constantly taking pictures in order to remember things. I’m a realist painter too, so being unable to form mental images gets to be a problem.
Same with me. When I’m reading, unless something pulls me up to the surface, I’m not even consciously aware of the words on the page, even though obviously I’m reading them - but it’s almost like I’m inhaling them more than anything else, and turning them into a movie in my head as I do so.
No imaginary friend as a kid, despite the dearth of real friends back then. And kinda mediocre at visualizing described objects; flipped a mental coin there and it came up Yes.