I had no problem with this exercise, but that’s because I subconsciously added another element to my visualization. I put the wheel on a rubber band instead of on a shaft, so when it was spinning clockwise, it was winding up the band, which eventually wound up tight, stopped the wheel, and reversed it. I wasn’t actually visualizing the rubber band itself, but that’s the motion I was visualizing.
Okay-- Senorbeef. Not only am I able to fairly easily imagine the water wheel, from the back of the wheel, or the side, or an overhead view, or an underwater view looking up at the paddles diving and rising from the water surface and an above water panoramic view, I can hear the slosh of the water, I can smell the wet wood, I can taste the air.
Moreover I find I can imagine it easier to envision all this with my eyes open than when I close my eyes, at least at first. I imagine the water dripping noisily off the paddles and hitting the river, I can feel the heat of the day, the smell of the blackwater river.
When I stop the wheel and count the paddles, there are twelve. The same as the slices of pie, or the numbers of a clock, or ths partitions of the Chinese Zodiac.
Weirdly – when I imagine this in my mind’s eye, the scene is never still. I’m approaching the water wheel as if peering from a camera on wheels, sometimes from a crane shot, sometimes hand held, sometimes not.
It helps that I have a solid frame of reference – there was a water wheel on the river at the city park down on the other side of town where I grew up. I used to climb out on the thing when my Mom wasn’t looking. When I imagine the wheel, its tethered to the bank without a riverboat – unless I want to imagine a riverboat. Then the riverboat’s there, instantly. It looks like the one in Karma Chameleon.
When I reverse the wheel in my mind, I see and I hear the wheel creaking to a halt, the water sloshing off the paddles and sides, the groan of the engine as it kicks into reverse, the chug of the wheel as it moves determindedly backwards.
My question: for those of you who visualize well, how many of you consider yourselves skilled visual artists in say, drawing, painting or photography? Or working with clay? How many of you can draw well from still life, or recreate the images in your mind?
Oh man, this thread is killing me because I never knew that some people didn’t visualize things before. Life is so cool because you really can learn something new every day.
Anyway, I thought this question was so interesting. I’m a good visualizer, but unlike Balthisar I’m not very good at moving the visuals around so I can examine them. In my mill wheel vision, there’s lovely stream throwing up some mist, and some nice shrubs on the bank that make it difficult to see all the paddles. Once I get the image (which is almost immediately after someone says “picture a mill wheel”) it’s difficult to change the image to do anything productive with it. I would have a hard time counting the paddles on a mill wheel that I saw in person (what with climbing around by the stream and everything), so it seems the same when I visualize it.
Mr. Del just pointed out to me that I don’t need to count all the paddles on the wheel in the first place, I can simply count the ones on the top half and times it by two. Dude, I can’t even do that with a real wheel. I understand the concept and everything, but the execution is difficult.
It started sooner than that. Its at least partly genetic.
I’m curious about how others remember what they’ve read.
For me, if what I read was descriptive, I remember it in the pictures or the “movie” that reading it created.
But with technical stuff I “see” the text.
Any variations on that theme?
Askia I’m artistic. I can paint from memory or from total imagination
I have trouble doing line drawings, partly because I’m left handed, and partly because my hand doesn’t always understand what my brain tells it to do.
NinetyWt She’s NOT a freak! I do that too.
Pochacco YES! Math was torture. The numbers wouldn’t “stand still!” I drove my algebra teacher nuts, because the equations were easy. They became “maps” in my head, but the numbers wouldn’t cooperate. I’d draw out hugely complex equations, and make a simple subtraction error, every time.
kayT If its any consolation, I have trouble believing you too.
Its like being told that other people have a sense of xzourmth, but it gives them the same information as my sense of smell.
Wow. It was really hard to slow down the wheel, at first. I used a stone mill house, with a breast shot wheel, moving relatively slow, from a pretty steady flow of water. Big mistake. The thing is massive, made of wood, and fifteen feet or so in diameter. That thing had massive momentum.
So, I made it a tiny little model of a mill wheel. Piece of cake. I can flip that sucker back and forth no problem.
So, I tried it again with the full sized version. No dice. It takes several minutes to stop it, and I had to put in a movable sluice to dump the water onto the back end of the wheel to get it to move in reverse.
Talk about hide bound visualization! Now I know why I don’t invent stuff.
Tris
Oh, and twelve pieces, Like slices of pie!
What kind of cheapskate cuts a pie into twelve pieces!
Tris
My mother tells me she got through high school that way. I’ve always wanted a photographic memory (not to mention perfect pitch).
I don’t visualize well, but my wife does. She has vivid dreams and I have dull ones; she memorizes poetry easily but can’t remember phone numbers, and I’m the opposite. When it comes to foreign languages, she remembers the vocabulary and I understand the grammar. Add the two of us together and I guess you’d get one decent brain.
Interesting. Previously, I was just imagining the wheel by itself, floating in space. That thing, I have no trouble reversing. But I just tried it with more detail, with an attached mill building and a flowing stream, and found it much the same as Triskadecamus: I could abruptly reverse it (and the stream), but I couldn’t slow and gradually reverse it without some sort of mechanism for reversing the stream (nor could I imagine the stream not moving at all). I think that this might be due to my habitual thinking and observing of physics: I can visualize things behaving physically, but I have a much harder time with nonphysical behaviour.
And the wheel doesn’t have any number of spokes (not “I can’t count them”, not “It doesn’t have spokes”, but “it has spokes, plural, but not any number of them”) unless I concentrate on that aspect, but when I do, it has twelve of them.
I’m really enjoying this thread.
After discussing with Hubby, he tried to make the wheel run backwards, but because of his practicallity he resisted trying to make the water run backwards. 
He’s the kind of person who can look at the shafts running out of a gear box and tell you what the gears look like inside; he’s very intuitive about levers and forces and what-not.
Another thought I had: who else tastes and smells the object brought up in conversation? One poster had a question along the lines of “If I say tomato what do you see”?
Not only do I see the luscious fruit, I can smell and taste it along with the visualization. Certain words evoke the senses in me. Example: say “knife”; not only do I see a visualization of the knife, I can feel its steely hardness and the sharpness of its edge. Say “fuzzy kitten” and I can feel its wamth and hear its purr.
Good or bad? Some days my senses drive me CRAZY. I’m particulary hyper-sensitve to noise; I can hardly bear the TV. There’s a flourescent fixture in the kitchen which gives off a high-pitched keen. I’m the only one in the house who can hear that. :dubious:
OTOH my son has an exacerbated sense of smell. He says everyone’s breath stinks. Poor thing.
Oh, I forgot, both Hubby and I said (at the same time) that the wheel had twelve spokes. :eek:
Evidentally you’ve never taught kindergarten.
Interesting. I also had 12 boards, or whatever, on my wheel.
I guess that’s just a natural shape for such a wheel.
It’s interesting what we’ve discussed about it being bound by the laws of physics. If you imagine a tiny wheel, say, three inches in diameter, and you’re running it under a faucet, it’s very easy to visualize moving the faucet and having it go the other way. But if we’re talking about a river, it’s very difficult. That’s interesting. As you’re in control of your own mind, presumably, it should be just as easy to do either, but we’re bound by what our minds accept as realistic.
In any case, the circumstances of the visualization play a role.
Try this. Imagine a glowing ball of light, and imagining it travelling in circles indefinitely. Now try to take that ball, and slow it down, and reverse its direction/cycle. Now we’re not bound by physics, this is purely an abstract idea. How does it change your perception or ability to control it?
I have as much difficulty controlling the ball, personally, than the wheel, even though I’m inventing the rules for it.
Also, I have no visual artistic talent whatsoever, when I’m concious.
However…
I’ve always been amazed at watching someone draw something. It starts off as just a bunch of lines, but gradually it turns into a full picture. That process is remarkable to me… I can’t do anything like that.
But in my dreams, I’ve watched other people do exactly that - a line here, a line there, a few minutes later a full, detailed picture is formed. So my brain has the capability to do such a thing, I just have absolutely no access to it conciously. That might be an interesting topic for another thread.
I don’t think I’m anything special when it comes to visualization, but I do think I have an auditory, specifically musical, talent when it comes to auditorization (? whatever the equivelant of visualization is). I can remember every detail about a song I haven’t heard in 5 years pretty easily, and play it in my head in an almost audio-realistic quality. I’m a bit sketchy on the percussion, though, that’s one part that I have some difficulty with. But in any case, I listen to a lot of complex, detailed music, and I can often remember every last detail, from subtle notes to seperate instrumentations, for stuff that I’ve heard few times and/or haven’t heard in a very long time.
I can direct my imagination to construct abstractions.
Artistic, me? Not really. I’m fairly proficient at technical drawings, but haven’t got a lick of artistic drawing skills. Except for photography, which doesn’t require motor skills to translate abstract images into a physical rendering. I can view a real-world scene, adjust the image in my head to a more aesthetic state (zoom in/out, adjust the focus of fore and background images, frame the image pleasingly) , and then use the camera to create the modified image.
This has proved to be a most interesting topic.
I’m still having trouble determining if I’m visualizable. May I am, but I’m not thinking of it like all of you talented artists. Like Chronos, I pretty much take the OP literally and think of just the wheel. But I see that everyone else is attaching scenery to it automatically.
Hmmm…. something universal about the 12 spokes. I was considering 12 paddles which would be 12 spokes. Interesting… especially as I approached this structurally rather than visually (I think). What’s even more interesting, though, is that of all of the mill-wheels that I’ve seen up close and personal (this is Michigan; they’re everywhere), they have considerably more spokes – say 30 to 70. Yeah, really.
I can visualize and control the wheel, although it’s not in such a detailed manner that I can count the spokes, unless I put in quite a bit of effort. (How do you non-visuals dream?)
I can also hear music in my head, and change it. I draw fairly well. If I read something in a book and I need to look it up again, I usually know whether it’s on a left or a right-hand page, and whether it’s near the bottom or the top. Gee, you’d think I’d be a lot smarter.
However, I have no sense of smell.
I too have little plastic arts ability. I can photograph well, and have many well received pictures distributed among friends. I don’t draw at all. I can’t sculpt anything recognizable. I don’t paint.
But I can design complex sets of objects in my mind, including mechanical linkages, color, textures, materials, etc. I don’t make claims on the esthetic superiority of my designs, but they are complete and detailed enough that I cannot think of something, and then go buy it, because the ones available will be substantially unlike the image in my mind, and therefore unacceptable. In fact, when a friend recently brought me “the exact teapot you described, except for the color” I was stunned. She had found an extraordinarily similar object to my description. It was very dark brown, instead of black, and that seemed esthetically an improvement to my mental image. Generally, I will have an image in my mind, and then shop around and find that the actual “state of the art” is far afield from my image. Naturally I think my image is superior. 
The various characteristics of an imaginary object are exact, if defined at all, similar to the “number of spokes” in Unc’s wheel. I get sixteen spokes, if I think of it at all, probably because it’s easiest to construct, geometrically, and the wheel is large, and needs more than twelve. At times such an imaginary object will have specific characteristics which are entirely hidden from direct “observation” even in my imagination, but will be defined, and specific in my mind. The type of wood in the wheel is currently undefined, although probably pine, since I seem to recall that soft pine is better suited to construction involving flowing natural sources of water. There are no metal parts, since rust would be a problem, and stainless steel is incongruous in the construction nineteenth century technology. The mill house is dressed field stone, with log lintels, and roof beams. The interior floor is rough cut heavy planks, and wooden gear works. (No wonder this sucker took so long to stop!)
At this point it is hard for me to decide how much is “looking” at the already imagined object, and how much is inventing the content of new “views” of the evolving object. Some of each, I think. Yes, some of each, as I just decided/realized that the millstones are missing, without awaiting grain, or finished flour. It’s sort of a historic reproduction, with no viable market to support. Since I myself have never seen a working water mill, and have seen preserved examples, that makes it easier to imagine one similar to my experience. The miniature mill wheel was a kid’s plastic toy. Only one moving piece, the wheel. Colored though, brown building, yellow wheel. Injection molded, snap together plastic crap. You could blow on the wheel and make it move. (twelve spokes!)
I don’t think I have ever examined the nature of my visualizations before. It’s a revealing study. I will have to try that out in my fiction, to see if I can feel the individual elements a bit more, and at least “enter the frame” a bit before I start writing. I think it could be a great help.
Thanks for a very interesting thread!
Tris
I find it much easier to control the ball of light than the wheel. I had a hard time getting the wheel to SMOOTHLY reverse until my wife told me how she was doing it. She visualized the river itself slowing down, stopping, and then reversing and that made it easier to get the motion she wanted with the wheel.
(It’s kind of interesting that this visualization skill seems to be attached to our innate sense of real-world physics. It’s much harder to visualize something that doesn’t behave plausably.)
Like many people posting to this thread I find it kind of amazing that everyone can’t visualize like this. My entire internal mental life is organized around images, so much so I can’t even comprehend what a language-based thought process must feel like … .
Nope. Can’t. It’s just going faster. Incidentally, that’s what happens when I get fevers and hallucinate- I either see/feel falling, or things moving around in circles faster and faster. It’s very disturbing.
As one of the non-visualizing people, I can say that I have an amazing memory for words in strings. Patterned words. I can memorise poetry like nothing, and I can remember whole chunks from books verbatim, because of the rhythm of the words. I can tell you how the words feel, and if they feel right, then I’ve remembered correctly.
I have the damndest time trying to learn other languages, because learning things one word at a time is much harder.
My mental life is verbal and tactile. I design and sew historical costume, make chainmail, spin, weave, do fifteen types of beadwork, and bellydance. I’ve got a weird verbal/kinasthetic disconnect. I can show you how to do all the physical stuff, but I can rarely manage a good description.
Balthisar, try putting the guided visualization aside for a moment, and examine your interaction with this thread in general, and the specific people you notice in it. Do you “see” the what others describe? Do you put faces, and or surrounding to the individuals? When I ask, what did you have for breakfast? how is it called up in your mind? As a list of items, or as a picture of your breakfast?
If pictures are part of any of your answers, you are able to visualize. IMO