Hacker News Reader

Comment by x3n0ph3n3 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, I finally have a word to describe my mental experience. To others, I've described the vividness of my memory as like a wireframe. I can feel spatial relationships but I don't see them like a picture in my head. There are occasions that I can see color in my minds eye, but it's mostly greyscale.

View on HN

Woah, I always thought that what you've described was the universal experience of mental visualization. A combination of wireframes / blueprints / spatial relationships.

When I think of my living room I can very clearly place where the couch is, its three dimensional form, what's next to it, the colour of the couch. However, when I recall these things in my head it's almost like I recall a "couch" object with a certain "couch" shape and a "blue" colour, as if they are semantic tags attached to my memory of the couch. For the life of me, I can't "see" the couch in the minds-eye. However, I could probably draw it by iterating over my memory of its properties.

Crazy.

I'm wondering whether work with 3D modeling software can improve that. I used to play a lot with Blender when I was young and my brain has clearly installed some sort of graphics engine as a result. I can easily imagine specific perspectives in my room, rotate objects in ~10 degree steps and tweak the point of view. It's surprisingly difficult to translate objects by a small amount though. It also takes a while until I get the colors right, and they are just superimposed on the eigengrau and fade quickly. Colors work very well with specific objects, for example a Red Bull can or an apple.

Interestingly, I'm pretty good at mental rotations, thinking of complex shapes, etc though I don't actually "see" the objects in my "minds-eye". They still remain abstract concepts.

The only analogy I can draw is this:

Imagine these "concepts" in your head:

    Recursion
    Monad
    Quantitative Easing

They don't particularly have an "image" associated with them. I can think of "recursion" as an idea and have a mental understanding of the concept, yet I don't see it as a picture (I assume that most people don't actually see it as a picture, but perhaps they do).

Now, when I think of things like:

    A Dog
    Flower
    Sunset

I still think of them as abstract concepts. Like the activations in my mind when thinking of "recursion" are of the same kind as when I think of "flower". If I really focus strongly on thinking of a dog, I get a really fuzzy "flash" of a visualization of a dog, but it's in no way "image-like". When I do this I can feel my brain really really working hard and it's mentally tiring.

Understandably, it's hard to express the internal mental life in words :)

Interesting. I think about recursion both in terms of linguistic/symbolic rules that are associated with it, but I also associate it visually with call tree diagrams, nested structures and loops. I can't think about dogs, flowers and sunsets just in terms of language though, there are always images, smells, sounds, movements etc. associated with it.

Perhaps take an empty piece of paper and imagine drawing a big letter on it. I've read before that non-visual thinkers can experience visual thinking that way.

Yeah, that's a good way to put it. I can "feel" myself navigating my house in my mind, can draw a floor plan, etc., but I can't picture it. More like knowing "I can expect a chair there, or a wall there" or whatever.

I kind of suspect it might be similar to how blind people experience "visualizing" something where they've got the contours well-mapped in their head, but of course I have no way to know that for sure.

I'm probably similar. I can easily picture objects' outlines, wireframe style, even when they quickly rotate.

But colors are almost impossible. Also I don't “see” light.

Wow, it's crazy how different our minds can be. And I thought it 'strange' to see colours differently - I always double-check with my wife if I can wear this shirt with these pants. Now, this is amazing, I can't even picture what you are describing, but wish I could!

How do you dream?

Rarely, if ever, and never as images. If your dreams are like movies, mine are like stumbling through a dark house.

A lot of my dreams I recall mostly as sensations, eg, I'll recall the sensation of being scared, but not any particular stimuli causing me to be scared.

@cottonseed, @sall, @x3n

How do you remember faces or your house, or your car?

This is not about memory, it is about what you can access consciously. Those of us who have no image in our minds have memories of our houses, cars, friends, etc. just like you do (as far as I know!), they are just not part of our conscious experience. If you want to relate to this, think of language processing: you are not aware of how your brain parses the sentences you hear, though you still have access to the meaning that is produced by that parsing. We don't have access to the visual images, but they are there somewhere and can be used by our memory system. (ps. I suspect that getting images to reach consciousness or not is not just a random 'accident', but rather reflects a more generally different brain organisation -- just not wrt memory having access to visual representations or not)

Rarely with any color. Mostly about moving through terrain and spaces, but the sensation is only partially visible.

OP's description of waking imagination matches mine and I dream vividly. In fact, for a while I tried to lucid dream and as I watched myself call asleep there would be an instant of sudden clarity. Like a light switch had turned on and whatever I was thinking of would jump into view, fully colored and textured. The difference to the vagueness of my normal imagination was so striking I would jolt awake. Same with sounds; I will get beautiful, complex music pouring into my head as I drift off. While awake, I hear noises I imagine but instead as if I were making sounds with my throat. I can't hear Beethoven but I can hear myself hum the notes even without doing so.

So I can say with some confidence that both extremes exist in the literal sense and this is not at all just a matter of describing the same qualia differently.

Honestly the questions given in the test don't seem to well capture my abilities. I have no ability to recall my own mother's face, but I can is of reconstruct it from facts I know (length of her hair, shape of her jaw, anything I've noticed explicitly). I get sensations of colors in short bursts if at all, it is not a dimness. And motion, rotations, and spatial relations feel real to me even if I can't see them. When it tells me to imagine a rainbow I don't see color, but I feel it's arc in the sky, even trace it mentally with imaginary hands. That aspect is not dim and vague. Makes me wonder if the author of this test either did not have this condition or had it in a different way than I.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com