Submitted 2 weeks ago by shalafi@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://i.imgur.com/OlhiGci.jpg
And how in the hell does one navigate life, or enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?! Reading a book is like watching a movie. I subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.
Yet #5’s are not handicapped in the slightest. They’re so “normal” that mankind is just now figuring out we’re far apart on this thing. Fucking weird.
Isn’t 5 is called Aphantasia ? To be unable to visualize something in the mind?
Yep! Craziest thing is that we just started looking into this thing in the past 10-20 years. Proof to me that it’s no handicap, but if you took my mind’s eye away I’d feel crippled.
It has its benefits. You can talk absolute depravity, like Trump farting so much shit into Ivankas mouth that liquid diarrhea is overflowing from the side of her mouth with chunks of yesterday’s pasta bolognese dangling off her chin, and get no mental image of that filth. But you can enjoy that imagery.
Wow. I didn’t know about the term “prophantasia” until now. Probably because I think that imagining things in our 3d world is a normally developed imagination power of the people who don’t have Aphantasia.
Prophantasia seems like biologically evolved Augmented Reality. Where instead of wearing a piece of AR glass, We’re naturally born with this trait.
I can pull out my palm in front of me and imagine a small cat jumping around. Not for too long because I cannot imagine the random movement a cat does. But, as a still object, imagining an apple is easy.
I am more curious to wonder if someone can manually develop Spatial Intelligence without being born with it priorly.
I’m a #5 on that scale.
And how in the hell does one navigate life, or enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?! Reading a book is like watching a movie. I subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.
I won’t say I’m not jealous of people who’re #1s. However, to directly answer your question, it’s not like our heads are empty. You think apple and (apparently) ‘see’ an apple. I think apple and it’s like thinking of how you’d describe an apple. It’s red, it’s round. It has a stem. It’s juicy. It tastes good… but I can’t see it. Or anything else. They’re just thoughts.
I have a very difficult time with facial recognition, presumably as a result of this. If I’m watching a movie where there’s a lot of characters that are shown but not named, I have a difficult time following that. I need to be able to assign names to them to keep them straight in my head, and often-times if a character isn’t named but they’re important, I’ll assign them a name myself just to have something to track them with. I can recognize people I interact with a lot obviously but if you asked me to describe what someone looks like who I’m not currently interacting with, that’s very difficult for me to do, beyond very surface-level stuff, like their gender or their build. If I had to describe someone for a police sketch, I’d be useless at that. Remembering facial features is like remembering a list of words; I can’t just call up an image of them to describe… if I haven’t already committed that description to memory, I can’t describe the person.
It’s funny, honestly, because I never realized this wasn’t how everyone is until I saw the image you linked some years back. I actually called up my mother immediately after and asked her what she could see. The conversation went something like:
“When you think of an apple, can you see the apple?”
“Yes…”
“Yeah, but like… you can actually see it, though?”
“…yes…?”
“Yeah but I mean like… you can see it, as if you’re looking at it?”
“…yes, what is this about?”
I had that exact same conversation with my mom but it went like this:
“Ok mom, picture a cow in your head”
“Oookayyy”
“Now you can see a cow right?”
“What do you mean”
“Like… You can see a picture of the cow, right?”
“Nooo”
My dad chimes in “yes, obviously”
“…crap. Mom, I have some news for you”
Both of us grew up thinking we had no imagination or were dumb. I remember being incredibly frustrated when a teacher taught us the concept of the Memory Palace where you picture things in rooms of a house. Like if you had to remember five playing cards you’d picture a room with 7 red clowns, with hearts on their cheeks. Then in the next room you’d picture a king, holding up a spade, etc. That just made it harder for me to remember and the teacher kept telling me I wasn’t listening or trying
I used to want very much to be an artist, or at least, be able to draw capably, but it’s always seemed impossible. I can think of what I want to draw in a macro sense - like, if I was thinking of that famous Norman Rockwell painting with the boy with the bindle sitting at the diner next to the police officer, I can certainly imagine the scene. Just thinking of that painting from memory, the officer is looking down at the boy who’s looking up at the officer, there’s a man behind the counter in a white outfit looking at both of them with an amused expression, there’s some pastries or donuts or something on the counter…
But to draw something, it feels like you’ve got to be able to imagine the micro details, and without references to look at, I just can’t do that. The same is true if I was going to try to describe the minutia in the painting - what color is the officer’s hair? Are any of the characters wearing glasses? What do the wrinkles in their clothes look like? What kind of shoes are they wearing?
I even have a difficult time commissioning artwork as a result of this, because it’s difficult to describe what I want without having something visual to reference.
I have aphantasia as well but I do actually have something sort of like a memory palace… kinda. It should be completely useless when I’m awake, but isn’t. I have a dream town, and every place I’ve dreamed about more than three times in the last ~20 years is there in a surprisingly consistent and exceptionally vivid way, like logging into a mmorpg, but spawning in random places. If not for it being easily recognizable as “my town”, I’d struggle to tell it from waking reality because that’s the only other time I experience “sight”. It’s genuinely unsettling sometimes, when my brain makes a new place, to not know if I was dreaming. Maybe that’s why I revisit places until they feel comfortable and familiar and get incorporated into the town.
I say it isn’t completely useless because I use spacial memory to “go places” when awake. I can’t see it, but I know what’s there if I go there, the same way I can mentally count the windows, and know what’s around them, in my house without visually touring the house; I think about where I go to open windows on a nice day, and count the stops.
I can’t put things into the town purposely. Locations or objects, unfortunately. Everything has to already be there if I want to make use of it. But if I can find a useful thing on my spacial tour, I can make note of where I found it, or move it to somewhere more useful. Like the finding the windows exercise, but, to continue your example, I happen to recall that next to window 3 is a Christmas cactus with pink heart-shaped flower buds, and I choose to ”move it” it to the 7th window of my tour. (And yes, if I make note that I’ve moved something, it does stay there when I dream, so that’s really neat)
Genuinely not that useful for things people probably normally use a memory palace sort of thing for, like short-term memories, (finding useful objects is difficult, and sometimes requires a lot of in-dream exploring, which takes actual time) but somewhat useful for certain long-term things, like numbers or recipes. And as a bonus, when I forget something, I’ll often stumble across it in my town and be reminded. Like the recipe for my mom’s cheesecake is the literal ingredients just sitting on the counter in the pocket floor she lives in (she’s a nightmare I had often enough to join the town’s residents, but I shoved her in an impossible floor so I can avoid her). I put that recipe there because I like to modify it, and I often forget what the base recipe is. It’s not written down in the normal sense because I’ll lose it, but it’s simple enough for a representation like that to be easy to hold onto.
But I’ve had similar frustrating experiences with people telling me to visualize things for whatever reason. Like nope, my internal computer is GUI-free. Text output only, with a screen reader. Not even multiple voices, which I hear is a thing most people can do, just the one default reader voice.
On the subject of not being able to visualize people, if there’s someone you haven’t seen in a long time, do you falsely match other people up with the description? For example, my mom died when I was 23, and I’m almost 40 now. It’s been so long that I genuinely don’t remember what she looks like unless I’m looking at a photo. But I know her general description, and when I see other women who fit the description I -feel- that they look just like her even though they usually don’t, actually.
Good heavens! I learned about the memory palace in a Hannibal Lector book, thought it was genius, assumed everyone could do that.
I’ve been told on Reddit that people with aphantasia can actually do the ‘memory palace’ thing. But, since it was just one commenter who didn’t quite describe how it would work, while I myself can visualize but dislike the ‘palace’ technique, I have no further information as to how to do it.
I’m basically the opposite. I can remember peoples faces very well but have a hell of a hard time trying to remember their names. I’d say I’m a 1 or 2 on this scale, depending imon if I’m fully engaged with the content (like reading a book).
You think apple and (apparently) ‘see’ an apple. I think apple and it’s like thinking of how you’d describe an apple. It’s red, it’s round. It has a stem. It’s juicy. It tastes good… but I can’t see it. Or anything else. They’re just thoughts
I think I’m a one, but I might be a five and I can’t tell, because how do I know what format my brain uses to tell me apple? I just know that it does.
I can imagine tastes well enough to cook pretty well and can often predict what a dish will taste like with pretty good accuracy ( I just recently saw a recipe for chocolate rosemary banana bread, and I could imagine that combination, even though I’d never had it before), so there are clearly some senses I can do it for. I think I can also do it visually, but I can’t exactly print it out, so I just know that I’ve received the thought.
If you close your eyes and focus on an apple, what do you see? My understanding is that people without aphantasia / who are “1s” can actually see an image of the apple, as though they were looking at it. If you just see black, no image at all, you might be a 5.
I’d never really connected my lack of a mind’s eye with my inability to follow unnamed characters through a movie until you just said that. 🤯
So you never have sexual fantasies? If somebody asks you to describe how something looks, how are you able to do it? Can you at least remember the colors red and blue?
I have sexual fantasies, but they’re more like reading erotica than watching porn.
I imagine I describe things just like I expect others do, except that instead of having a catalogue of pictures to reference, I have a filing cabinet of documents with descriptions of those things. The concept of a ‘photographic memory’ is completely foreign to me. If I’m walking down the street and I see someone get mugged, then I get asked about it later, I can recall and recite the things I specifically took notice of in the moment, but if I want to be able to give a description of e.g. what the person was wearing or what color their hair was, I need to consciously observe those things and commit them to memory at the time. As I understand it, some folks can just recall the event and ‘replay’ it in their mind, and recall things they might not have taken direct notice of originally; I definitely can’t do that.
I subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.
But aren’t you visualizing the assigned character’s faces? I think we all have varying amounts of this depending on what it is. It sounds like you can visualize faces, but not spaces.
It sounds like you can visualize faces, but not spaces.
Can’t visualize faces at all; I think you pulled that quote from a different post. ;)
The thing to remember, though, is that… I didn’t even know this was something that I “couldn’t do” until it was pointed out to me that others can do it. I just assumed everyone else was being metaphorical when they said they “visualized something” in their head, or whatever. So whereas you hear it and think “Oh gosh, these people can’t do this very normal thing! That must be awful!”, to us, it’s more like we’ve just been living our lives as normal and then 30+ years in, we discover that most people have a superpower that we don’t have.
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WARNING your neurochip implant has detected copyrighted material in your imagination cortex. Please be aware that we are legally obliged to report repeat offenses to the authorities. For your protection, please refrain from picturing further copyrighted material.
On the upside our kids aren’t going to be traumatised by pictures of apples.
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My sister has #5 and I can ask her to make a response if you want OP.
Last we talked about it she said if she tried really hard she can see come colors and shapes but that’s about it.
The best conversation about it we ever had went something like this (keep in mind were both autistic and when together dont always communicate like neurotypical people do):
*while driving*
her: “get in that turn lane to the right”
*i do the 👆hand tricks and turn*
her: “when I don’t want to do that I always think in my head ‘never eat soggy waffles’ and remember that east is left and right is west”
me: “that’s not even correct, but like WHY would you do that??”
her: “to remember how to turn”
me: “why wouldn’t you just do the hand things?”
me: “like imagine them in your head and-”
her: “MUST BE NICE HUH?”
*we both explode in laughter*
she didn’t even mean to make a joke about it, that’s just genuinely the way she remembers lefts and rights
The left/right story might be a different thing. Was in my 40s until I could instinctively know left from right. Before that I would snap my left fingers, or mime it, because I’m sinister and can’t snap my right.
Only way I got better was saying to myself, “This is bullshit and you’re all growed up. Work on this thing.” Somehow I got better, can’t say how.
I have serious issues with modelling the world in 3D, but I’m a solid 1 on the aphantasia scale. Weird.
The left/right story might be a different thing.
very well could be, our genetics are a concoction of adhd, autism, anxiety, depression, etc etc
i used to be able to know without doing the L R hands in highschool, but I guess that skill faded over time 🤷♀️
personally it’s not big enough of an issue for me to do anything about bc taking a wrong turn is way more embarrassing than doing a L R hand.
I have serious issues with modelling the world in 3D, but I’m a solid 1 on the aphantasia scale. Weird.
that’s interesting, my sister has done some stuff with a CAD program for 3d printing and it wasn’t an issue for her. What specifically do you have trouble with?
My brain is like a vector database, it stores the “feelings” of information, not the actual information - if that makes sense?
I can make lightning fast connections in my head when something happens, like when something breaks in production, I see the symptoms and the vectors just connect from effect to the cause.
Can I explain to others why and how I know where the problem is? Nope. …Or yes, but it’ll take a long time for me to follow the feeling-vectors and put them into words I can actually communicate to other people.
For actual people and characters in books I also retain the shape and …something about them, but I couldn’t explain how most people in my life look like to a sketch artist.
When I read a book, I kinda retain the “feeling” of the characters and maybe one or two visual traits. I can read thousands of pages of a character’s adventures and I can maybe tell you their general body type and clothing - if they have an “uniform” they tend to wear.
I’ve read all 5 books (over 5000 pages) of The Stormlight Archive and I couldn’t tell you what Kaladin (the main character) looks like. I have no visual recollection of his hair colour, eye colour, skin tone or body type.
Oh, and DEFINITELY no voice in my head. I’d get myself committed if I had someone talking to me in my brain.
Holy cow. This is possibly the best description of how I usually think I’ve ever encountered. It was actually a bit unnerving to read. Though I’ve always conceptualized it as “shapes” and “holes” rather than vectors.
The ability to near-instantly make connections between symptoms and cause for any given issue in a system I’m familiar with especially resonated. The best explanation I could give someone without stepping back and basically re-solving the whole thing from a standing start would be “the shapes fit together”.
It feels like I’m being asked how I knew a puzzle piece fit in a space, and for some reason “I looked at it and could see that it fit” is not a sufficient explanation. No, I didn’t need to investigate other possible pieces. They are obviously different shapes. The one that you’re asking about doesn’t even belong to the same puzzle.
Similarly I am also utterly incapable of describing what a person looks like in any detail. I have a “mind’s eye” and can conjure up images of them in my head, but for whatever reason I just completely lack the ability to express what I see in words outside of very high level details. They have brown hair, they’re tall, what do you mean “what shape is their face?” Sara’s face is the shape of Sara’s face. It couldn’t be any other shape.
I do have an internal monologue or voice though, but it’s not constant. It usually only comes up when I’m dealing with other people and need to try to reason through what someone else is doing.
This is a perfect representation of how my mind is laid out. Everything is a tree with things connected together by feelings/relations. Individual events are painful to keep track of (wife constantly tells me that we’ve already had conversations multiple times). Superfluous detail is lost immediately.
But how a certain function in code breaking can ripple to the whole system is as natural as I breathe. Random trivia facts too, since they were novel enough to connect at the cool thing to know node. What someone wore yesterday or where the ketchup is (I don’t eat ketchup) is just completely filtered out. Couldn’t describe peoples faces but I know them when I see them. 99% of those “celebrity lookalike” things look nothing like them and I get baffled how people can confuse them, but I’d assume it’s from them visualizing the celebrity with some error
For my own inner monologue, it often feels more like a preview or mirror than like hearing something external. Definitely English words, though I can also navigate nonverbal ideas in a similar sense to how you describe. The “essence” of the item, its database ID in a way.
Same with my inner audio sense: I can play things back I’ve heard several times and recall, like an old song, which is just a copy of how I heard it before (mostly). If it was a 90s mp3, it’ll still have whatever weird audio glitch crept in there during all the piracy. Can’t pick the elements apart, it’s just one layer.
No mind’s eye for me. Good spatial sense, though; it just isn’t tied to any feeling of sight. As for “imagining” an apple, I definitely don’t in any way see an apple. But there’s a part of the brain that, when you look at an apple, takes the incoming light analyzes it, and returns “Apple”. When I imagine the apple, I get that same return, the sense that I have just experienced or currently am experiencing an apple. Does my brain tell me I saw the toothy curves of the bottom of a red delicious? Yep. Did I see anything, anywhere, metaphorically or otherwise? Nope. All analysis, no pixels.
I can see things in my head, rotate them, look from different angles, try out different colors for a room, etc. But it’s not really the same as seeing visually. It’s just kind of imagining what it would look like. It’s hard to explain. It’s as if you were dreaming it while you are still awake. But also less vivid than a dream.
Same here, I can rotate things in my head and change their color, but it’s not quite HD. It’s like an abstract image of what it should look like. It’s also quite fleeting since I get easily distracted. But when I’m half-asleep or waking up on a lazy Sunday, holy shit, I can visualize so many things in bright colors and can see them clearly. I wish I could do that all the time.
My architect buddy wanted to hire me to handle IT, do drafting in my down time. He met me managing a reprographics shop, blueprint place. “I can’t look at a blueprint and visualize what it’s going to look like.”
LOL, he looked like I slapped him! Totally alien thought to that man.
I’m not as puzzled about the concept of aphantasia (or the opposite) as much as the fact that people here, and two I know IRL, always self report as either 1s or 5s, with a handful of exceptions (ATTOW).
Is there a selection bias, where anyone in-between doesn’t relate to either extreme enough to comment, or do said extremes conflate the ability to “picture” fine details with the ability to remember them in the first place?
Well, if it makes anyone feel better, I’m somewhere around 2 or 3. But that’s really nothing to write about.
I’m noticing that in this comment section, too. I hadn’t noticed before, but most people do seem to be one extreme or the other. I imagine it’s because at either end they feel like they have something unique to offer the conversation, but those in the middle probably feel as if they are normal and it won’t be interesting to contribute, maybe?
Ooc, what would you label yourself? I posted mine if you want to see my experience as someone who jumps around the spectrum a bit
Without rigorously researching the phenomenon, I’d put myself in the 2, edging towards 3 - I can visualize things with however many details I can see with my own eyes if I focus a little, but instinctually I only see vague shapes that serve their purpose in whatever scenario I’m thinking of.
I can rotate objects and remember the back-face details;
I can picture a moment from a story I was reading, where a bipedal nocturnal lizard in a cramped spaceship violently recoils from having a flashlight pointed at its eyes;
I cannot quantify the spacing between its eyes compared to the height between those and the tip of the nose as seen by a front-facing isometric projection, even if it’s all a fiction and I could just make things up.
Basically my mind is running Unreal Engine 5 with medium settings, low LOD and AI generated textures - which would also explains a lot of other things now that I think about it.
I think I’m like a 3 or 4.
I remember some years back there was a “test” going around the internet where you were supposed to picture an apple moving off a table in your head, and then it would ask you “ok what did the person pushing the apple look like, what color were their clothes, etc.” and I thought “oh shit do I have aphantasia?”
Later I realized that couldn’t be entirely true since I do picture characters in books, although I always picture them as an actor or another character from a comic/show/movie, never as an original face.
For those who are a 4 or 5 on this diagram: What are your dreams like?
Pretty lifelike. Full color/sensory immersion, even to the point of feeling things like cold, heat, wind, hearing loud noises, smells etc. Sometimes, if ive been really sleep deprived, it can take me a solid few minutes to realize Im even awake and in the “real world”.
I’m a 5. Dreams are fine. As realistic as I want them to be.
They can be amazing or terrible. Fly, go through days in dreams, sex, get chased by a monster. Lucid dreams. I also have sleep paralysis, so it can get pretty fucked up. It’s like having another life. Best part is I should be too old to have nocturnal emissions. Worst part is you can be so scared you wake yourself up (and your partner) by screaming. Or, in a few instances, choking or hitting your partner in your sleep.
But you see things vividly in your dreams?
Like, I’m a 1 on this scale. I remember and imagine very visually. I can picture an apple sitting on a plate on a table and it looks real. In fact, my mind imagined it being slid onto the table, and the apple rocked on the plate as it slid to a stop. My imagination has a physics engine.
I also dream vividly, the experience feels very lifelike. The few lucid dreams I had tended to fade quickly when I realized I was dreaming. I’d love to be able to cause, and then maintain, that state.
Some people also don’t have an internal monologue. I’m probably a 3 or 4, it takes significant effort to see something in my head. But my thoughts a words and they definitely have a voice.
I assume there is a scale for how well we can imagine every sense.
Some people also don’t have an internal monologue.
I have an internal dialogue.
I have to practice pretty hard to do that, it’s much easier in a journal than in my head to dialogue. Do you find it helps being mindful?
I mean I guess that’s lucky in some ways my thoughts never stop
Mine don’t stop either, but it’s just constant words. Are your thoughts mostly images?
You’re mind has an active visual cortex. Other folks think more using their audio cortex. Some more with somatic awareness (feeling tone).
Mathameticians can visualize math.
Everyone is wired a bit different.
I’m a two or a four on the scale, depending on how much weed I consume. As heavy weed use dulls the minds eye. Though irregular use can enhance it.
And after years working in kitchens, I can think in smells. I.e.mix spices in my mind and smell them in my head before adding to a dish.
I’m that way with ice cream. I own an ice cream business that creates custom ice creams, and after many years, I can think of a a flavor combination, and sort of “taste it” in my mind.
I love ice cream, but I don’t eat it that often any more. If I have a craving, often just thinking about what flavor I’d have is satisfying enough.
Just from that one flavor combo I now want to try all your ice creams 😂💜
They’ve done studies on dopamine with sugar. It’s not the eating it that’s satisfying, it’s the getting it. So most dopamine is released on the way to the mouth. Assuming you’ve had ice cream before and the neural pathways are laid.
Which is why the first bite is the best.
But yeah the mind has some plasticity. We can learn to be more visual or olfactory ‘thinkers’.
I never know how to interpret this scale. I can think of objects and describe what I’m thinking about, but I don’t see anything in the same way my eyes do. Or rather, I see a black void, and if I try to picture an apple it’s like a black object on a black background, but I know it’s there.
I also get better at it the longer I do it; if I read a book for a long while, the ideas get sharper in my head and can be in color, but I’m still not “seeing” in the same way my eyes do.
Some people really are out there living their lives with aphantasia. I can’t imagine that.
being a 1 with ADHD is crazy, like I can be in the middle of a class and zone out and start visualising myself walking around the campus in incredible detail, or FPV droning inside a friend’s house, or really anything I can think of, although that said it takes a fair bit of effort to keep it going beyond a certain amount of time.
I have severe 5 aphantasia. It was such a relief when a name was put to it.
3 or 4
I can “picture” with images but it’s not top accuracy. It’s mostly imagining a thing existing
I’m a 5, yet I can have extremely vivid dreams that are exactly like I am in that world. I can perfectly picture peoples faces from the past too while dreaming. So the ability is in there somewhere. 🤷♂️
I can’t actually see the image with my eyes, I don’t believed people actually can but I suppose it can be. I can see flashes of black and white stills in my mind but that’s it. My dreams are the same just with weirdly numb feelings. Like when you are in vr and someone touches you, you have the feeling in your mind but don’t feel anything physical.
For individual objects it is difficult to impossible for me to create the exact image.
For directions however, I can do a visual “fly” over the roads which I believe I should be going down, to make sure I’m going the right place. The roads are clear images, but not to the same effect of watching a video of someone driving along said roads.
I’m coming to think there is a lot more nuance to this than the 5 images let on.
I’m somewhere between 3 and 4 I think. If I try to imagine a detail, I can’t see the rest of the thing. If I want to see the whole thing, it’s all very vague and shadowy.
I don’t know how to explain it but mine is in constant flux.
I’ll bounce between full on 3d animated cutscenes to like “Old ass TRON style wireframes of the object”
How many Au/ADHD can do this vs non-neurospicy? Just curious of there’s a difference or likeliness one way or another.
I can see and manipulate objects in my head. I can make up voices or objects in my head and “hear” them. I can feel an object’s texture without touching it.
I can’t imagine not having these things in my head.
This one is a cluster fuck for me… I can visualize an object in my head and even to the point of placing it in real space in my hand and being able to rotate it. I cannot however, see your face in my mind after you have just left the room.
Don’t really know how that fits in.
I think that I have a good visual imagination but it works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let’s say that you see a mouse run by. You think “I have seen a mouse. It was small and gray.” My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.
This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.
I thought it was either 1 or you have aphantasia. Didn’t realize there was a range.
I find it gets better with practice to some degree, if I go for a long stretch reading more or less fiction I find it affects my imagination and ability to visualize with more or less detail and memorability. I don’t think it’ll bridge the gap to 5 necessarily, but it might bump a 4 to a 3 or a 2 to a 1.
Is this new, somehow? I’ve always recognized that the people around me think differently. I even recognized that there was a spectrum.
I’m definitely a #1, and always recognized that about myself. I’m like to write, and I think that activity demonstrates the spectrum well. Stephen King once said that he doesn’t understand why people struggle with writing. He just pictures the story in his head, and writes what he sees. When I read that, I instantly recognized myself. That’s how I write.
But I also know that some people write almost like they are putting together a puzzle. They choose certain words that go together well, and they are constructing their narrative brick by brick. I think poetry is often constructed like that, and I think those prose writers have a more poetic sensibility than others, and that sort of writing reflects it. That might explain why I really don’t care for that style of writing much, because I am extremely bad at poetry. That construction style just doesn’t work for me.
@KoboldCoterie you can still be an artist. You’ll just have to rely more on references but it’s possible. There’s one person that made a video about it that I saw some time ago. youtu.be/ewsGmhAjjjI
The current prevailing theory is that we (4 here) actually do create the images much the same as you 1s, we’re just not consciously aware of it. Our brains are doing the same thing behind the scenes, and they just translate it differently. Some personal “evidence” of this that I have are that when I’m high, I have an easier time visualizing, and that I dream VERY vividly.
This reminded me of a sort of similar topic, and curiously enough it’s about reading, and might provide some insight into your question.
Some years ago, I happened on a thread in which the OP asked people whose voice they “heard” when they read.
I couldn’t even make sense of that question. The only time I “hear” voices when I read is when a character speaks. The rest of the time, I not only don’t “hear” the words - I’m not even really aware of them. My eyes follow the lines while my brain instantly translates the words I’m seeing into images and concepts and the like. And yes - it’s like a movie playing out inside my brain, and yes, I’m a #1 on this chart.
But apparently there’s a not insignificant number of people who “hear” a book inside their heads just as if someone else was reading it out loud. Instead of visualizing things, they remain focused only on the words - the representations - and somehow glean from them alone the necessary details.
I wouldn’t be surprised if those people are also generally #5 or thereabouts on this chart, and again what it is is that their brains don’t directly envision things but instead rely on descriptive representations.
I don’t get how it works either, but self-evidently it does.
the_q@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
You guys are gonna lose your shit when you find out some people don’t have an inner monologue.
Glide@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
What the fuck do you mean some people don’t have an inner monologue. How do they… Think thoughts? I literally cannot comprehend how they work through thoughts.
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I’m convinced lots of people actually don’t think
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Vibes or visuals
rhombus@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Probably different for everyone, but I have neither and sometimes feel almost compelled to speak my thoughts out loud. If I don’t speak them they’re just kind of abstract feelings or impressions.
MajorasTerribleFate@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
My best guess: sometimes, one idea flows to the next in my head without the words. Usually I “feel” sentences falling into place at least a few words ahead of what I’m saying, at least kind of. But sometimes I just sort of talk, without the inner mo ologue, and it’s mildly confusing. Like, who the hell is building the sentences if it’s not me? And why does what’s coming out of my mouth totally agree with what I would be saying if I could build the words right now?
Basically, sometimes the place that ACTUALLY assembles the words bypasses the self-awareness layer, and the words just come out.
I imagine this is somewhat analogous to the people with no inner monologue; there are still thoughts, they just don’t take the form of words. Pictures, concepts, or even other things that make less intuitive sense to those of us with inner monologues.
Bgugi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m a word-er, but I think hank green explained it pretty well in a video. Language is just an I/O bus, thoughts occur as a set of abstractions with associations.
Noved@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Yeah I’m calling bullshit on this one haha, op is implying some people cannot process word if not spoken or written. That would be so unbelievably disabling you probably couldn’t function in society.
Holytimes@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Easily we just do. It’s like breathing. We just do it.
Can you explain how you breath? Or beat your heart? Or create blood?
That’s how we do.
shalafi@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That should be my next post! 😂 My inner monologue is like words on a page. And again, I can’t see how one could enjoy a novel with the monologue and mind’s eye.
absGeekNZ@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
This one I find difficult to comprehend.
My inner monologue is petty much my entire thought process. How does one think and rationalise without one?
alternategait@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’m a 5 on this scale (maybe a 4 if I’m distracted, processing other stuff) and I have a big component of kinesthetic sense and some emotional tone comes into play. It actually often takes work for me to turn ideas into words. This gets harder if I’m tired or sick or something.
nailbar@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
My inner monologue even reacted to your comment when I read it 😅
Xttweaponttx@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Tomorrow is chores.