What We See When We Read

Am I the only one that doesn't even attempt to to put a face to characters? When I read a book, it is a visually stimulating experience but it's all very ethereal - I conjure up vague landscapes, actions, objects, poses, expressions etc, but never an entire portrait of a character.

To be honest I think I read entire books without even considering what colour a person's hair is, how tall they are, what shape their nose is.

It is difficult to describe faces because we don't have a familiar vocabulary for them. It's not necessary for us day to day to describe exactly what faces look like. Sure, we have chiseled jaws and high cheekbones, but there isn't a word for the many different styles of noses and shapes of lips. And we don't have a point of reference for the words that would be associated with the faces of our friends.

I suspect that if verbal descriptions of faces were a constant part of society, that our ability to imagine faces based on authors' descriptions (using that shared vocabulary) would be much better. I also wonder what experience police sketch artists, like the one who drew Anna Karenina, have when reading books, as they probably think about this sort of thing much more frequently.

As a sidenote, it may seem like I'm appealing to the now somewhat discredited Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but I'm only saying that our lack of vocabulary constrains what we express, not that it constrains our cognition.

Personally, when I read I do visualize things, but I don't have strong visualizations for people's faces, much like mcjiggerlog elsewhere commented.

I never focus on a detailed physical description of book characters unless a body part is brought to my attention by the author. In fact, it annoys me when some authors insist on irrelevant details such as clothing (I used to joke with friends about some American writers, especially for courtroom dramas, making extremely detailed inventories of the main character's suits. We called it the "navy blue syndrome"; for some reason, the suit was always navy blue, and it was important for the author to call our attention to this).

I do have a very general idea of what main characters looks like, in particular about whether they are young, middle-aged or old, and about their hair color. When I see a movie adaptation, this always clashes with my preconceived idea. "No, no, the character was older and had black hair!"

maybe what we are thinking of when we "picture" a character is the resulting feeling. so we know when someone looks like anna because when we look at that person, it feels the same- but its much harder to go the other way, like a hashing function. we know when the things match, but its hard to know how to make things that match.

There's a curse that comes with watching a movie adaptation of a book before reading it, in that you can't not picture the faces of the actors that portray the characters.

I'd attempted to read The Fellowship of the Ring a few times as a kid, but never got into it. I watched the movie before I started it in earnest, and I feel I was kind of cheated by all of the visuals I wasn't able to conjure up myself. For that reason, some of my favourite parts of the book were those that were cut from the movie, such as Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-downs.

Thankfully, I went on to read The Two Towers and The Return of the King well before the movies were released, and enjoyed them much more because I got to inject a lot more of my imagination into them.

There are probably neuroscientists researching the links between human visual perception and memory. I would like to know whether someone has done a comparative study of literary perception and visual perception with regards to memory. I recall reading that because vision takes more sensory input and our spatial reasoning is so well developed, our brains are able to reason and recall more effectively in this realm... but I assume blind people and others may have alternate configurations. Would the 'photographic memory' applied to literature result in words? Or visual recollections? Feelings?

Whenever I try to imagine how a character looks like, I will eventually forget about it and make a new one at the next reading. So, I try to map the character to the person I know, which become a problem when the character grows older.

From a writer's point of view, maybe it is fun to put a lot of details about the world they are trying to describe in a very detailed way.