There’s some evidence that visualization is a teachable skill. I’m not clear on the state of the science, and it’s a fuzzy field, as it’s difficult to determine what is really going on in someone else’s head.
I’m not a strong visualizer, but I can do it with effort. I’m totally a recognization reader(1). And I do well on some of the sort of things aphantasiaists are not supposed to (drop a 1/4 nut in field of 6mm ones? No problem.).
(1) and I used to be a crazy fast one, I could read 200 pages of fiction in an hour. Getting old and the decline in visual acuity has slowed my reading down notably.
It’s interesting that there seems to be a high representation of aphantasiacs here on this site. I’m sure it means something, but I can’t picture that.
This is all fascinating to me. I don’t know all these terms. I do know that I used to think in words and at some point realized I didn’t have to, so I trained myself to think in concepts and abstracts to speed things up. But I can do both modes now… as all kids, I thought I was special and had discovered some breakthrough but really I was just learning to change known lanes.
It drives most of the women in my family crazy as I take some time to boot up my other OS if I’m deep in thought when they talk to me so I can be very slow to respond. I get nagged a lot for listening without providing any response or acknowledgement.
On the other hand, I’ve had some luck with lucid dreaming so I think that is the opposite of aphantasia?
I once woke up hearing a Counting Crows song, which I had heard exactly once before, on the radio that day, in full and audibly in my head. I think that was classified as a kind of seizure in the auditory cortex but not a seizure in the “let’s monitor you going forward” sense.
For each scenario try to form a mental picture of the people, objects, or setting. Rate how vivid the image is using the 5-point scale. If you do not have a visual image, rate vividness as ‘1’. Only use ‘5’ for images that are as lively and vivid as real seeing. The rating scale is as follows:
No image at all, I only “know” I am thinking of the object
Dim and vague image
Moderately realistic and vivid
Realistic and reasonably vivid
Perfectly realistic, as vivid as real seeing
Immediately I knew I was going to be answering 2 to pretty much everything. Sure enough, I ended up with two 1s, fourteen 2s, and one 3. They classified that as:
It makes sense to me that people can be at the other end of that spectrum, though – to my understanding our entire visual experience is a construct of our brains (our own personal Virtual Reality), and so it seems natural that some people’s brains can produce those experiences from only internal stimuli. Mine can too – I’ve certainly had vivid dreams – but not on-demand.
I’m not sure how to interpret the “with sound” internal thoughts. If that means “essentially the same experience as hearing actual noises” then I’ve almost never experienced that, with only extremely rare and fleeting exceptions (maybe a handful of occasions in my life, all of which I found disconcerting, and which I presume were essentially momentary hallucinations). I talk to myself in my head all the time, though – with a normal conversational cadence (including variable speed and ‘pitch’), but no physical experience of hearing myself speak the way I would if I was actually vocalising.
(If no one else is around, I’ll often do some of that talking out loud. I’ve no idea whether that has any relevance. Sometimes that’s me rubber-ducking with myself; sometimes I’m just annoyed with something and it feels better to express it out loud; but sometimes I think I’m just voicing my thoughts, and I’m not sure whether or not there’s a particular reason, but it might be a variant of the first case – if I say things out loud then I’m reinforcing and experiencing those thoughts differently, and that can be beneficial for processing them.)
Further to the variable speed and pitch of words, I can absolutely “sing” a song and melody in my mind, but I’d never suggest that this “sounds” like the real thing. It might be a step up from my ability to produce visual images (but if so, still not a big step – and to be honest I think it’s more that I’m comparing “moving” audio with “still” images. When I consider moving images I don’t expect the same level of visual detail from any given “frame”, and consequently I don’t feel I’m falling quite as far from the mark trying to conjure that up in my mind).
I think in one of Feynman’s books (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! or What Do You Care What Other People Think?) there is a story about how he discovered that he could do visual tasks while accurately and silently counting to sixty, while his friend could do auditory tasks like hold a conversation under the same conditions, but they couldn’t do the other, eventually concluding that it was because Feynman was “speaking” the numbers in his head while his friend was “seeing” numbers counting up in his head.
When I read this as a teenager, it was perhaps the first concrete example I’d come across of how different what goes on in people’s heads can be and I found it fascinating. It sounded useful to be able to do both, so I tried to develop the visual method of counting and found I was abjectly useless at it…
If I remember Nikola Tesla’s autobiography correctly, he describes designing, constructing, and manipulating complex objects in three-dimensional space entirely in his mind – essentially a very-rapid-prototyping phase where he was able to ‘test’ his ideas, see how they’d behave, identify flaws and make adjustments, all before building anything physically.
I used to have two conference calls scheduled for 9 am every day. I did it for six months or so before my manager realized I was responsible for both, by wearing a mono aural headset on each ear. My contribution to both was to say the application I was reporting for, and “nothing to report “. If I had anything to report, we’d be having a different set of calls, because we would have had to explain the outage to the FCC.
After my manager discovered I covered both calls, one of my cow orkers had to do one of them.
Which happened to me last night while slightly bending down to help my kid dress for bed. Though it was probably helped along by lifting the same kid down for the kitchen counters and top shelf of the closet over and over again the past couple of days…
The largest child in question was about 80 lbs, rather less than I regularly clean and press. I confess I don’t usually throw the barbell at the end of the rep, which was the point of picking up the child.