Bookworm with very active imagination here. (I also suspect I’m not entirely normal, but to quote a certain Mrs. Gump, “What does ‘normal’ mean, anyway?”)
I can imagine the wheel, no problem. On it’s own, just rotating, or attched to a millhouse, whatever. (Although I think I might be cheating with reversing the wheel…I simply “walk around” to the other side, and voila.)
I get tunes stuck in my head very easily. I can also imagine entire conversations between any number of people–and when I’m very exhausted, I can almost “hear” them talking (but I can’t necessarily make out coherent words).
I draw (not very well) and write (not very well, either). In fact, my biggest frustration is that I can never seem to get what’s in my head onto the paper (or the computer screen).
I can’t count the number of spokes in my waterwheel just because there’s so many of them, and it’s moving too fast to count them. If I try to reduce the number of spokes to some countable number it winds up with only 8 spokes.
Now it’s speed, on the other hand, is kind of freaky. I timed it while it’s moving at “normal” speed, and I swear that it does a complete revolution between 3 and 3.25 seconds – close to pi.
Hmmm… that’s a good test, but now I’m going to not be successful because I’ll over rationalize everything. What I think I really need is for someone to conduct a word association test with me, and I’ll figure out if I’m “word based” or “image based.”
Not… completely true, actually. You point to anything in your line of sight, and you decide how to frame the subject, you decide on the physical distance, you consider available light and shadow, you adjust the focus lens and decide sharpness and softness. If the subject is live, you can get them to pose: sit, stand, rotate, show varying facial expressions. Manipulating the abstract image becomes an actual physical action once you get into the darkroom and work with the negatives: you can further enlarge, crop, and manipulate angles, use filters to develop contrast. I guess I should have also left room for people who manipulate images using PhotoShop, too. My point: I feel that people who do this kind of thing with an artistic bent have conditioned their portion of their brains to more easily see possibilities, even to the point of being partly nonsensical.
People with technical skills maybe able to do it, too, but seem to do so by manipulating overall dream logic. For instance: I was struck with how many people here said they had to stop or reverse the flow of the river in their minds. When I reversed the wheel in my mind, it was going against the flow of the river, which is why I made a point of describing how noisy it seemed. I didn’t put 2 and 2 together until I re-read the thread.
I"m another one of these weirdos with pictures in the head. Sound, smell, colour, touch, taste, the works, if I want. I dream the same way too. I’ve dreamed in occaision in cartoons, with different paper and drawing styles as well. Once I dreamed in Labview, the graphical programming language.
Actually, I didn’t know that some people didn’t imagine pictures in the head until this year when my counselor told me that he thought in words.
Some people may ask, what language do you think in? A lot of the time, I think in pictures and then describe the pictures. I can choose which language to use, or just draw the picture (no words needed). When I was in high-school physics and chemistry, I often took notes in cartoon form–this helped with things like electron orbitals.
Oddly, I don’t do as well in word logic puzzles… I find myself trying to turn it into a picture.
And I don’t do well Just Following Instructions, such as filling out a formula and getting an answer. I’m a lot happier if I can have some context that allows me to put the parts of the formula into a picture that makes sense.
The wheel in the OP wasn’t a problem for me either. I was even able to animate the water in relation to what the wheel was doing.
I don’t think it’s so much that someone can’t place where their stapler is on their desk when asked. I bet a lot of people can do that. Now get the same people to imagine the same stapler animating itself into stapling random papers on the desk, and having the piles of paper sort themselves automatically. Now that’s the power of visualization.
I think that’s part of what’s being discussed here. I went through a good chunk of the exercises at that site at each of the three—beginner, intermediate & experienced—levels; probabaly about 40 of the images. I got only one wrong; and very few did I have to study for more than a few seconds.
Count me as one of those people who is totally unable to visualise at all. I can even stare at an object, close my eyes, and be unable to ‘see’ it. I will have a set of descriptive words, but no picture.
If, for example, you say to me, “Visualise a wheel”, I simply cannot do it. I can describe one in great detail. I will give you colours andd textures, size, dimensions etc…, but in no way am I ‘seeing’ it in my head. What I have instead are a set of language based descriptions. I often wondered if other people had the same problem. Now I know they do
You are visualizing. People don’t actually physically “see” what they’re visualizing, in the same way as you do when looking at a tangible object, or even like a dream. Rather, it’s more like remembering a scene from a movie. Maybe doing that would be easier than imagining the water wheel (I had trouble with that, because I’ve never seen one in person and only seen one once or twice in moving pictures–it was easy with a bike wheel though); imagine a scene from your favorite movie in your mind for a few minutes and then visualize one of the actors breaking script and doing something that is not in the movie. For a visual thinker, this should be easy to “see.”
I can visualize really well; I can call up specific scenes from movies or books at will and see the action clearly. It’s also pretty easy to translate visual mind images to text; I think I’m naturally inclined toward fiction writing because I spend all day thinking up imaginary things and then using my textual skills to translate them. (It’s a one-way transmission, though–I have no practical artistic skills, and can only write text-based reports of the visual images in my head.)
I can’t recreate speech or music at all, though. When I visualize one of the scenes from a book in my head, I’ll see the characters, but the words just stay words, kind of like closed captioning. It’s the same when I’m recalling conversations or the auditory bits in movies–it gets translated into text, and associated with the visuals. To relate this to music, one of the reasons I don’t like instrumental music as much as music with lyrics (and why I’m not a huge fan of that either–I really do think I’m incapable of enjoying music on the same level and to the same extent as other people) is that to me the instrumental is just aural sludge, with nothing for me to grasp onto mentally. The words are like an “anchor” that allows me to project a visual image onto the song. No hearing problems, just complete ineptitude with anything auditory. I’m totally tone deaf too. Win some, lose some.
Same here UncleBeer. Very little effort to complete those. NinetyWt: I can do your daughter’s trick too. I still don’t understand how everyone else gets through exams having to actually memorize stuff. I just read the book off the back of my eyelids and write the answer down.
My visualized wheel has at least 30 spokes. When someone first suggested to count the spokes, my reaction was, “yeah, right”. It was just way to big of a task to be worth the effort. Now I can envision a smaller wheel with 12 spokes and count those.
I don’t think anyone will be able to answer this, but just to think about: for those of you who don’t visualize and think strictly in words, what do you think your thoughts were like before you could read? Maybe you used to think in pictures, but found that words are more efficient?
I guess I’m right in the middle. I can visualize things, but the images lack detail. When I dream, I don’t feel like I actually “see” colors, but neither do I “see” only black & white; I just “know” what colors things are. I “know” what people look like in my dreams, but I could not draw a picture of their faces from memory. I remember dreams more as a time-compressed impression of things that happened, as opposed to a vivid, detailed “movie”. Colors usually don’t seem important in the context of the dream.
There does seem to be a “momentum” phenomenon or propensity for things to remain constant in visualizations. When I read a novel, I automatically construct a visualization of the scene in my mind. Sometimes the author adds more details to the scene which conflict with the initial image I made up, and it’s virtually impossible for me to change that image. The road to my house runs due North, but when I first moved there, I hadn’t actually seen it on a map, so I thought it was going East. To this day it never “feels” like North.
I wonder if the “wheel” thing is more difficult because of the symmetry. It’s hard to visualize a bicycle wheel slowing down and reversing, but if I imagine it with a valve stem or a reflector or some other assymeterical part, it’s easier to see that part moving in a circle.
(My bold) YES WE DO! At least I do. What I visualize is not floating out in the world, its in my head, behind my eyes. Its not vague, or colorless, It is distinct and natural looking.
Please don’t generalize. You are not in my head, nor will you be invited. My visions are my own.
You can do yours however you see fit, but please don’t speak for all people.
I can clearly ‘see’ things that I’ve never seen before or haven’t seen in forever, except for faces. When I think of my mom, I see her in my head, but her face, although I can see it, I could never describe it to you while I could describe everything else about her. Same with imaginary people, the rest of their features I can describe perfectly, but when it comes to the face, I have trouble putting my pictures into words and describing them satisfactorily. I have a terrible memory for faces and I have not recognized my friends on several occasions, so it’s probably connected that.
I love doing these experiments with my friends since everything thinks differently. I knew one girl who thought in association. I would say “stop” and she would think of and visualize a stop sign. “Train” would make her think and see “train tracks.” Another girl would see things that she knew. For example, if I said “house” she would see her own house compared to others who saw general houses. Some people would be able to taste/smell different foods if I named them. For example, if I said ‘pickles’ to them, they would taste pickles. I can feel the taste of pickles in my mouth just by reading the word. Even abstract concepts would have visual representations for some people. Yellow made some people see the sun. When I visualize, it is in colorful videos that can involve all the senses. The video quickly moves from the exact to emcompass more details. For example, “cow” makes me instantly see a single cow, then right after the ‘camera’ pulls back and I see the cow in a field with other cows eating grass. As I have more time to visualize the scene, I see the blue sky overhead and the fence surrounding the cows. The more and more time I have to think of a thing, the more details get added to it. I have a very active fantasy life that is full of imaginary characters who do and say all sorts of things. When I think of my characters, I could tell you everything from the biggest details (he’s in a coffee shop) to the smallest ones (the counter top has slight smudges of green ink). Unfortunately, I can not express what I see in my head properly to other people. I have no way with words and my artistic skills are next to nothing. It can be rather frustrating at times.
Sit down with a friend sometime and have them randomly say a bunch of different words to you. You’ll learn a lot about your own thought processes that way.
I’m mid-way, I guess. My wheel has some momentum, and doesn’t stop all that easily, and only reverses kind of jerkily. The flowing water idea helps some, and it possibly helps if I don’t over think the thing.
Another one that helps to reverse the wheel is picturing a car wheel traveling through a dip, going up the far slope, slowing down, and reversing.
Why twelve spokes? Well, twelve is a nice, round number. Zodiac, hours on the face of an, ah, analog clock. Not too many to count, just count three for the first quadrant and viola.
I’ve had a good memory, but it seems like it might be getting weaker here at middle age. Or maybe it’s just that I’ve seen, ah, more than I can recall ::nods towards the Jimmy Buffet parrot heads::.
An interesting sidenote that when I was about 16, and claimed to be proficient and “natively fluent” in two languages (English and Russian) people would often ask me “But what language do you THINK in, that’s the one that’s truly your native language”, and I’d just stare at them as if they were idiots.
I do not think in a language about things not related to languages. For example, if I am not trying to express myself in my head, or modeling dialogue, or thinking about a book, inscription, speech, etc. language does not come into it. You could say I am thinking in my brain language, and certain abstract concepts(i’m really good at higher abstract math, like differential geometry or abstract algebra, but suck at calculus) are separate in my mind from pictures, but they are definitely not in a linguistic language.
For me it is trivial to visualize a wheel and then reverse it, if I want a river to flow and then reverse flow I need to close my eyes but I can still do it effortlessly.
groman. Okay – but when you DO express yourself in your head – talking to yourself, arguing with yourself, cheering yourself up, etc. – do you observe a preference or predominance for Russian, English or some sort of “Spanglish”-type blend of the two?
Personally, though I can imagine a wheel turning one way and then the other (like a reversible ceiling fan), I am unable to mentally flip objects around in space and imagine them backwards, or anything like that. Those tests where they show you a flattened box or flattened 3-D shape and then ask what it would look like folded up on the lines completely baffle me. So do the ones with the three random patterns of geometric shapes that ask which shape follows next in the sequence. I haven’t the faintest clue of how to approach them. I just answer “C”. I can’t predict the gear rotation direction questions or tell which way to turn a cord to untwist it just by looking at it. Ever. An upside-down screw is a trial-and-error exercise each time.
However, I can’t help but feel the folks saying they “cant’ visualize” and are missing out on something in life are being too hard on themselves and taking the word visualize perhaps too literally. It simply isn’t true that you can’t visualize. I’ll prove it to you.
Think of getting in your car and going to the store.
Well done–you just “visualized” being in the car and visualized the store. I think very few people actually “see” the car and the store as if they were actually looking at them, though some can. For most, the information coming into the visual cortex via the optic nerve is just too overpowering for the brain to shut off in favor of what the mind “prefers” to “see” at a given moment. With training and relentless practice, top athletes learn to visualize game situations and see themselves actually making the perfect play at any given time. But you couldn’t even function at all in daily life if you couldn’t visualize future actions and events. You couldn’t go to the bathroom if you couldn’t visualize what it’s like to head for the bathroom. Everything you ever do is thought of first, on some level, and then carried out. Every project you’ve ever completed, every item you’ve set out from home deliberately to acquire and then succeeded in obtaining, everything is the result of your visualization. Congratulations! You are not missing out on life after all.
I rarely mix, but this heavily depends on the language I’ve been using throughout the day, if I was home and talking to my parents, I may talk to myself in Russian, or if I was at college, then it is English.
Sound, smell, colour, touch, taste, the works, if I want. I dream the same way too. I’ve dreamed in occaision in cartoons, with different paper and drawing styles as well. Once I dreamed in Labview, the graphical programming language.