I had a related experience while exploring whether I had aphantasia ( inability to visualize ) or not. I had at that time always considered my visualization abilities above average. I enjoyed tinkering and making things, drawing, and sculpting both with physical and digital media. But when I started exploring my ability to visualize colour I found it very difficult. I realized I couldn’t even visualize different shades of grey well, but I was looking at vivid internal models of the world! What the heck was going on?
Drum roll to build suspense and let you consider speculating and investigating your own experience before reading on...
So, what I discovered was that what I thought was me generating imagined visual data was actually me generating imagined tactile, kinesthetic and proprioceptive data. I now realize it is multimodal, there is weak perception of vision which I have worked on strengthening and there is also auditory or linguistic packets, like, the word “joint 1” may be attached to a kinesthetic imagining of a joint such that placing my focus on it causes me to be aware of the idea of “joint 1″ and vice versa.
Since I was (and still am) apparently ADHD and obsessed with fiddling with things to investigate their physical properties, it seems that this is actually the modality I feel most comfortable thinking in. It’s a little bit like I have many invisible or ghost hands to touch the surface and inside mechanisms of whatever I’m imagining, but like how when holding a pen or some tool, my awareness goes to the point I’m concerned with, eg, the tip of the pen, I can make use of any existing or imagined tool in place of my hands for working with my plane of imagination. Not that I would need to use a tool to modify anything, I can just think them different, just that the idea of imagined hands isn’t quite right, it’s more like “hands or any other tool I can imagine”.
There is also some kind of awareness of the entire plane that I don’t quite understand. It’s like an awareness of what it would be like to pick up or physically interact with an object but without the idea of the physical interaction… just the properties it would have if I was interacting with it.
@Alex_Altair, since you seem to be indexing memories in spacial locations, I wonder if you have any of this kind of spacial imagination happening? I’m also curious if other people experience this?
As for the question of indexing memory, I definitely do the same thing with books make frequent use of method of loci, usually with geometric shapes rather than memories of real locations. As for indexes of conversation, I more often have problems where I only index conversations by their content without indexing who I was talking with, when, where, or basically anything other than the ideas I experienced during the conversation. It can lead to embarrassing situations where I have long conversations with people and then fail to recognize them. I’m usually not that bad with it, but that is more my experience. If I index spacial location of a conversation I usually also index other details.
I had a related experience while exploring whether I had aphantasia ( inability to visualize ) or not. I had at that time always considered my visualization abilities above average. I enjoyed tinkering and making things, drawing, and sculpting both with physical and digital media. But when I started exploring my ability to visualize colour I found it very difficult. I realized I couldn’t even visualize different shades of grey well, but I was looking at vivid internal models of the world! What the heck was going on?
Drum roll to build suspense and let you consider speculating and investigating your own experience before reading on...
So, what I discovered was that what I thought was me generating imagined visual data was actually me generating imagined tactile, kinesthetic and proprioceptive data. I now realize it is multimodal, there is weak perception of vision which I have worked on strengthening and there is also auditory or linguistic packets, like, the word “joint 1” may be attached to a kinesthetic imagining of a joint such that placing my focus on it causes me to be aware of the idea of “joint 1″ and vice versa.
Since I was (and still am) apparently ADHD and obsessed with fiddling with things to investigate their physical properties, it seems that this is actually the modality I feel most comfortable thinking in. It’s a little bit like I have many invisible or ghost hands to touch the surface and inside mechanisms of whatever I’m imagining, but like how when holding a pen or some tool, my awareness goes to the point I’m concerned with, eg, the tip of the pen, I can make use of any existing or imagined tool in place of my hands for working with my plane of imagination. Not that I would need to use a tool to modify anything, I can just think them different, just that the idea of imagined hands isn’t quite right, it’s more like “hands or any other tool I can imagine”.
There is also some kind of awareness of the entire plane that I don’t quite understand. It’s like an awareness of what it would be like to pick up or physically interact with an object but without the idea of the physical interaction… just the properties it would have if I was interacting with it.
@Alex_Altair, since you seem to be indexing memories in spacial locations, I wonder if you have any of this kind of spacial imagination happening? I’m also curious if other people experience this?
As for the question of indexing memory, I definitely do the same thing with books make frequent use of method of loci, usually with geometric shapes rather than memories of real locations. As for indexes of conversation, I more often have problems where I only index conversations by their content without indexing who I was talking with, when, where, or basically anything other than the ideas I experienced during the conversation. It can lead to embarrassing situations where I have long conversations with people and then fail to recognize them. I’m usually not that bad with it, but that is more my experience. If I index spacial location of a conversation I usually also index other details.