wait, what?

[ysobel]

Elsesite, someone linked to an article on aphantasia, the inability to visualise mental images, and my mind screeched to a flaily halt because

a) there's a word for this, and

b) that means some people *can* literally see things? what?

Seriously, I can’t visualize anything -- so eg I can’t remember faces (I recognize people when I see them but I can’t pull up a mental picture even of people I know well and have seen recently) -- and I know eg that the tree outside my window has a brown textured trunk but if I’m not looking at it I can’t really see/remember the exact shade of brown or the specifics of the texture or the shape of the branches or what the leaves look like -- and I remember when I was a kid reading a book where someone was teaching a budding telepath how to build a mental wall by visualizing a brick and then visualizing more bricks until they had built a wall, and I thought that being able to close your eyes and actually see a brick was more unrealistic than the telepathy, because I mean of course everyone knows bricks are rectangular and sort of brick red and whatever but actually seeing one in your head was impossible.

Except this is actually a thing? Other people can see things in their imagination, not just vaguely understand the basic features? And I’m not normal for not being able to but also not alone? Whoah.

Comments

[kaberett]

I cannot see the things either! You are definitely not alone.

[james]

I cannot visualise things like 'how will this quilt look when it's put together' which makes it very hard to plan quilts. I always have to pick a pattern and follow it exactly, so that I know it will turn out right. But if I just have fabric and I try to think 'what if I did this?' my brain just goes "..."

[afuna]

I have a really hard time as well; I've figured out the trick a little bit but my primary way of envisioning things is still to think of words that describe the thing in question and have those words float in my mind :3

[twistedchick]

Yes, I can see mental images. Not always but most of the time. For me, I think it has to do with being excessively right-brained, so that I think in shapes and positions more than words.

[zhelana]

Wait, people actually visualize when they say visualize? I think in text. I even dream in text. Like my dream is a story someone is telling me, not a visual landscape...

[krait]

As someone with a pretty good visual imagination, I consider text a visual image...

After reading a book, if I want to go back and reread a scene or find a quote, I can generally remember ("see") where it was on the page - left page or right page, top, middle, or bottom of page, within a large paragraph or a small one, one-third of the way through the novel, or right at the end, etc. I may even be able to skim for a certain fairly unique word ("I remember it was something about triathlons, but what was the exact wording?") and have it 'pop out' of the page at me, like a picture.

[zhelana]

See, I can't do any of that. In fact, in high school they thought I was learning disabled with reading comprehension because of the difference in my English/history and math/science scores. I have no memory for what I read. It's more like being read a text or story than a story though when I dream.

[princessofgeeks]

That's so great to have a name for it and know you're not alone!

(Yes, people can do that. I have a vivid visual imagination. But it's not a universal thing.)

[synecdochic]

I can picture things if I try really really really hard, but not specific things -- more that I can build a mental construct of the Platonic ideal of a thing, etc. (So, I can't visualize the tree outside my window, but I can visualize a tree if I concentrate hard enough.)

I can't remember faces to save my life. Like, it's not proper face-blindness, I can recognize people if I know them well enough, but it's definitely in the same neighborhood. (Weirdly, there are some people I am much better at remembering/recognizing even after only meeting them a few times. I haven't been able to figure out the pattern of what kind of features/appearances I'm better at picturing.)

[azurelunatic]

One of the more surreal things my brain has ever done to me was allowed me to observe the difference between remembering Purple's face well enough to draw it (not photographically in total, but as a composite of enough well-known shapes that I could write it down) and knowing him feature by feature, but not actually holding a good image of him in my head. My mental image of him at that point was literally a pencil-drawn caricature. When I saw him the following week at work, my brain went "of course!" and restored the mental image, but I'd never observed myself losing it like that before. (I lose people's faces all the time; the thing where I failed to recognize my sister was great. It's just the noticing it that's rare.)

I can visualize by building constructs too, but it's hard to bring things into focus unless I know that sort of thing very, very well. Studying photos helps. Knowing how I would paint it helps, because it ties the abstract visualization together with a nameable and/or kinesthetic pattern to reproduce it. This does have the odd effect that the visualization can be linked to the medium, so the effect is sort of like seeing the painting of the thing with a quickly rendered 3D model of the thing ghosted behind it.

Some asshole once said in the hearing of my father when he was a kid that the ability to hold and manipulate mental images of things was "seeing things" and meant you were crazy and should be locked up. So he very quietly and unfortunately mostly successfully tried to eradicate the ability to do so.

I'm pretty decent at mental 3D modeling, especially when I have yarn and a crochet hook to print it.

[vass]

I'm in the same camp as synecdochic here. I can make a picture of a thing in my head if I try, but it's effort-intensive and the rendering is shitty and bears little resemblance to an actual visual thing from the real world. And I have little to no visual memory for specific visual things I see, and I'm if not face-blind then at least face-Coke-bottle-glasses.

Some people have a dedicated graphics card. I have to use the shitty one built into the motherboard, using the same RAM and swap and processor I use for all my other brain stuff, and my processor is generally way underpowered for what I want my brain to do.

It sounds like you don't have a... graphics display driver? No, that analogy doesn't quite work. But it sounds like your firmware or OS doesn't make use of a component that most people's do.