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People used to tell me I had a great imagination, but honestly I’m more on the aphantasia side of things.
It’s difficult for me to hold mental images in my head. Like if I imagine an object it’s like it’s in my minds eye for a single frame and then black. It takes serious effort to visualize things in detail and keep them in my head for more than just a flash of detail.
However, I’ve realized that the raw data of the thing im imagining is still there. I might not be able to see it but I can experience other imagined senses. I definitely get lost in maladaptive fantasies a lot. I can imagine a story, I can imagine a universe, I can know how it feels to be in a different place or even a different body than my own, I can’t imagine the proprioception and tactile sensation of different limbs, Imagine emotional scenarios far beyond my personal experience, all of that… but I can’t picture the face of someone I know.
Brains are weird
That’s similar to how my mind works as well.
I’m towards the hyperphantasic side of the spectrum and I’ve also noticed that it influences quite a lot of things.
Perhaps the biggest factor is that I don’t have the same drive to visit places or people. I could travel to a castle to look at it, or I could do so in my mind. I could meet back up with an old friend, but as I think of them, my desire to see them again is satiated. This does mean I’m terrible at maintaining friendships and socializing in general.I was almost aphantasic from around 8 to 20.
When I hit 20 I regretted having lost my ability to see things in my mind’s eye, and trained myself to visualize again, so now I am closer to hyperphantasic side.
That said, although I can model people in my mind’s eye, it only gives me an approximation. I still feel like I need to see people in the flesh, because I can read their body and even their presence and aura if you like, which tells me things I cannot get through modeling.
On the other hand once I know someone for 5 years or longer, there are fewer and fewer surprises. So even if I know my model is not exact, I know I will hear all the old motifs and be disappointed. It is staggering how little growth some people have. Write down their sayings today and check five years later. If nothing has changed, you know what’s up.
Of course there are people that do grow, so hang onto those if you can find them.
I don’t think visualization is a disincentive to socialization all on its own. If I choose to spend time socially I want an interesting experience. I don’t want to hear the same 5 stories for the 406th time. 20 times tops. I can stand some repetition, some stories are very dear, I get it. But my patience is not infinite. So visualization isn’t the issue, but being predictable and repetitive to an extreme degree is imo the real issue.
Some people claim telepathy, and that’s different from visualization in that talepathy is not a product of modeling. I suppose telepathy could make in person contact unnecessary, but to me that is mostly theoretical. If I want to take the best measure of a person I have to get within two feet of their body still.
I am absolutely aphantasic. It’s like my brain operates with a command line interface. Like, there’s that mental exercise of picturing a ball rolling off a table. I can tell myself that I’m thinking about a ball rolling off a table, but I can’t actually see the image of it. If I try to remember something falling off a counter or whatever, I can’t recall the event visually, but I can remember the details involved. It’s like reading the summary of a video clip, but not being able to actually see the video.
Some People Can’t See Mental Images. Rotate Them In Your Mind As Punishment
I wonder how life is for them. I see everything in images, wether someone’s talking, or even if i’m reading.
Paywalled, but interesting topic. Afair, being able to generate internal vision in the same way as our inner voice, is called “Phantasia”. “Aphantasia” is the lack of that ability. I learned ~6 months ago that everybody else could actually close their eyes and see a thing in front of them. However, somehow I can still sense movement and some vague 3D shapes of stuff, and that seem to be enough for me to ‘navigate’ most information.
OC I felt cheated out of ~50 years of opportunities to conjure unwanted images up in other peoples heads ! Cock, sweat, anal, tits, puss, a hot turd between toes, and a million other image generating references that I could have casually snuck into conversations in the most in-appropriate situations … what a waste of a great supervillain power ! “The Nasty-Visions-Man” was not to arise :-(
Anyway, I’m curious to how blind-born people imagine or sense the physical world. They must have their proprioception and a 3d world model, so they should be able to sense movement/shapes etc like me, and imagine how others move. We all have a dozen+ internal representations of the outside world, and besides the potential for human mis-communication etc, it also hints at how to build a full artificial brain, AGI.
Added archived link, and I can’t really visualize things by closing my eyes and thinking about an object either. Yet, when I dream, my mind can conjure up visual imagery no problem.
I’ve read that there are experiments showing that blind people do end up repurposing their vision centres to work with the sensory information they get.
If you close your eyelids, relax, and look into the dark space behind your eyelids for say two minutes, does anything show up?
If yes, the second step can be to try applying your will to those images.
For example lets say you see a pulsating purple fat dot in front. Can you make it pulsate faster, slower, change its color to red (there is already a red component in purple), make it oval instead of round, etc. At some point you could volitionally massage the dot to resemble an apple. The main limit is patience. It could get boring.
If you can do all that, it should be similar enough if not exactly the same to visualize. Visualization is a bit more subtle and more “inner” than the closed eye visuals, but not radically different ime.
If you can deeply relax in bed for say 20 minutes to an hour while not allowing yourself to be totally carried away into unconscious dreaming, you can likely see all kinds of pre-dreaming hypnagogic imagery. That can help with the same “muscle”.
If you can remember your dreams, you are already pretty connected to your own inner vision.
At my “worst” I didn’t even dream. I would go to bed, and immediately I get up, except it’s 7 hours later and I am not tired. There were no dreams and time would just jump forward seemingly. I love dreaming, so this eventually became uncool for me, and I wanted to dream really bad, and dreams came back to me. I still get too many boring dreams, but to me that’s better than nothing at least. Once in a while I get a dream that blows my mind.
In my experience we have a lot of say over such things.
When I close my eyelids and relax, I tend to see random noise in darkness. I can manipulate it to an extent in terms of shape, so I can see how that can be worked on with some patience to shape what I see more intentionally. So, I think you’re right that with some dedicated effort I could gain more control over what I’m seeing with my eyes closed.
In general, I find when I try to visualize things, it feels like I perceive the shapes I’m thinking about, but not in my visual field. It’s more like I have a concept of the object I’m thinking of, and it can be detailed enough to explore, but it’s very distinct from actually seeing it. It feels more like there’s a ghostly shape floating in my mind.
Right, it’s not the same field as the eyes for me.
It feels more internal, that’s all I can say, because it has no obvious relationship to the head. It could be vaguely closer to the back of the head, but not literally.
So it’s just as you say, basically. If you make a habit of focusing your mind there, you will make it stand out more, make it brighter, stabler, etc.
In general, I find when I try to visualize things, it feels like I perceive the shapes I’m thinking about, but not in my visual field.
I think this is IT. The real deal.
It’s like we can have more than one field, basically. The eyes work with one visual field of the few that we have. I think we have at least two.
Typically you might habitually overlook the visualization field, so the sensations there can appear arbitrarily subtle and abstract.
I was taught when young that fantasizing is what unserious people do, so for a period of time I learned to ignore and tune out some aspects of my inner life. Of course I wanted to be a serious person. I think different things happen with different individuals. I am just sharing this as one example of what might have happened. Inner life can be complicated. But I still believe almost everything happens for a reason, even if the reason is obscure.
Yeah that’s a really good way to describe it. Basically, it’s like a visual field, but not from the eyes, and my brain just kind of suppresses it. But practising focusing on it could help with making myself more attuned to paying direct attention to it. I really should try spend a bit of time on that.
It’s really fascinating to hear how other people’s mental processes work, it’s not something we tend to talk about. And it’s kind of easy to assume that other people’s minds work roughly like your own, but clearly there are some pretty big differences.
I am in perfect agreement! (that almost never happens)
For me I was taught that subjectivity (what’s inside) distorts and dillutes objectivity (what’s outside). Objectivity is reality. Subjectivity is fantasy, delusion, fake, a distraction, a waste of time, a matter for unserious people, and so on.
I somewhat resentfully accepted all that, until later I rejected that entire way of thinking.
I think I even had a few black and white dreams when little, and I quietly freaked out about it and started paying more attention to my dreams, which appeared in color, and I was like “I thank my lucky stars.” Boy I hated the idea of not having color.
As far as I remember there are like two halves or aspects of mine fighting. One is the pro-objectivity side and another is the pro-subjectivity side. I have been trying to tell myself it’s a false dichotomy, can’t all of me please get along now? It’s all valuable and valid, there is no need for me to rip myself in half. I was somewhat successful.
It didn’t help my pro-odjectivity side that I have low-key envied the visual arts people. Now there is more internal peace for me, and subjectivity is valid, valued, and needed, together with what we can call objectivity. I don’t have useless parts.
The way I like to look at it is that we build models of the world in our heads. Our subjectivity is basically our own distinct understanding of the world that we develop through our unique experience. It’s not the objective reality itself, but it’s how we represent it and make sense of it.
