Try this: choose an object around you. Preferably something with a definite shape and color, like that red Swingline stapler, or a Netflix envelope, or even your computer screen. Stare at it for a few seconds, paying close attention to the size, shape, and color.
Now, close your eyes and try to visualize the item.
How good is the image in your mind? How faithful are the colors and shapes, and how long does the image persist?
Be brutally honest - of course no one here can confirm or refute what you’re seeing in your own mind, but it’s more interesting if people are honest and objective (about something which I realize is inherently a subjective experience).
For me: it’s bad. As soon as I close my eyes, the thing “dissolves” within 2-3 seconds. If I concentrate hard, I can maybe get the image to hang around for 10 seconds, but that’s pushing it. The color drains - well, not so much drains, but more like the information about color is gone, and the item becomes “wireframe” - not like a real wireframe in computer graphics, again, more like an object with “information missing”. Very hard to describe. Everything is like it’s made out of some pliable material, and things won’t retain their shape - even rigid objects dance around and distort into odd shapes, totally out of my control. And no, I’ve never done illegal drugs
I’m pretty sure this lack of visualization ability is one of the reasons I suck at art and navigation - two fields which, I feel, require good visual reasoning skills.
It seems to be one sense that prevails over all the others for most people. At an acting class years ago they had us sit with our eyes closed while the instructor named things associated with each sense (sunset, Mona Lisa, cawing of a bird, dog barking, smell of bread baking, feel of velvet, taste of Coke, etc.). There were at least 10 things per sense. We were supposed to imagine the sensation and react to it. I couldn’t really do it for 4 senses - I reacted like I normally would but I was faking it. But I could actually feel the different textures with my fingers! Most people in the class seemed to react to visual or taste.
I’m definitely a visual learner, and I’m good at visual arts and navigation.
Tell me how to do something, or ask me to read instructions, then go do something - nope. My ADD brain starts wandering right away /oh look a shiny thing/ and I lose focus. Show me a picture or a diagram - I’ve got it, I can remember it clearly, I can turn it around in my head, I can tackle the task. As far back as high school I learned to doodle while listening to lectures. That kept me focused, and I could mentally link whatever I doodled to what was being discussed, so it worked as a mnemonic technique.
Math/arithmetic, or strategy games like chess - I suck completely and utterly.
It may be more complex than that. I’m in the top 1 or 2 percent of art talent: professional graphic designer and semi-pro photographer, and my visualization abilities aren’t much better than yours.
I don’t have a photographic memory, I can’t visualize even a few chess moves by reading game notation. I don’t notice hair styles, and can’t describe a person’s appearance just by thinking about them (beyond the basics like, long straight dark hair, round face, etc.)
I have theories about the abilities that are important in art, but that would be a semi-hijack, so I’ll just say my visualization is pretty average.
What’s worse than poor? That’s how good I am. My grandmother used to play that game where she would arrange items on a tray and cover it with a towel, then let me look for 30 seconds, then cover it again. I would have to write everything I saw on the tray. I don’t think I ever impressed her with my ability.
I don’t know about red staplers. What I can do is take one look and know the size of a nut, bolt and thread size. This really comes in handy for saving trips to the tool box. Yea, the hardware is usually silver or grey.
I have fairly good visual memory but an odd aspect is that I seem to recall things mirrored to how they actually are. Not things I’m very familiar with but if asked to recall (for example) three people sitting on a bench I’d get most of the details correct but the order they were sitting in flipped.
I close my eyes and can fully recreate this ipod in any possible angle.
I am also picturing that red swingline stapler and the netflix envelope under it.
It is now sitting on my hand in my mind.
Been abot 2 years since I handeled a netflix envelope.
Probly a month since I watched that movie.
These are exactly the things I was wondering about - thanks for your responses.
I also read recently (can’t remember where) that there has never been a real documented case of “photographic memory” – apparently it’s a myth. Certainly some people have good memories, but true eidetic memory – apparently not.
Weird, but I’ve always known that I’m a “book learner” and not very visual. I can retain and even parrot back words on a page much easier and more accurately than I can the physical characteristics of any object. For example, I looked very closely at a plastic spoon on my desk - it is white, about the size of a standard teaspoon, and has two ridges on either side of the handle. Then, closing my eyes and trying to recreate it, I failed to remember that it is stained with coffee, has a small plastic mold mark on the base of the handle, and has a small number embossed near the bottom of the handle. If those characteristics had been written down somewhere, I would have easily remembered them.
I think my visual memory is fairly good. I tend to remember things by how they look or where they are in relation to other objects, rather than by their names or other descriptors. I could probably fairly accurately sketch nearly any object in the house (assuming my artistic skills are up to it, which they aren’t, but dammit, I know in my head what it looks like!)
I recently started a thread looking for the name of a set of crystal glassware for my in-laws… I was able to doodle an accurate drawing of them even though it had probably been about 4 months since I last saw that set, and as luck would have it, a poster here recognized them and was able to provide me with the name.
I cannot visualize anything clearly. Sometimes I can get a vague “feeling” of how something looks like, but I can’t see it. I’m completely lost if you ask me to describe something or someone.
However, I can sketch out things, not very artistically, but good enough to show someone the layout of my house, for example.
I’m pretty bad at it. I also completely suck at creating a picture in my head when I’m reading a book. Sometimes I’ll assign an actor to “play” a character and can somewhat picture them, but making up someone out of whole cloth, no matter how precisely they’re described, is a no go. And I have only the vaguest notions of the settings. When I see movies based on books, I’m always gobsmacked at how vivid everything is!
FWIW, I also scored relatively poorly on those spatial skills tests where you have to tell what shape a box will be by looking at the unfolded, flat version and stuff. And I can’t understand instruction manuals without having the item in my hands and following step by step - reading it ahead of time is just hopeless at adding any understanding.
This describes me to a T. I learned a long time ago that one way to compensate for my almost complete lack of navigational abilities is to remember street names and place names, which I can retain and rattle off easily. So, I’ll be able to get somewhere when driving by remembering “turn left on 1st street…second right on Pacific…” etc. But I have no visual concept of what’s along the route. In some ways it’s as if I’m blind.
If I can translate instructions into a movie or picture as they are given, I’m okay.
This is me as well. But I thought I was just taking notes in cartoon form.
I’m pretty good at math, but tend to get too distracted by existing patterns to do well in strategy games like chess. For this reason, I also do badly at those phrase-unscramble puzzles, especially if the scrambled phrase is arranged as incorrect decoy words.
OK, I guess. I’m fucking hating electronic theory right now, though. Who thought it was a good idea, instead of axioms, rules of inference, well-formed formulas, to say, “fuck all that, we’ll just give you a schematic instead”? I spent last term trying to create a formalized language for electronic theory, and got slammed in the face by crazy ass chinese finger puzzles that are supposedly “logically” soluble.
Call me a Fregean, but isn’t that why we have formalized languages and the tools and experience to implement them? Viz, to obviate the need for stupid pictures?
And I just drove 3/4 hour to the hospital, visited my friend, had dinner, drove 3/4 hour back, gassed up, collected the mail, and came inside …and without rereading the description, I can still see the image of UFC’s spoon in my mind’s eye. Damn thing’s like that song you can’t get out of your head.
Schematics are more flexible and far easier to understand than formulas for the same circuits. In second year we had to analyze networks of components. Without schematics and lots of notes, we were lost, lost, lost. Mind you, programs like SPICE and similar simulators would represent the entire circuit internally as a set of formulas.
You probably wouldn’t like LabView’s G programming language then. It’s the programming language you draw. It had issues when I used it, and documenting it was …not well thought out, but in general, I found it easy to understand.
I really feel terrible now - earworms (or mindworms in this case) are awful. I get them all the time (usually as the result of hearing the most gag-inducing bubblegum pop of the 60s). Which makes me hesitant to tell you that I threw the spoon away this morning. They picked up the recycling bin, so the spoon is doubtless being melted down into its component polymers by now.
That’s what I ended up grudgingly admitting to myself – schematics are far more compact. OTOH, people who are used to doing math and logic L to Right take a little more time to translate the schematic into sensible form.
I like things like pSpice, and making stuff on breadboards, cause it’s very similar to how one begins with logic – just screwing around, seeing how it works. I’d give a fucking left of a nut to see how PSPICE deals with the schematics a user inputs.
