I guess I’m like a 3 or 4? When asked to visualize an apple or a cow or a campfire or something, I can kinda manage it but only for a split second. I can’t just hold an image there.
Nope. I can see an apple in my mind’s eye for like a half second and then it instantaneously vanishes. It’s like grasping smoke. A second after that I can then visualize it again, so I suppose in a sense I can imagine something for a while, but it’s built from discontinuous frames where I gain and lose focus. I can imagine, like, a person walking, but only the first couple steps before it vanishes. Been like that all my life, though unlike John Green I’ve been aware that some people can visualize and others just can’t.
I don’t even feel where I could hypothetically put the “effort” to “try”. It’s like if I asked somebody to move an object across the room via telekenesis, or to swish a nonexistent tail, or imagine trying to move a third arm. It’s not that I can’t do it because it’s too weak, it’s that I don’t even have the “muscle” there.
I do have a pretty distinct inner monologue in my head though. Not active all or even most of the time because I don’t need it (and I tend to talk to myself when alone anyway), but when I need to “summon” it I can “say” sentences or paragraphs with it. So I guess it’s just two different mental skills or something.
Wait. I’m a 1. I didn’t know there were people that can’t visualize.
I mean, it makes sense I guess. Vision isn’t the only way to perceive something. Feelings, sounds, smells etc are just as valid.
I would love to know if you’re good at drawing and the like? I am a 5 on the scale and I have always excelled in school and university, but I can’t draw worth a damn. Hell my handwriting is pretty bad too.
I would also call myself a 1, but I am not even remotely good at drawing. I also wouldn’t say I can “see” things in my mind like I can with my eyes, it’s more like I can imagine the way something looks in the same manner as remembering a vivid memory.
My internal monologue is constant though. Every time I read something or think of something is like that cartoon inside out. I have a mini me that lives in my head.
I am a very visual person and I can picture stuff very clearly in my mind. I can’t draw for shit, to the point that it makes me mad sometimes because i can imagine something visual but i can’t put it on paper, or it looks nothing like what I imagined.
Me too. Part of the issue is that deconstructing a perspective does not come naturally to many people, they [I] instead imagine the object in a more 3D sense instead of the sight of the object itself.
I’m partially in this camp too, it used to be very irritating, but I have learnt to take it much more slowly, and try to picture object from a fixed angle. From there you can zoom in to specific areas and think about lighting, shadows, etc as needed. I initially was never patient with myself enough to actually use my imagination for drawing, but after I took more time I found it is a really powerful tool. As the other commentor said, you have to be more strict with yourself. Normally I could have a mental image and fly all around it and view it from many different angles. Putting it down on paper requires concentration to fix it in a certain configuration and keep it constant, so you can record it. I really recommend giving it a go. Imagine some simple objects and see if you can render the shadows in your head. Then see if you can draw them. Be strict with your imagination, don’t let it run away.
Some incredible artists have aphantasia!
By 1, do you mean you can picture all the details of an image in your mind, or do you mean you can turn visual hallucinations on and off at will? Many people who say they can’t visualize anything are unwittingly just saying they can’t hallucinate, because they think you can.
Maybe people aren’t saying “I can personally hallucinate at will”, but many people saying “I can’t visualize images” think that other people can hallucinate at will. The twitter poster even says “the way your eyes see?” which is pretty clearly asking if people can hallucinate.
Depending on how someone comes into this discussion, their prior experience, and the particular language they come across, it’s easy to interpret these images as representing… well… images. People who say “I’m a 1, I’m a 2, 3, 4” are probably just saying they can think about and recall the shape, texture, color, etc of things, and can’t actually see shit. Having a scale of “good image, bad image, outline” was probably meant to be very abstractly tied to this ability to think about those details.
I think if you took a group of completely neurotypical people, whatever that means, who all have EXACTLY the same sensory experience, they would start labeling themselves on every part of this chart and completely misunderstand what everyone else is saying about their perception. You’d have 1’s and 5’s despite no actual difference.
By 1, do you mean you can picture all the details of an image in your mind, or do you mean you can turn visual hallucinations on and off at will?
I suppose that’s strictly true for me even though real visual input completely overrides the hallucination. It’s like comparing the Sun with some random star. However, there was that one time I smoked way too much weed, which had an effect of greatly augmenting my mind’s eye so it became comparing the Sun with Venus. Visual input was still at the forefront, but you now had the mind’s eye image of the object being superimposed on the actual object.
If you’re talking about just being amused by the floating images when the eyes are closed, yes I’ve done this countless times. I don’t see this as any different from replaying movie dialogue or imagining eating something delicious.
Some people don’t have a voice in their head either. Like that inner-monologue that is explaining your thoughts
Sorta, it’s not disembodied in the way you may be thinking. But like someone else observing and commenting on my actions or environment. When I wrote this all the words were strung together in my head and I would say and resay (which is a dumb but more apt way of say think and rethink in this context) the sentences I was writing before I wrote them in order to determine that what I’m writing makes sense. I’m assuming everyone does this even those without inner monologue but I might be wrong. Inner monologue for me is like that except for all my voluntary actions, not just speaking or writing. It’s questions like, “should I do [blank]” and statements like “maybe [blank] wasn’t the best idea”
However considering this is entirely internal and I never really speak to anyone about I may be misinterpreting what everyone else is referring to as an inner monologue and attributing something completely normal to that concept without fully understanding it but if you do not experience or understand what I said previously then I’m probably right.
It’s wild that some people don’t have a little David Attenborough in their head that narrates what they do like an anthropologist angel on their shoulder. Like their lives aren’t an extended nature documentary where they live at the mercy of the narrative’s critique and plotline. They don’t even mentally see things from interesting camera angles that advance mental cinematography, it’s just flat and their own thoughts.
One of my favorite weird scientific theories says that prior to a few thousand years ago, this internal narrative voice was mistaken for the voice of the gods, and explains why so many old texts are full of gods saying and doing things with people. The theory says that as we became fully conscious in the way that modern humans are, this narrator–which is actually the linguistic centers in the left hemisphere–finished integrating into the rest of the brain, and we started recognizing that it was actually just our internal monologue, not the gods; this was supposed to be the catalyst for modern human mentality.
It’s almost certainly false and pretty fringe, but I’ve always really loved it as a theory. It’s called “the bicameral mind.”
This is somewhat the premise of an old nutty book book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. The book has a section towards the end called The Auguries of Science that is very dear to me.
It’s almost certainly false and pretty fringe, but I’ve always really loved it as a theory. It’s called “the bicameral mind.”
Doesn’t look like anything to me.
Ok so I can produce a voice in my head, on purpose. But it’s not prattling on endlessly. Does it do that for some people?
Same issue with figuring out who’s who. Some people really can’t imagine words being spoken. Most can imagine words being spoken. Some can trigger auditory hallucinations. Many of the people in the middle will label themselves as being on one extreme because they think other middle-people are describing the opposite extreme. Like wow you guys can make yourselves just HEAR things that aren’t there? And they’re like yeah, I can “hear” it in my mind (they don’t actually have the sensation of hearing anything at all).
I think I started around a 3 and made my way to 1 by using it all the time for depressive escapism. 3/10 experience, better than nothing - still not very effective
Fun to have, though.
