That’s how I’d do it. Since I was a kid, I liked creating and furnishing dream houses in my mind, so I’ve had a lot of practice.
Yeah, easy. Like if you slide the plane cutting the square up and down, you get a rectangle that stretches out on one axis vs. the other until it becomes a 1-dimensional edge. Or you can rotate the plane so that it makes a trapezoid and then a triangle. All easy to do, and I can rotate the whole thing in my mind as I’m making the transformations.
I’m less good with “squishy” things. But anything fairly geometric is easy to visualize and manipulate. In fact I can do it at two levels; both consciously (with vivid imagery) and subconsciously (where I’m not really visualizing anything, and yet somehow I can design objects that work the way I want).
I may have aphantasia. Or I might not understand what people mean by “picturing” something in your mind. Generally speaking I don’t pictures anything; until I was 23 I had no idea that some people imagine things when they read.
But I still know what familiar objects look like. You tell me that you are describing a dilapidated Christmas tree with shabby tinsel and broken ornaments, sure, I know basically what that would look like, but conjuring up anything like a mental image takes a lot of effort so I generally don’t bother.
If I try hard I can get a mental imagine of things that I have seen before. If you describe something that I have no familiarity with, I can’t. This used to tick my mom off but I rarely could help her find things because I couldn’t picture what they looked like.
I don’t understand how people “imagine things like in a movie” as they read fiction because you only read a few words at a time and would need to constantly adjust your mental image. That sounds frustrating and exhausting.
I cannot imagine or keep track complex/busy scenes so things like hearing a battle or a baseball game described don’t make much sense to me. So I ignore ballgames on the radio and gloss over fight scenes in audiobooks unless it’s later proven vital enough to rewind to try to make sense of it.
Yet I do dream in pictures, moving and full color. Go figure
I was thinking about an old abandoned house where I’d walked up on the porch, and peeked in the door. After recalling details about it, I thought I should revisit it. But the location of it just wasn’t in my brain. Eventually, I realized that it was from a book, and I’d only read the description of it.
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I was putting this in the MPSIMS “Humblebrag” thread, but thought it’d fit here:
I had breakfast with a friend who’s a third my age. She mentioned that she’d been ‘up north’ to a music fest where Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) had a cabin with an old sign that had fallen upside down. It originally said People on it in in all-caps, so he gave his new music project that name.
I quickly said “So… Three, Seven… Lower Case D, Zero, Three, Lower Case D?”
She just stared at me… “Four of us worked on that last night and gave up…”
28 years, 2 months and 6 days…
and counting
It’s a good topic; my visualization skill is as poor as the OP’s. And I wonder if it’s the reason that:
- I can’t draw very well
- I don’t read much fiction. When I’m reading the description of a place then maybe I have a static image of one view of a not very complex scene, for pages or more of a story. And even that image just flashes in periodically.
- I can read Chinese, but can only draw a handful of characters from memory.
There are some colors I can’t naturally see. Some shades of green and some shades of red. People raved about things like the girl in the red dress, and I never got it. But one guy on this board (NG) lent me a pair of enchroma glasses that allowed me to see what you guys see as red. Wow. I will never forget seeing a red flower in the beautiful outdoors. I will never forget that color or that moment of seeing a color that can’t exist on earth, it seemed like an alien color, the only way I can describe it.
Impactful moments stay for a long time.
It IS… I’m one of those “vivid image” people, and I’m fine when an author describes a person in one chunk right when we “meet” them. But when all you have to go on is “Dr. Sawbones sidled into the patient’s room” it’s tough, and with a minimum like this , I don’t make much of an image, because I’m assuming he’ll sidle out again after delivering some news.
BUT, it’s hell when he sidles in, and then a page later runs his fingers through his long mane. Now I’m picturing a surfer dude with sun-lightened hair, and he’s grown a foot. Oops, later his “diminutive posture” is mentioned, and he’s got black hair, and a chapter later he’s wearing glasses, and now the author thinks to mention he’s from Russia.
So I purposely don’t “nail down” a specific person (I’ve learned not to cast a specific celebrity as my version of a character). But it’ll still be a vague character who’s a tall, skinny, balding, middle-aged man.
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And many times I’ll make a mental image and just stick with it, despite additional description. So “my” Alaric Morgan and Duncan McLain were introduced without much detail, so they have their hair color swapped for the entire series of Deryni books (hey, Morgan looked more dashing with flowing black locks matching his riding leathers).
I have this. I can’t visualize in my head at all. As a manufacturing engineer, it made things more challanging.
I’ve mentioned this before on the 'dope. I’ve worked as a yard-hostler, truck driver, and airport line crewman. My ability to accurately place anything from trailers to jets with limited visibility really amazed a lot of people. I can* memorize the physical space where I intend to park them, then place them exactly in position. This includes pushing planes into tight hangar spots where the only thing I could see was the nose filling my entire FOV. The only time I damaged one, was when I had the wrong model “in my mind” and was in fact pushing a longer version.
I can only draw mechanical objects (cars, boats, bridges, etc.) with any accuracy. But my wife and kids were always fascinated as I’d start with some obscure part and fill in from there. They liked to guess what the finished picture would be. I had the entire object in my mind, including the orientation, so could start with a lugnut or a cable connection and fill everything out.
I cannot draw, nor can I keep images of people in my mind. If they change at all, I won’t recognize them. I am completely lost at reunions as I recognize almost no one. Once I was gone for 6 months to a job, and my wife lost a lot of weight during the time. I walked right past her in the airport wondering why the strange woman was waving at me. I would be useless in law enforcement, as any fleeing perp could remove his hat and become invisible to me.
*or at least, “could”