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When you look at a photograph and then look away but try to recall details, how is your memory of it encoded? Do you immediately have a verbal description of it

When you look at a photograph and then look away but try to recall details, how is your memory of it encoded? Do you immediately have a verbal description of it in your head?

spacedcowboy 5y ago
I can’t see the light in your example either. If I shut my eyes, and try to see it, I just see blackness though I have no problems with the concept of a blue light (or even the entire scene) - I just don’t see it. To answer the photo question, I don’t have a verbal definition of a photo, I have a relational one. I can still describe the photo reasonably well, but I don’t “see” anything. I’ve thought quite a bit on how my mind works once I discovered that “the mind’s eye” wasn’t just a euphemism for other people. I think my mind works with rules rather than visuals, and it constructs/deconstructs a lot of them as needed to describe something it can work with. I’m a software engineer, an ICT5, working at Apple. I tell people my primary skill is “solving problems”, and that’s accurate as a 10k-foot view. I’m good at mentally modeling the intricacies of how a system works, what the dependencies are, what the interactions are between sub-parts, how that effects corner-cases. I can “run” this mental simulation in my head forwards and backwards a bit (not too far) and get a grasp of how it fits together. But there’s no visual to any of this, whether I’m thinking about a bicycle or server-side cryptographic mail storage and transport. It’s all just interacting rules. I’m often the one to point out a flaw in a systems model well before we get to implementation, and I’m good at “breaking new ground” when it comes to implementing something, even for a different group - I get “loaned out” a fair bit. So I think there are upsides to not having a mind’s eye - I chose physics at college, and found it easier than most I think; equally there are upsides to having the ability to visualise things, I expect. It’s probably a species-optimization to have the capacity for both…
- vidarh 5y ago
  This fits me very well as well. It did not connect with me that people weren't talking figuratively when talking about seeing stuff until I read an article saying some people didn't, and I realised I was the outlier.
vidarh 5y ago
I don't know how it is encoded, but I certainly can verbally describe things relatively easily, but I also tends to have a mental spatial understanding of what I see, so I can move through a model of what I've seen and describe element by element on the basis of e.g. that I know how elements of what I've seen is connected.
ItsMonkk 5y ago
If I were to try to remember code, or try to remember a photograph, or try to remember how to get to the closest Super-Market, it's all structured in my mind in the same way. I might remember details, but only if I have paid attention to those details and understand why those things are important to remember. If those details happened to be based on visual details, I would use that, but it is no way close to the same amount of details of a photograph. I think the best way to answer this might be for you to imagine what a blind person imagines when they take a trip.

When you look at a photograph and then look away but try to recall details, how is your memory of it encoded? Do you immediately have a verbal description of it in your head?

spacedcowboy 5y ago

I can’t see the light in your example either. If I shut my eyes, and try to see it, I just see blackness though I have no problems with the concept of a blue light (or even the entire scene) - I just don’t see it. To answer the photo question, I don’t have a verbal definition of a photo, I have a relational one. I can still describe the photo reasonably well, but I don’t “see” anything. I’ve thought quite a bit on how my mind works once I discovered that “the mind’s eye” wasn’t just a euphemism for other people. I think my mind works with rules rather than visuals, and it constructs/deconstructs a lot of them as needed to describe something it can work with. I’m a software engineer, an ICT5, working at Apple. I tell people my primary skill is “solving problems”, and that’s accurate as a 10k-foot view. I’m good at mentally modeling the intricacies of how a system works, what the dependencies are, what the interactions are between sub-parts, how that effects corner-cases. I can “run” this mental simulation in my head forwards and backwards a bit (not too far) and get a grasp of how it fits together. But there’s no visual to any of this, whether I’m thinking about a bicycle or server-side cryptographic mail storage and transport. It’s all just interacting rules. I’m often the one to point out a flaw in a systems model well before we get to implementation, and I’m good at “breaking new ground” when it comes to implementing something, even for a different group - I get “loaned out” a fair bit. So I think there are upsides to not having a mind’s eye - I chose physics at college, and found it easier than most I think; equally there are upsides to having the ability to visualise things, I expect. It’s probably a species-optimization to have the capacity for both…

vidarh 5y ago
This fits me very well as well. It did not connect with me that people weren't talking figuratively when talking about seeing stuff until I read an article saying some people didn't, and I realised I was the outlier.

vidarh 5y ago

I don't know how it is encoded, but I certainly can verbally describe things relatively easily, but I also tends to have a mental spatial understanding of what I see, so I can move through a model of what I've seen and describe element by element on the basis of e.g. that I know how elements of what I've seen is connected.

ItsMonkk 5y ago

If I were to try to remember code, or try to remember a photograph, or try to remember how to get to the closest Super-Market, it's all structured in my mind in the same way. I might remember details, but only if I have paid attention to those details and understand why those things are important to remember. If those details happened to be based on visual details, I would use that, but it is no way close to the same amount of details of a photograph. I think the best way to answer this might be for you to imagine what a blind person imagines when they take a trip.