Aldous Huxley, in his psychedelic classic The Doors of Perception, confessed “I have always been a poor visualizer.” Nonetheless, he did get some trippy visual effects on mescaline. It’s interesting, in a somewhat perverse way, to read an accomplished author and intellectual reflecting on psychedelic visuals despite his inability to visualize. His visuals didn’t stay on the visual plane but were immediately translated into metaphysical ideas.
Depends.
NO, I do NOT see adult-sized diapers. I mean it depends on how you pronounce the word.
If you pronounce it “Toe-MAH-Toe”, I see a large (usually red) berry.
If you pronounce it “Toe-MAY-Toe”, I see Betty Page, in a provocative pose. 
Count me as someone who was not aware that there are people who can not see a tomato in their mind’s eye when someone says the word. How very odd, but it sure explains a lot about some folks’ apparent lack of imagination.
I have a (sometimes) annoyingly keen sense of smell. I paint, I’m an excellent photographer, I’ve done caligraphy, and can construct something in my mind before building it on the physical plane.
On the other hand, one of my sons (who is musically talented) has difficulty in visualizing. I noticed this when he was visiting a few years ago. There is a mountain here called “Sleeping Lady” by locals, “Mt. Susitna” officially. I took my son (who interestingly was also subject to migraines when younger) and daughter up to an overlook and said “There’s Mt. Susitna. What does it look like to you?” Simultaneously, my daughter said “a sleeping lady”, and my son said “mountains”. No matter how much we tried to point out how the shape was reminiscent of a supine form, he couldn’t see it. I thought he was putting us on, but now am not so sure.
Whenever I’m on the phone speaking to someone, I can almost “see” the person directly in front of me and I can watch their lips move and the changes in their facial expressions as they speak. Anyone else do this?
If I’ve never met the person I’m speaking to I can come up with a pretty good idea of what they look like.
Also, if I’m going to a location I’ve never been, I play a game and try to visualize everything about this place before I get there and then compare the picture in my mind to the location itself. Of course, I’m usually well off base, but I’m surprised by how detailed I can make the picture in my mind.
Is anyone aware of any studies on this? I would be curious to know if there is a relationship between reading ability/preferences and the ability to visualize. I would think fictional books would be tedious to someone who can’t conjure up the images to go along with it. It would also be interesting to see a study based upon visualization skills and political affiliation.
I was just thinking about that, Chefguy. I can visualize quite well, although like some people earlier in the thread I run into trouble when I try to picture something that is fundamentally ‘wrong’ to my sense of physics. (Although I can generally get it after a bit of mental readjustment - somewhat of a ‘which way the gears spin’ sort of thing)
However, I’ve noticed that although I love reading novels with vivid, descriptive prose, I can’t make head nor tail of poetry. With few exceptions, the sort of concepts and images that a properly crafted poem is supposed to evoke just don’t ‘happen’ with me. If someone walks me through it and shows exactly how certain ‘attributes’ mentioned in the text combine to form a second-order concept, I can ‘get’ it, but never on my own. I think of words as either the image of the word on the page, or as the image that the word describes, but rarely in terms of concepts. If I think of something on my own, I generally have no trouble putting it on paper, but I can’t absorb meta-data that other people created. For example, I have no problem writing code or mathematical formulae, but reading something someone else wrote is a massive headache for me. Usually, it involves a series of ‘passes’ where the symbols are visualized in turns and slowly parsed, so that the objects they represent are assembled into a cohesive whole in my mind’s eye.
I’ve often had situations (usually when studying for a memorization-heavy course, such as physiology or biochemistry) where I would remember either the image of the page or the biological pathway (usually as a sort of node-tree structure), but not the series of concepts that the words evoke. Like groman I also natively speak English and Russian, and I’ve found that my mind works like he described: my mental ‘language’ is dependent on the situation, and the concepts involved. Anything that relies on visual thought is not mentally verbalized.
Interestingly enough, one of my major issues in learning is that I am internally strongly visual, but externally strongly verbal. I have great trouble absorbing anything on a page (leading to that dual visualization issue mentioned earlier) but learn very quickly when listening to a description of an object or a process. This occurs to such an extent that I can stare at a page for hours and not learn anything (although I may memorize the shape and perhaps even the words on the page), but if I read it aloud, I often learn it on the first pass.
Weird stuff.
I can see it, and I can make it slow down, stop, and reverse, but it’s dim and very hazy, not concrete like other Dopers’ descriptions. What is clear to me is the sound of it, the running water, the slapping sound as the paddles hit the water, birds twittering in the distance. Weird.
I can’t speak for everyone in the thread, but I hear the words, as opposed to seeing them. Which is why I’ve usually done most of my studying by reading aloud. It might have driven my college roommates crazy, but it worked for me. Also, if I write something down, I’ll almost always remember it. But it’s an auditory memory; it isn’t visual or tactile. That appears to be how my imagination works best.
Interesting,look!ninjas, but I–Holy crap! Look, there’s some ninjas!
::Sometime later::
Ok, now that that is done, I was wondering. Who’s voice reads the words?
Wow, I see everything in my head. This morning I was with some friends and we were building a footbridge over a creek to get to our paintball field. We have a pile of pallets, normal sized and some heavy duty 12 long ones. In my head I was putting them together like puzzle pieces to see what would assemble with minimum work.
When somebody else was describing their idea I kind of glaze over while I’m putting it together in my head. One guy was doing a poor job explaining how he thought it should go. My exact words were “I can’t see it.”
I do the same thing with construction projects around the house, or planting gardens, anything really. I build it in my head.
I can techinically draw very well, blueprints and such. Draw a face or something, not a chance. I’m also an excellent photographer. I was helping a friend for a while doing videos for weddings, he said a few times how well I framed things and got some great shots.
I can see a person in my head but don’t know how I’d ever explain it a sketch artist. Go figure.
As to the OP, I pictured a wheel free floating in space. As each person described a style or color or background I can change my wheel at will. Do a cut-away, size scale all that tech stuff.
I recall reading a study a few years ago (sorry, no cite) about male vs. female ability to reconstruct an object from memory. The test was to draw a bicycle and I think the subjects were young, like early teens maybe.
Overall, the boys were exponentially better at drawing a properly scaled bicycle with correct placement of the seat. wheels, and gears; whereas girls had a very hard time with it.
IIRC, the conclusion of the study was that boys were more spacial thinkers. Not sure I buy it, though.
Ruby made me think of something else, possibly related (maybe not.) I can estimate size usually within an inch or less. If we’re building something, I can look at a pile of boards of different lengths and never choose one too short for the application. Even if the project is still on paper.
Chefguy, There is a secluded complex of buildings not far from our house. Its a neuro-physiology research institute that studies how children learn.
Their name escapes me. I think it was an acronym, so I had no frame of reference to hold on to it. If I have time tomorrow, I’ll drive by and get the name.
They do have a website that has hints of their current research projects. (It got lost when I got my new computer, sorry)
One was about how the toddler brain processes language while learning to speak and how it relates to retaining memory. Their preliminary theories speculated that one needs speech and sensory input to develop memory.
I wonder if they might have done any studies of how we think. Of course, their mission statement speaks only of study subjects between birth and 4 years old. If I am remembering correctly. I’m pretty sure the aren’t yet able to translate EEG or any of the endless brain scanning technology into language, so maybe not.
I am a very visual thinker. I have no problems picturing the wheel. I have no problems picturing a mill or a paddleboat attached to the wheel. I can picture the colors and can hear the sounds and smell the scents of the surroundings. I can see the wheel moving in one direction. I can stop the wheel. I can reverse the direction of the wheel whether or not I stop it first. But, I can’t for the life of me slow it down.
Or at least I couldn’t, until Chronos mentioned the rubber band thing. If I view it as one of those spinning toys where the string twists up and then the wheel reverses itself, I have no problems.
I can also visualize many concentric wheels turning in alternate directions, and can visualize a car tire spinning forwards attached to a car, while the spokes in the hubcap spin the opposite direction (like you sometimes see at night due to the strobe effect from streetlights).
I have also been told that I have a very good eye for picture taking, though I lack any formal training (I use a digital camera, so I don’t have any experience developing anything). My older sister is a part time professional photographer and has given me many compliments on the photos I’ve taken.
But I can’t draw, sculpt, paint, or anything similar to save my life. I have the same problem as Trigonal Planar. What I see just doesn’t translate into paper. I guess that’s why I find artistic photography easier. I capture exactly what my mind sees as interesting.
I am also a visual thinker where it comes to occupation. I work as a software engineer, and when coding, I am almost visualizing what the code is doing as I write it, in both the aspect of what the user is going to see, and the aspect of how each section of code interacts with other sections. If I do say so myself, I’m very good at what I do for a living, and I think the fact that I can visualize what I’m programming is why this is so. Programming (like almost all other engineering disciplines) is just as much of an art as it is a science.
When reading the OP I imagined a simple circle with an indistinct number of spokes. I rotated it as described, wondering what the final question would be. It surprised me to learn that some people don’t visualize everything. During a demo they had you close your eyes and someone put an object in your hand. You had to guess what it was. It was easy because each surface filled in my picture. The rod became a pen when I felt the curvature, then the clasp. I visualized the ball on the end of the clasp with a shadow underneath and a reflection on light off of the top curve. I couldn’t image any other way to do it.
As I read the threads I too created scenes of paddlewheels and bayous and rushing rivers and croaking frogs. I shifted to a new image and POV with each new poster’s ideas. They pop into my mind now as I try to remember what I want to post here.
What I see in my mind is photo-realistic. It overlays my current vision but I can walk or drive while doing it. I do think my awareness of what is actually occurring is impaired when I do this, but I usually control this and do not let it intrude too much.
When I look down at my keyboard for some typing or glance over at the screen, the quiet dawn with the paddlewheel and the croaking frogs is “overlaid” as a very very dim image. I can concentrate on those reeds and see their detail. Having read this thread I notice that I’m looking at the keyboard keys but really seeing only the reeds until I shift focus. I hadn’t paid attention to this shifting of focus and can only describe it as I did - an overlay. Also, anything outside my field of vision is blurred, just as in real life. Looking at the reeds has the paddlewheel blurry until I pan over to it.
Also, when I’m looking down at the keyboard, I don’t rotate the river scene to fit the horizontal plane of my desk. I tried just now and I can have any POV I want at any angle, but I realized I prefer observer points of view. Imagine yourself diving into a pool. I prefer to visualize any POV that watches, not one from a “diver” POV. I can do it, but I mentally blink when hitting the water.
I saved all this in Notepad in case of hamster attack and visualized the file name as “Visualization.txt” in Arial before I needed to enter a filename. When I need to write something centered on paper I visualize it as a shostly image and adjust the font and spacing until it’s what I want and then I “copy” it. I draw well, but I find it hard when I focus so much on one part of the image and don’t take the other parts into account. What’s in the POV is sharp and the other parts are fuzzy so I often miss a proportion when I try to do one half of a face before sketching the other half first.
My wife asks me to drive somewhere we’ve been before and I figure out how to get there by visualizing driving the route at faster-than-light speed, basically reviewing snapshots one after another. In junior high I remember riding the bus and imagning myself running alongside like the superhero Quicksilver. I actually imagined enough detail that I noticed my heart rate sped up and my breathing grew short.
And it’s not just real world things. I can visualize that stapler on the desk standing up on gumby legs, growing fangs and attacking. I wrote a story in school about appliances coming to life and had to visualize what happened to be able to write the story. I can make the paddlewheel do whatever you want, but it’s a little difficult to make it rotate against the river; the water splashes and creates a great churn against an opposing wheel. The physics has to work by default. But I can imagine a paddlewheel rotating against an unaffected river; as if the wheel were some ghostly manifestation. And I can also stop one “side” of the wheel and have the other side continue, thus twisting the paddles into an impossible shape for wood.
When I type and read these posts, I hear some voice - I think mine, but not as nasal as when I actually head my voice - speaking the words, at narrative speed, and with inflections and emphasis. Remembering what I read I think that I’m somewhat remembering the actual mouthing, articulation, head motion, etc. but I wouldn’t swear to it. I do notice that my tongue tries to form words as I read quietly to myself.
If someone sad, “Imagine being sad,” I would have to call up some scene in which I felt sad and then the emotions would actually wash over me. If I couldn’t call up the emotion (like being on stage and embarrassed to try) then my scene switches to one in a movie where some character had the emotion and I just “watch” it.
Now for the freaky part. When you close your eyes do you notice the light shining through that gives the blackness a red tint? Then do you notice the after images, the little white spots of adrenaline and other chemicals that shoot around sometimes, the striations and patterns like those you can imagine in the snow on your TV screen? Well, maybe seven times in my life I’ve gotten a little further. A little quarter inch area in my vision streams some of those threads together and for just a moment I’ve actually watched an image that my mind is creating.
I’m not actually projecting anything. My mind must be creating a mental image that it’s also letting me sense through my visual cortex, or something like that. At first it was a 1/4 second movie and looking at it made it disappear. Practice let me relax and just watch it. My best experience was about 2 seconds and I could actually pan across the image. It was a stream of consciousness thing where a face smears into a tree and the tree smears into a mountain, etc.
Depends. Most often, it’ll be my own voice, at least for written notes and stories written in the third-person. Other than that, it just depends. If I’m reading an interview with someone, and I know what their voice sounds like, I’ll hear their voice. If I’m reading a letter from a friend, I’ll hear their voice. If it’s male or female dialogue or a male or female narrator, I’ll hear some sort of generic male or female voice. Anything written out phonetically will be heard with an accent - Trainspotting, for example, has varying strengths of Scottish accents. And if I’m writing fiction, the characters will all start to develop different voices and ways of speaking as I get to know them better. It really just depends.
Thanks for the responce, it is very enlightening. You know, perosonally, when I was a kid, I would sometimes find that my imagination was having various memorable voices narate what I was reading, such as Darkwing Duck treating my history book as if it was a book-on-tape.
I don’t remember anything before I learned to speak, and I think that the two may be related. But being able to read is not a precondition for using words - are you imagining that those of us who think in words are actually seeing them, as if on a printed page? My thoughts are in ideas and words, but never pictures. Sounds, yes; smells and tactile sensations as well, sometimes.
The closest I can come to pictures are either vague impressions (really more clearly related to the emotion that would be inspired by the event) or sort of like a very washed out, jerky movie. Things aren’t distinct in my mind unless I’m concentrating on them, like in a dream where you look away from something and it changes. Now my visual imagination doesn’t necessarily change when you look away, but it’s as though I have a very small amount of “storage” for imagery, and I can either imagine an entire scene vaguely, or focus in on one object, with everything else a background blur.
I feel like I remember things in ideas, which are easily then translated into words. I might have a flash impression of a person’s face, but if I were to describe them, it would be based upon ideas about their appearance that I have tucked away. I don’t see a red-haired woman with freckles and glasses; I know that the person I’m describing has red hair, freckles, and glasses, so I describe her that way.
Music, though, is easy. I’m not sure exactly how well I can recreate a piece in my mind; I don’t have the phonographic memory (if you will) that some are reporting. But I can “envision” people’s voices, imagine hearing a particular person saying a particular thing, remember - with what at least seems like note-perfect recall - what my favorite pieces of music sound like, etc.
I always assumed those were impossible for everybody. I mean, now I’m supposed to be able to do origami in my head? I don’t think any of those puzzles are really visual, though. The above is probably kinesthetic (since it involves heavily manipulating an object.) The geometric squiggles usually just require you to analyze them - in the sense of “taking them apart” and considering only the individual parts of the squiggle - I don’t think it’s directly visual.
Please don’t tell the rest of us how we think. Not only can I not resurrect a single visual memory of driving to the store, but when I tried to “visualize” it, it rapidly turned into a birds-eye view of the car backing out of the driveway and then faded away completely. The bits I saw were just the best mental pictures I could make from the ideas I have stored away about driving to the store - I couldn’t tell you, without looking, which side is the gas gauge and which side is the temperature gauge on the dashboard. Unless you’re using “visualize” to describe something that has nothing to do with actual vision, then I don’t have the capacity to visualize what you’re talking about.
Yeah, but it’s not thought of visually. I don’t think in pictures. I “visualize” going to the bathroom only if you mean “visualize” to describe something entirely different. In fact, going to the bathroom is pretty much an autonomic process. I don’t need to plan it out in advance in any respect whatsoever. What, do you need to have a little mental picture of the toilet and how it works in order to use it successfully?
Statements like these demonstrate, I think, just how deeply the differences extend. I love reading fiction, and I can’t even understand why you would need visuals to go along with a book. I might vaguely picture certain scenes if a book has an abundance of physical description, but for the most part, there are no visuals when I’m reading a book. I can’t even begin to comprehend why that would bother anyone. It sure doesn’t inhibit my enjoyment of a book. The only way I can describe reading a book is that I read ideas - the words translate directly into ideas, feelings, and so forth, and rarely spend much time as physical images.
I can visualize the mill wheel, or the wheel on the paddle boat in a still frame of the the mill or boat, but I can’t make them move in that form. To get the wheel to rotate, I wound up thinking of something that looked like a ships wheel floating in space. When I made it spin it was counter-clockwise, and it just kept going faster. I was finally able to stop it after great effort and much scrunching of my eyes, but not to make it spin clockwise. I have worked on visualization purposefully, for yoga classes and other mental exercises, but I’m still not very good at it. My “monkey mind” insists on chattering. In words, all the time. Unless I’m reading, or writing, which doesn’t shut it up, but does focus it. That’s not true, I can also pay attention to a speaker, but not without great interest in the topic, or extreme effort. I’m one of those annoying people who wants to talk in the movie, or during the show. I don’t do it, I have been socialized, but I really really want to. I was the despair of many a teacher with my smart ass replies to the lesson.
On the other hand I am a voracious reader, mostly of fiction. I don’t picture the scenes and characters in my head, I hear the words. I get exasperated with long drawn out descriptions of scenery. I want to get on with either the characters’ thoughts or actions. So now, I give myself permission to skip them, which I didn’t used to do. I read every word on the page usually, and I’m a very fast reader. But now, especially when re-reading a book, which I do often, I no longer read the long physical place descriptions.
Also, I have only vague fuzzy pictures of people I love in my head, and I’m constantly being told that I’m not very…well, I’ve temporarily lost that word, but it means that I don’t notice the things going on around me very well. I’d make a terrible police witness.
That would be me.
I’ve never been able to form pictures in my head. I had a hell of a time with my drafting class in college. I can recall sounds quite clearly, but visualizing is pretty much impossible. I once had a conversation with a friend who was quite good at doing math in her head. She told me that she could just see the numbers, as if she were writing them on paper. My brain just isn’t wired that way, and up until that time I thought everyone else was like that, too.
There is an exception, though (besides dreams, which are frequently quite vivid). I recently developed migraine auras, which is a visual disturbance that precedes a migraine. They’re basically hallucinations, only it’s generally apparent that they’re in fact not real. The aura is often still there when I close my eyes, so my brain is obviously capable of creating images, and my interpretation of what I’m seeing affects what it looks like (e.g. if I think “that looks kind of like a horse,” it turns into a horse), but under normal circumstances I can’t bring up images in my head.
As for the person who commented earlier in the thread that people who can’t visualize might not enjoy reading fiction, that’s definitely not true in my case.
I’ve heard it said before that men are overall better at spacial reasoning than women. I’ve had some truly awful experiences trying to move furniture for women. They couldn’t visualize what the furniture would look like in place A, they need to SEE it there before they decide it really needs to be at place B…then you move it and really it needs to be at place C. It is VERY frustrating as someone who could easily picture what the cabinet looks like in places A, B, and C, and decide which spot would be best.
My mom was also fascinated by my stepdad’s ability to pack the back of the car with stuff to help move, because she cannot picture what the best way to fill the car up will be beforehand.
I’m sure there are plenty of women who could kick my ass at either of these things, but I have definitely noticed this myself. Apparently studies trying to find differences in this are controversial:
I would consider it feminine for a guy to not be able to pack a box tight or know whether he would like furniture in a spot before seeing it actually be there, so I bet it is largely social conditioning instead of an inherent difference between the sexes…