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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

Also known as having an imagination. I remember doing this on bus rides to better understand quake levels.

I’m thinking being able to replay worlds or map geometry like your brain is rendering it live is more rare and maybe this is teaching it a bit. No one’s ever quizzed me on how many details (big and small) I could get right though.

Reminds of Maths class in school when our teacher got us to try visualising and manipulating a 3D object in our mind. Very few were able to do it, which surprised me a lot.

What kind of object? Visualize and manipulate how?

I tried imagining a cube, rotated it and then morphed it into a tetrahedron, which wasn't too difficult, but perhaps it was more complicated than that?

I imagine this is the kind of thing people refer to by spatial intelligence. But also I can imagine it's easier to do if you've actually done the thing in real life and paid some attention to perspective, shape, shadow and so on. Or if you've tried drawing cubes, etc.

https://aphantasia.com/vviq/

I used to play so much Tetris that after a while I could just close my eyes and play without a computer. From talking to other frequent players this was not uncommon.

And good chess players don't need a board either.

Right, lots of people have ongoing fantasies, which is basically the same thing, imagination. The only difference here is people are talking in public about their fantasies and enlisting others to help create and maintain them. And even that is not uncommon, people have used prostitutes this way forever. Perhaps video games have made sharing alternate imaginary realities more socially acceptable. These days you can imagine a fantasy world and actually create it in software and make it an actual reality.

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