And here are some more threads about the same topic, fyi.
Weird psychology question regarding visualization
and
Here’s a thread that I started on this subject. My reading voice is still stronger than my reading vision. I get narration, along with snapshots and short movie clips.
I can experience both, depending on the nature of the text. I think that in the most general way, whatever you learn or become skilled in could be reflected in how you experience some texts.
In my case this ability (or curse?) may be partly related to the ten years’ worth of music lessons and school band activities. I started playing the piano at seven or eight and became pretty good at sight-reading. (That’s the ability to figure out what the music should sound like from reading the sheet music. If you get really good at it, it requires less of a conscious effort and a little more like regular reading.)
I’d be willing to wager that an education emphasizing debate, rhetoric, classical orators, plays, and poetry would have the same effect, and even more so. I don’t think you’re supposed to read something like the orations of Cicero in an abstract, coldly disengaged way – these were intended as speeches, with rhetorical flourishes, dramatic pauses, and so forth. There’s even a difference in the way that the words were meant to be received when you compare, say, a playwright and poet like Shakespeare to those of a novelist like Flaubert (for all his implied narrative presence and sympathy in Madame Bovary).
But I can vouch for other areas of influence, too. I went through an architecture phase years ago; understanding more about the vocabulary of buildings helps me visualize them when I read even texts unrelated to that field. Even a cursory reference to a “Georgian” home or to the mansard roofs of Paris becomes more meaningful…
I really think “neither”.
I just read words. They go into my head.
Certainly when I’m reading something like a book about chess or the stock market, I’m not “seeing” anything. Am I ‘hearing’ something? I don’t think so. It just goes into my head.
As for “seeing”, like say I’m reading Tolkien (without having seen the movies). I have mental images that sort of exist as I’m reading. If you wanted, I could sketch what I think the land and the costumes and the characters look like, but it’s not like there are moving pictures running through my brain as I’m reading.
On the message board, sometimes I’m just reading. Sometimes I “hear” though. I at least imagine things said in a “generic” whiny tone or a “generic” sarcastic tone.
Good question 
I only really imagine things–see and hear them–if I set out to. Mostly I just read.
I sort of see images, and I definitely ‘hear’ a voice- but mostly when I read what I get is the feeling of a book. Words have personality and feeling, and the shape and sound of the words (hard/soft, visual/auditory/tactile) creates a series of distinct feelings.
That particularly happens when reading fiction, but sort of applies to all genres.
I’ve read a lot of novels out loud. I think that may have reinforced the shape/sound connection- when reading aloud the sound of the words, and the patterns of speech, become almost as important as the meanings.
Oh, lord. Did anyone else understand that?
I “watch” my books as well. I kind of picture a movie about the book going on that’s on the back of my eyeballs as I read. I don’t see it literally, but it’s there for my own brain.
That’s why I hate when books don’t mention if it’s day or night at first at a scene. More than once, I’ve imagined it’s night time, but then they say it’s daylight. Screws up my mental movie!
I do something (involuntarily) that I can’t stop doing when I read. It’s really kinda weird and I’ve never really heard of anyone else who does it, but then again I haven’t really talked about it much because it’s not really that important. Instead of really describing it, I’ll give an example which is really lame.
Recently, I read the new Harry Potter book while playing an online game. When my character died online, I’d read the book until the next round started. However, while I was reading, my mind was still stuck on the game. So when I think of certain parts of the book, I think of them as if they happened in the map I was playing online. Like, there is one part in the book that involves a lake and in my mind, this lake is placed in the middle of one of these online gaming maps because I was playing that map while reading that part.
The same thing happens with real locations and they just pop up out of nowhere. So when I read “Interview with a Vampire” a decade or so ago, I saw all the action in my head, but it was inextricably linked to a location in my hometown, as if all of the action happened there. There’s a big house? It was located in the place I imagined it, whether there really is a house there or not.
It’s really weird and I’m not sure I even described it well enough for anyone else to understand.
Me too. I had no idea people “see” or “hear” things. And I really enjoy reading. Weird.
I wonder if this is related to the fact that I seem to read much faster than my friends and family?
Possibly, but I’m a very fast reader and I still “see” and “hear” what I read.
Only if it’s well written. A glaring error can really screw it up for me. UK authors should farm out any and all references to firearms for example.
This has a lot to do with why I hate watching a movie if I read the book already. The movie hollywood makes is never as good as the one that happened in my mind whilst I was reading.
Oh, another thing that messes it up for me is characters or places with “screwy” names. Even if they are authentic to a novels setting, they trip me up.
No, I understand what you meant. I have the same “problem”, but for me it is that I kept on expecting Daco to act the way he did in the more seminal fanfiction stories, not the heartless villian he is in the books.
Both. Like the others, I see a little movie in my head.
Crappy writers, who can’t accurately describe a scene or make believable dialogue, make little breaks in the movie, where I have to decipher what they are saying. At those points, the book turns into “just words”, until my head can get the movie going again.
Those little breaks make me hate crappy writers.
hear, always hear. there is the usual everybody narrator voice. then everyone in the book has their own ind. voice. i even hear what i type and write (in my own voice of course).
when i read threads on the sdmb each poster has their own voice. if i meet you and then read your posts, it will be heard in the voice with which you spoke to me.
for me to have a continous movie during reading is rare. it has to be a very lush book that takes you to a different time and place. usually the pictures are very impressionistic, and just scenes here and there. i’m figuring it is due to my being quite nearsighted.
i figured people who heard what they read, read faster. rather surprized to see lilyofthevalley’s theory.
<hijack>I don’t know that Draco is a heartless villain. I think he’s a very confused little boy who wants desperately to be a man. Not unlike Harry, actually. He and Harry have to be foils for each other.</hijack>
What do you mean, Kevbo? As far as I’m aware, guns aren’t out and out outlawed in the UK. You can still have them for hunting, for example. Or do you mean that, in your opinion, UK authors can’t write scenes with guns convincingly?
I can usually visualize action sequences. Long descriptions of scenery or what people are wearing tend to make my eyes glaze over. I don’t usually visualize characters speaking dialogue, although if the characters are well-written, they will each have a distinctive voice.
For technical works, depending on the subject, I may visualize the manipulation of symbols or canonical examples of the objects being discussed; however, sometimes, my mental process is strictly verbal.
I see a movie and hear individual voices. When I miss something, like quotation marks at the end of a paragraph, and notice it a second later, I have to reread so I hear it in the correct voice.
The “movie” thing proves a problem when I’m listening to books while driving. I have to think of something else entirely, lest I don’t pay enough attention to the road. Recently, my sister and I were on a road trip. We loaded the cd player up with the first 6 CDs of Stephen King’s Dark Towers IV. She was driving during discs one and two. After that, I couldn’t tell you anything that happened. I listened to the start of CD 3 (bullets in the characters’ ears to block out the thinny noise) four times, and I still couldn’t tell you anything that happened after that. I just can’t accomplish dividing my attention like that. It’s tragic. :rolleyes:
I’m a “neither” as well. I think in words, but I don’t hear them when reading. Definitely don’t see them; I’m horrible at spatial relationships. The written word for me seems somehow extra-sensory. The words just soak in and the brain fizzes and it’s nothing to do with the base 5 senses, even when they’re describing a character’s sensations.
Very difficult to describe. Like a character whose name you could spell backward and forward and recite their ancestry and relate the things that happen to them in detail, but you haven’t ever thought how to pronounce the name, let alone know or care whether they are blonde or brunette unless it is somehow central to plotlines. I’ve had several “I am not watching this movie, because that does not look like So’n’so” moments, but I couldn’t describe what my idea of So’n’so looks like to save my life.
Named my ball python Shai after Dune’s shai hulud and still don’t know whether it’s “properly” pronounced shay or shy.
When I start out reading a book, I don’t really hear or see it. After a few minutes I’m completely focused on the book and everything is visualized - I usually forget I’m actually sitting there reading something until I’m interrupted. That could be why I have a hard time reading textbook material - it’s difficult to visualize and focus on. After a few phrases or sentences I’ve got to stop, try to remember what I just read, and process what it actually meant.
Both, and neither. I get flashes of all senses that are involved in describing a scene. Occasionally I’ll hear dialogue, but I read so quickly that dialog is more like an information dump that gets sorted out later. Reading it at the pace of actual spoken words would cut my speed, and enjoyment, drastically. Academic text is, if it’s done well, like a download straight into my brain. I see the page, it’s translated to concepts. If it’s dense text, I slow down enough to see words, but usually I read in chunks of information.
I took a preliminary speed-reading course once. One of the things they said is that the biggest limitation on speed is subvocalizing, as in mentally or even physically saying things to yourself. According to them, it’s the byproduct of phonic approaches to reading. Some people progress beyond that limitation, some people get stuck there, but almost no one is taught techniques to get past it when they are in school. That’s where the speed reading courses come in. Of course, by the time you take a speed-reading course, you’re pretty set in your habits, so you’re likely to fall back into what’s comfortable.
I learned how to read so long ago that I can’t remember when I actually used to sound things out. I was three when I learned how to read and I must have made the jump to concept-based reading when I was still in first grade or so. Usually, the only time I sound things out is when I hit foreign or made up words and unusual names. I sound them out once or twice and then I’ve got the concept-key sorted out. After that connection is made, I see the word, get the concept. No translation to sound involved.
The scary thing is that there are people who do read faster than me. My grandmother read at almost double my speed. I’ll bet her mental interpretation was pretty similar to mine, but she could take things in bigger chunks. She’d glance at a page and find a typo at the bottom, as well as the one in the middle, in just a few seconds.