Both. A little movie plays in my head and I hear them “speak” and everything. Each character will have their own individual voice and everything. I’m still a really fast reader though, even though I read the dialouge like someone is saying it. All the characters look exactly how I want them too, sometimes they don’t even follow what the writer said. While reading It I could never seen Bill with red hair, ever. Unless what I’m reading in a textbook is about people or animals doing something I can’t concentrate well. I have to see the people do it in my head to have it stick.
I think I’m another neither, or maybe both. No, it’s more like neither… man, it’s hard to describe what happens inside your head, isn’t it?
It’s not seeing, it’s not hearing, it’s … reading. It’s its own thing, reading. So I guess I’m like Trunk and a few others.
Sometimes I do get mental pictures, but it’s not like a movie, it’s more like periodic, vague still pictures, a little fuzzy like water colors. The exception is if I’m reading about something I know well, say for example a guide book about a place I’ve been. Then I will picture it more concretely. Or if I’m reading a post from a person I actually know IRL, then I “hear” their voice to some extent, but usually only the key phrases.
Until Harimad-sol said he (she? sorry) was also a fast reader, I always vaguely assumed it had something to do with reading quickly. Harimad-sol, do you visualize everything, or just the highlights? I read very quickly, and not really word by word … it’s more like chunk by chunk. If I try to make it seem like a movie, it’s going way too fast and everyone looks ridiculous. Oh, unless I’m reading something for specific information, like how to install equipment, then I want it to be v-e-r-y s-l-o-w and picture everything in great detail (I am not a bear of great technical achievement), but I hardly consider that reading in the same sense as sitting down to read a book.
On the other hand, I think I do have a very vivid imagination, and when I think about something, I do see a movie in my head. When I think back on a book that I have read, there’s much more of a movie going on than when I was actually reading the book. So I am a visualizing person, only not when I’m in the act of reading.
I (it’s she, just for future reference) read in sentences, which is sometimes why I don’t quite get the proper sense of some things–I go a bit too fast. I visualize the scene as laid out by the author, often with additions of my own. These are coherent, complete scenes, but I don’t seem to do it consciously. The scene appears in my mind as I read, but I have no sense of calling it up or trying to make it appear. I have always had a fairly vivid imagination.
I was reading something from a friend a few months ago, and as I read, not only did I have a picture of the scene he was describing, I also had the narration of his voice in my mind.
Definitely see. Not necessarily as a movie-type production, but maybe as an evolving sequence of still scenes, or character portraits doing stuff, or any number of things like that. If that makes sense. (On preview, the way my head works seems a lot like what delphica is trying to describe.) Quite author dependant - either good (so that all the vivid details are there) or bad (so that nothing is there and I can make it all up) is fine; what kills me are books that are squarely mediocre, with plenty of (or maybe even too many) details but also something like a slow-moving plot or excessive wordiness. Pick your example of choice from classic literature, there are a ton of them - and don’t get me started on why I liked the LotR movies more than the books.
I don’t really enjoy comic books, and I think it’s because as animation devices they are horribly inferior to an actual cartoon/animated program, and as devices to read they come stuck with writing and imagery constraints that make them generally inferior to what my mind would be coming up with anyways. They’re sort of that halfway point in the middle where they do writing and images alright, but neither good enough to really make me care.
I have to concentrate a lot to read most academic stuff and not have my mind wander off. Reading with “sight” might make fantasy, mystery, or whatever else (romance, I am sure, if we have any “chick-trash” readers out there) an immersive and interesting experience, but it makes slogging through a poorly-written treatise on statistical trends in development economics a living hell.
I read fairly quickly, about 2 pages of text a minute, but still see get a full on movie. I just don’t notice that things are going faster then they should.
I’m intrigued by this. What happens if you picture a scene and fill in the details and then something appears in the text that doesn’t match with your image? Is it jarring to you? Or does your mental picture smoothly transform to incorporate the new information?
Oh, I also wanted to mention that I’ve heard that about Harry Potter (and other books) and as someone who doesn’t visualize while I read, I always assumed the imagination part meant after the kids closed the book … they could imagine themselves going to school at Hogwarts, or imagine the characters from the books having other adventures, or imagine having an owl, or something like that. It never occured to me that it meant picturing the action in their heads! Huh, I guess that works too. :smack:
I usually only consciously notice non-matching details when they make a big difference in the picture in my mind. Otherwise, the replacement occurs fairly smoothly.
It’s actually a little difficult to describe this, because I’ve never tried to do it before. It’s one thing for something to happen and another to try to explain it. I didn’t really think that other people experienced what I do when reading (since it’s a matter of course to me that most people don’t think the way I do in many areas), but I hadn’t thought much about what they did experience.
I see the story as I read. I think that I tend to see not necessarily freeze frames, but a shot, or clip… the two characters sitting either side of a desk, say, but I won’t see all the movements as they have a conversation. I don’t think I even hear conversations between characters - I think I just move to a point where the words have been said. It’s odd.
If I imagine a room, and then a paragraph or two later the author says “Dave put his hat on the hatstand”, it’s no problem at all for me to picture a hatstand there, even though I’d not pictured it at all.
I do have problems when I see the movie or tv series of a book. For example, I remember in The Hitchiker’s Guide, Trillian was described as being a brunette - but the UK tv series (which had the original radio cast) had the extremely blonde Sandra Dickinson. That was weird.
I always see it. I also completely ignore the author’s descriptions and replace them by my own mental images. You might describe a short overweight blond man standing by a wooden house besides the road, and I’ll replace this by a tall brown haired man standing by a stone house on the top of a hill. I don’t think this over, the image appear spontaneously and I don’t even notice it if I don’t pay attention.
Moreover, I also see what I hear. For instance when listening to tales. I asked around during a story-telling course, and I’m not the only one doing so.
I also arbitrarily (and similarily uncounsciously) gives faces for instance to posters on this board, or people I’m speaking with in a chat room, similarily ignoring what actual hints I should be aware off. Faces of people I knew, or saw in the past. In rare cases faces from drawings (for instance ** Diogenes the cynic ** got the face of a comic book character). Sometimes I can guess why I came up with this face (there’s some obvious relation), sometimes it’s a complete mystery to me. Same with characters in books.
I even have mental images when I read a newspaper.
I have to stop and think about it to even notice the existence of this “home cinema”.
And I never hear anything. My mental movies are mute, the text of the dialog acting as subtitles. Actually, I think it’s more like a serie of still pictures than a “movie”.