so the visualization thing is called aphantasia

[mizkit]

I’ve been talking about this topic for years (whether you see pictures in your head when you, say, read), ever since a conversation with a friend and Ted and the friend said something about the radio drama in her head, and Ted said “You only get a radio drama?” and she said “Oh no! I get the whole movie!” and I said “wait what?”

After some

Comments

[dancinghorse]

I can run operas in my head, but the visual thing...yeah. Faces are hard. Colors are feelings and a sense that's almost tactile, and visuals are more like those Chinese paintings with the brushstrokes that hint at a line or a shape.

You mean people really do that 3-D thing? Wow.

I hate comics btw. Used to read them but now I find the pictures crazy-making. I want the words. Then I'll feel the colors and thes shapes and we're good. And hear the voices which is weird in light of my disability, but what can I say?

[haikujaguar]

I can't do that 3D thing either, and I'm an artist! It's actually one of the reasons I'm not a great artist. I was trained to naturalistic/realistic painting, but I don't have the perception of depth and volume to compose effective works. If someone had trained me initially in 2D/abstract principles, I'd have become a far stronger artist than I am, because 2d visuals I can do. It's conceiving those things as real objects that I have trouble with.

I have this trouble with the real world, too, though. I am bad at knowing where things are in space. (But excellent at navigation, because it requires snapshots of intersections/decision points.)

[dancinghorse]

Yes! Yes! I'm an ace navigator. Give me a 2D map, I'll get you there.

I did a school battery of testing once that included spatial relations. 99th percentile for everything else. 67th for that.

With time I did get better. Riding horses made a big difference. They're spatial-relations geniuses, and I can, if I try, and if I shut off all the words, feel the shapes in space that they're transcribing as they move. But it's like an alien brain transplant.

[pameladean]

My brain works a lot more like yours than like the others' described. I do not see a movie in my head, and I really really really do not want to do so. Words make images, but the words are always primary. I don't actually see very many movies and have to be careful in selection, because even a bad one will stay with me viscerally for a long time, and horrible scenes actually do show up behind my eyes, and it's unnatural and I hate it.

P.

[mizkit]

I don't get what could possibly be considered lingering visuals from movies, but seeing part of some (possibly Christopher Lee) Dracula movie when I was about eight (and other horror movies I've accidentally seen, for that matter) left me with a very similar kind of sick visceral reaction in my head (and gut) that trying to visualize did.

Brains are amazing. O.O

[brienze]

Interesting topic, and interesting comments so far! I can hear music fully (am not a musician) and picture well-known faces in 3D (but cannot draw, something about not being able to break down the forms and lighting that make 3D 3D).

I have a hard time with new faces IRL, and never ever picture character faces when I read, even when the author describes what they look like. My experience of books is almost kinesthetic (and so is my rare recall of things I dream) - I can place myself as the viewpoint character in the negative space of their surroundings, whether that's fancy ballrooms or crowded marketplaces or whatever, and place other characters as clothes-with-character-voices-in-them. I can only read comics now that I can use the frame-by-frame viewers to isolate a picture and figure out what it's showing, along with reading the text. A whole page of that is way too much info that I don't process well.

tl;dr my mind-camera is like masking people with a cranked-up depth-of-field, and adding clarity and vibrancy boosts to their/my

[peartreealley]

I saw this article yesterday and thought of the conversation you and I had on LJ about this some years back (i also don't see images in my head). I'm amused to see it hit your blog, too, but not terribly surprised ^_^

[kesmun]

I wonder if visualization is linked at all to lucid dreaming. I have vivid visualizations, though they may not be completely realized all the time, but there's usually a lot more going on in my head than there is out in front of me.

I also have vivid lucid dreams, usually as a character in a book I'm reading or one of my WoW characters. I also frequently have dreams where I'm in a school of some sort and living in a dorm, though those are becoming less frequent. To me, life without the rich pictures in my head would be dull and flat.