Spatial skills seem to be separate from visualization. Elsewhere in the thread a commenter said they can’t visualize, but do very well with rotating objects in the mind and fitting shapes together.
As to your question, people indeed can imagine smells, tastes, and sounds. Smells are supposedly one of the strongest factors in evoking memories — although my own olfaction was always questionable and got worse with age, but some strong smells still elicit recall from ages ago, e.g. the mechanical smell of subway around here when I haven’t been in it for fifteen years.
Another commenter said they can imagine the taste of a dish from its ingredients, which I can do only approximately.
However, I’m pretty good with imagining sound, particularly music — while knowing jackshit about music theory. This actually brings some annoyance, as I’m trying lately to finally do some music production, and it never sounds quite like I want it to.
shalafi@lemmy.world 1 day ago
When I read “you see a mouse run by” I saw it like a movie. The background was rather generic, a wooden floor, chair leg in the foreground, warm lighting, but that’s it. But I clearly saw the little gray mouse, even pausing for a second, whiskers twitching about before continuing on.
I am utterly broken as to rotating objects in my head. Took me until I was into my 40s to figure out that my brain simply doesn’t work.
Standardized tests in 70s-80s elementary, rocked out on every subject until spatial reasoning. Didn’t give up because I found it hard, really tried my little ass off, couldn’t do it, mostly guessed.
Say I get an antique shotgun and tear it down. I’m mostly mystified as to reassembly, very little online to explain old stuff like that. Have to have my young friend across the street come over and figure it out. He’s a born mechanic, hates the work. 🤷🏻♂️
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Interesting… I can’t do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child’s crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn’t bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now that I think about it, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.
shalafi@lemmy.world 23 hours ago
This whole thread is blowing my mind. Second you said car chase I imagined a red car chasing a yellow car, but that may be because you mentioned color. Woman’s voice? I get a somewhat husky tone, not saying anything in particular, but if she was, I’d hear it. No idea what authors are on about with voices being “contralto” and such. And yes! I can hear the clang!
ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works 19 hours ago
Speaking of mind blowing… I took ketamine for the first time a few months ago (by prescription from a psychiatrist, yada yada yada). I have just come back to normal from a ketamine trip during which I constantly kept thinking about what you’ve said. In fact, I was thinking about it so much that I couldn’t relax enough to get the full effect of the ketamine. For me, the first thing that lets me know that the ketamine is kicking in is that I gain the ability to “see” even though my eyes are closed. I remain aware that I’m sitting in my living room and wearing a blindfold, but in my mind there are patterns that I can look at and think “Ooh that’s pretty.” Not just the abstract sensation of seeing a pretty pattern, but actually an experience like vision, complete with the ability to look at a different part of the pattern and see something new. When I stop being able to do that, I know that the ketamine has worn off.
I thought that that’s what people called hallucinating, which seemed odd to me since I never felt like what I was seeing in my mind was real, whereas people say that hallucinations can seem real. Now I wonder - can some other people, like you, just see things in their mind that way all the time? Amazing!
I don’t mean to imply that I think your experience of the world is the same as mine is on ketamine, since ketamine does a lot more than let me look at pretty patterns. The first time I took it, I was sad since I realized that I was all that existed and the entire world was a figment of my imagination, a dream that I woke from. But being able to look at things in my mind has been beautiful and very dramatically different from the way my brain works without ketamine. So far I’ve only seen patterns like twinkling lights, clouds, or mazes. You’re saying that you can see anything you want… Excuse me because I’m going to say something immature: if I could see things in my mind like that, then it would take me a really long time (if ever) to get tired of just seeing naked ladies.
But if I really have aphantasia, how is it that I’ve always been good at “using my imagination”? I love reading fantasy novels and they’re not just words on a page for me. And how do I solve geometry problems in my mind? Strange.