I call this the curtain; when I imagine something, like a tree, I can’t see the tree. But it is still there; just like it is behind a black curtain, no images from the tree can be seen.
Comment on The ancient Greeks or Chinese should have already had words for this.
MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip 1 day agoI have some level of auditory imagination; I can play back something I’ve heard a few times, but it’s more like a ghost of the thing than feeling like it’s hitting my ears somehow.
The main non-verbal sense I use in my head is spatial. There is a 3d space that I can imagine objects within, rotate around, kind of analyze things about it. There is no visual component to this, yet it feels like it shares the space that the mind’s eye could see into.
I’ve described the closest thing I have to visual imagination as like many of the things that happen in the brain’s processing of images after the eyes: resolving patterns of light into shapes and lines, processing shapes into the sense of a particular recognized object. If I think about a tree, I definitely don’t see a tree in any sense. But I do sort of feel like I did just see a tree, just… without any sense of light or feeling like I actually did any seeing, metaphorical or otherwise. All the analysis, none of the pixels.
absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 1 day ago
planish@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I have a little more of the seeing, but I also want to reach for your ghost metaphor. Imagining a tree for me is a little like seeing a tree, but quite a bit more like having just seen a tree.