Comment by yurishimo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yurishimo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

And some people can’t see any pictures in their minds! My partner is one of these people. We both really enjoy reading fiction books, often with a fantasy or sci-fi bent and it genuinely amazes me that they can experience these books in a way that feels wholly alien to me.

The fun of reading to me is constructing the world in my minds eye and turning the words on the page into a visual experience only found in my mind using imagination. This is a reason why many people get upset when a movie adaptation is made and the actor chosen for their favorite character feels very off or wrong; their mental picture of that character is totally different and it causes dissonance that our brains don’t like. For my partner this is a non issue because they never make a mental image of the person, so the movie is genuinely the first time they are “seeing” a physical representation of the character.

The human mind is genuinely amazing and fascinating and I believe that this range of human experience will be the final 20% for “AI” that might never be reproducible.

Does anyone else just end up with a random celebrity 'playing' characters in your brain image of scenes? I find that I generally picture a person that I have seen on TV, with details that don't nessesarily match book character details.

For example, I recently read a novel where there is 'tough lady cop' character and in my brain, entirely involuntarily, the role has been assigned to Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Rosa Diaz in exactly the clothing and context she exists in that TV show.

When the character in the book has a certain clothing or whatever it all kinda glosses over until it's back to the character I have seen before.

I don't know if this is more a male thing or am ADHD thing or what but details of characters dress and looks are pretty much lost on me once there are assigned a character from 'central casting'

> This is a reason why many people get upset when a movie adaptation is made

I still haven't watched the Dune movies because of this reason. I liked the book a lot, and had a very personal image of what the world looked like, and was afraid to lose it. Unfortunately, by now, I've seen many video clips on social media, and my internal imagery has already been poisoned. Might as well watch the movies at this point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com