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It's interesting to hear from someone else who also doesn't form mental pictures. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand what other people mean when

It's interesting to hear from someone else who also doesn't form mental pictures. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure I understand what other people mean when they say mental pictures. If I close my eyes and try to imagine an elephant, I find myself describing the elephant essentially with words. There's nothing like an "image" in my mind, though I do sometimes have mental ideas without sentences (for example, I could easily imagine a flow chart right now). Do other people see actual images when they imagine something?

rayalez 12y ago
Yes. I used to be very bad at imagination, but then needed to learn it when I was learning how to paint. I've started with drawing a dot on the piece of white paper, and was closing my eyes for a few seconds, trying to imagine it. After that - moved onto simple shapes and colors. Then practiced imagining cars or people's faces. Sometimes you can take a car and "rotate" it in your imagination, or change colors and details. Or walk down the street and mentally replace buildings with a nuclear wasteland or a jungle with dinosaurs =) Now I can close my eyes and imagine flying around a city, or enact some cool action scenes, car chases, anything. I strongly suspect that it's not a limit, Tesla wrote in his autobiography that he could imagine things so vividly that they were like hallucinations, and invented/simulated whole mechanisms in his mind.
- morgante 12y ago
  I don't think it's fair to call this "imagination." I have a very active imagination and can easily come up with entire stories, cities, and ideas in my mind. They're just encoded textually.
kaoD 12y ago
> Do other people see actual images when they imagine something? Pretty much. In my case the image is not very clear around the edges, but it's very sharp where my mind eye is directly looking at. The rest is a bit blurry and fluid, but the general spatial structure is still clear. I do see color too. It doesn't actually feel like literally seeing. It feels more like the post-processing your brain does after the real sight is processed. I can even mind-see with my eyes open and it feels different, which suggests they're separate mechanisms. It feels kind of like a projection in the back of my mind. I'd compare it more to remembering sight, with the ability to mix those memories and imagining them (e.g. I've never seen a pink elephant but I can mix elephant and pink color). For more intricate shapes like people's faces everything is fluid and not very sharp though. I get the rough shape of their heads and obvious details like the hair and then I can focus on specific parts of their face but not the whole picture. I've never been very good at remembering faces, but I'm very good at recognizing faces (even strangers which I just happen to cross on the street), which also suggests those are different brain mechanisms too. Memorable faces like Angelina Jolie's are easier to picture as a whole, but common faces are harder to picture, no matter how much I've seen them (it's easier to picture Jolie than my own mother).

rayalez 12y ago

Yes. I used to be very bad at imagination, but then needed to learn it when I was learning how to paint. I've started with drawing a dot on the piece of white paper, and was closing my eyes for a few seconds, trying to imagine it. After that - moved onto simple shapes and colors. Then practiced imagining cars or people's faces. Sometimes you can take a car and "rotate" it in your imagination, or change colors and details. Or walk down the street and mentally replace buildings with a nuclear wasteland or a jungle with dinosaurs =) Now I can close my eyes and imagine flying around a city, or enact some cool action scenes, car chases, anything. I strongly suspect that it's not a limit, Tesla wrote in his autobiography that he could imagine things so vividly that they were like hallucinations, and invented/simulated whole mechanisms in his mind.

morgante 12y ago
I don't think it's fair to call this "imagination." I have a very active imagination and can easily come up with entire stories, cities, and ideas in my mind. They're just encoded textually.

kaoD 12y ago

> Do other people see actual images when they imagine something? Pretty much. In my case the image is not very clear around the edges, but it's very sharp where my mind eye is directly looking at. The rest is a bit blurry and fluid, but the general spatial structure is still clear. I do see color too. It doesn't actually feel like literally seeing. It feels more like the post-processing your brain does after the real sight is processed. I can even mind-see with my eyes open and it feels different, which suggests they're separate mechanisms. It feels kind of like a projection in the back of my mind. I'd compare it more to remembering sight, with the ability to mix those memories and imagining them (e.g. I've never seen a pink elephant but I can mix elephant and pink color). For more intricate shapes like people's faces everything is fluid and not very sharp though. I get the rough shape of their heads and obvious details like the hair and then I can focus on specific parts of their face but not the whole picture. I've never been very good at remembering faces, but I'm very good at recognizing faces (even strangers which I just happen to cross on the street), which also suggests those are different brain mechanisms too. Memorable faces like Angelina Jolie's are easier to picture as a whole, but common faces are harder to picture, no matter how much I've seen them (it's easier to picture Jolie than my own mother).