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Your visualization experience sounds very interesting! I actually believe it is possible to consciously 'do' what you describe to at least some degree. It woul

by xaedes 8y ago

Your visualization experience sounds very interesting! I actually believe it is possible to consciously 'do' what you describe to at least some degree. It would be nice to hear more about your experience in detail, may I ask you some questions? Was it as vivid and sharp as daylight open eye view or was it rather blurry / fuzzy? Where the colors saturated or rather gray? Was every action instant or was there a time lag? Did the shapes stay stable or did they deform or fade after a time [of no new inputs (from touch I guess)]? What did it look like to touch a wall? How would you describe the field of view you had in your visualization? Normal? All-Round-View onto the 3D map? Did you have a feeling for the volume where the field of view of your body would be? How did you visualize your body? Abstractly or more like you might look in daylight? Could you move as observer in your visualization or was that out of your control?

bitL 8y ago
Well, it's not like I didn't perceive stuff with my eyes, it's just that I also internally had another view (I still have some fragments fairly vivid in memory), where I could kinda rotate my view, e.g. being inside a tunnel with irregular slopes hinting at some abyss through cracks at the bottom and I viewed it inside as a certain irregular shape I could rotate, localize me (where "me" was some uncertain blob and my pose was how my body was reporting to me, but my overall shape was just fuzzy/unimportant) and do some planing. As for colors, again unimportant, not sure if there was even a concept of color in my internal representation. Actions as such were instant, but the feedback was basically tactile/otolithic, updating my location/pose estimate. FOV was variable, changing as I needed and as I moved inside visualization. It might have been inspired by some speleology mapping tools that at the time started to become 3D, so my brain might have used a similar representation. I guess it was really dampened sensory inputs, not dominating perception as usually, that allowed this kind of planing/internal model to come out. Without spelunking I'd probably use it only subconsciously in sports like when hitting a tennis ball at 120mph and planning all moves in advance, serving a sneaky ball in volleyball etc. I had a similar feeling once when a car that was joining my road almost rammed into me and I just remember that my brain switched to 100% focus and almost automatically did all the crash avoidant tasks where I felt more like an observer, and the calculation was perfect (i.e. no crash).
- xaedes 8y ago
  Thank you that was a very interesting read. It sounds similar to how I imagined it. Sometimes I ask myself if this is similar to how blind people visualize their world. I remember reading from Hellen Keller (deaf-blind from birth) that she also had a visual representation of the world around here. Something along the lines of the human brain is just build for this kind of representation. I think that there is some common underlying representation that everyone uses. When seeing something through the eyes this representation is overlayed with salient visual sensor input in eye fov and our internal fov just focuses on this for convience and because it is so damn salient. I think it is possible to detach the internal fov from the eye fov and see how the brain models the other regions. Your suggestions that sensory deprivation brings out the underlying internal representation is very intersting. It makes a lot sense! Really gotta try that sensory deprivation chambers some time =)

by xaedes 8y ago

bitL 8y ago

Well, it's not like I didn't perceive stuff with my eyes, it's just that I also internally had another view (I still have some fragments fairly vivid in memory), where I could kinda rotate my view, e.g. being inside a tunnel with irregular slopes hinting at some abyss through cracks at the bottom and I viewed it inside as a certain irregular shape I could rotate, localize me (where "me" was some uncertain blob and my pose was how my body was reporting to me, but my overall shape was just fuzzy/unimportant) and do some planing. As for colors, again unimportant, not sure if there was even a concept of color in my internal representation. Actions as such were instant, but the feedback was basically tactile/otolithic, updating my location/pose estimate. FOV was variable, changing as I needed and as I moved inside visualization. It might have been inspired by some speleology mapping tools that at the time started to become 3D, so my brain might have used a similar representation. I guess it was really dampened sensory inputs, not dominating perception as usually, that allowed this kind of planing/internal model to come out. Without spelunking I'd probably use it only subconsciously in sports like when hitting a tennis ball at 120mph and planning all moves in advance, serving a sneaky ball in volleyball etc. I had a similar feeling once when a car that was joining my road almost rammed into me and I just remember that my brain switched to 100% focus and almost automatically did all the crash avoidant tasks where I felt more like an observer, and the calculation was perfect (i.e. no crash).

xaedes 8y ago
Thank you that was a very interesting read. It sounds similar to how I imagined it. Sometimes I ask myself if this is similar to how blind people visualize their world. I remember reading from Hellen Keller (deaf-blind from birth) that she also had a visual representation of the world around here. Something along the lines of the human brain is just build for this kind of representation. I think that there is some common underlying representation that everyone uses. When seeing something through the eyes this representation is overlayed with salient visual sensor input in eye fov and our internal fov just focuses on this for convience and because it is so damn salient. I think it is possible to detach the internal fov from the eye fov and see how the brain models the other regions. Your suggestions that sensory deprivation brings out the underlying internal representation is very intersting. It makes a lot sense! Really gotta try that sensory deprivation chambers some time =)