I am utterly incapable of forming voluntary mental images, and experience very faint involuntary ones only occasionally, during the hypnagogic state when falling asleep. (I used to practice at manipulating these, but made no headway.) I do experience afterimages, and I must be encoding information in a ‘visual format’ somewhere, because I can rotate molecular models (for example) in my mind with no problem, and get a very faint disturbance in my visual field when I do so.
Yet I do dream, sometimes quite vividly. Dreams are pretty much the only time I see something purely in my mind. I once experienced bizarre visual hallucinations due to a side-effect of medication, and they struck me as being quite dreamlike.
I suspect that my incapacity for mental imagery was strongly influenced by the fact I was born blind, and had no usable vision until the age of three. However, so far as I know, that doesn’t explain my incapacity for other kinds of sensory imagination.
I am a fairly skilled singer, with a good pitch sense, yet I would not say I can ‘hear a tune in my head’. Rather my experience is that I ‘just know’ what intervals sound like, how the tune flows. I can hum or sing it for you from memory, but I cannot ‘play it back’ in my mind. When I try, what I really end up doing is making motions in my mouth and throat as if I were singing very faintly. It’s as if the information is encoded somewhere, but gets decoded only at the point of action. In much the same way, though I can’t draw well, I can roughly draw complex shapes from memory—like the outline of the contiguous United States. But I am not aware of experiencing that shape in a visual way in my mind; it is somehow encoded.
I used to believe, as this excellent post says, that my experience was universal and that all talk of ‘visual imagery’ was metaphor, but I was convinced otherwise by deep conversation with a close friend who is an eidetic imager.
I am also new, like Garth, and I also completely lack visual imagery.
Unlike Garth, I don’t even see things when I dream—I dream in thoughts, which for me are textual or feeling-based. Afterimages are hit and miss for me. Also, unlike Garth, I was not born blind; my vision is completely fine and corrected to normal with glasses, which I wear all the time. I am also a fairly skilled singer and have good pitch sense, however this is a skill that has developed from practice. My experience in this is similar to Garth’s, as is my experience in drawing.
I am extremely bad with directions to get somewhere, but have no problem navigating to a place once I’ve learnt the way. I think this may indicate the difference between imagery and procedural memory. Interestingly, I have /fantastic/ semantic memory. As a recent example, I crammed/studied for a test over the course of 2 hours after missing 8 or so hours of lecture. I got a 85⁄100 on the test, simply by remembering which answers fit textually.
I have to admit, I was skeptical about the existence of those without visual imagination, but after reading your post it seems that that skepticism was derived from a lack of understanding. I couldn’t comprehend the vehicle by which thoughts would be transmitted without a visual component, but your description has gone a long way towards clearing that up. Thank you for your excellent contribution.
Hmm, that is very interesting. I’m fairly good at imagining stuff but not to the point of e.g. looking at Rubik’s cube and then solving it blind.
I have a theory here. The mental imagery requires two things:
A: forming mental image somewhere in your brain—akin to how Boeing will simulate aircraft in computer.
B: perceiving it consciously. Some people might lack B but possess some form of A which they could not consciously access.
I’m pretty sure that A can work without B in myself—e.g. good mechanical design can just pop in my mind, the kind of good mechanical design that absolutely requires some sort of simulation to produce. Yet I did not consciously imagine variations of that design.
The most important part of A for me is ability to imagine system and the rules and evolution of that system. For example I can even imagine configuration of conductors, and then imagine electric potential and electric field around them, from just the differential equations (i simply know how nabla squared times a looks). I can do that in 3D, and i imagine the 3D itself, not the 2D projection (which i can imagine if i need to). It’s a lot like imagining soap film surface (it obeys same equations).
Hi, new here.
I am utterly incapable of forming voluntary mental images, and experience very faint involuntary ones only occasionally, during the hypnagogic state when falling asleep. (I used to practice at manipulating these, but made no headway.) I do experience afterimages, and I must be encoding information in a ‘visual format’ somewhere, because I can rotate molecular models (for example) in my mind with no problem, and get a very faint disturbance in my visual field when I do so.
Yet I do dream, sometimes quite vividly. Dreams are pretty much the only time I see something purely in my mind. I once experienced bizarre visual hallucinations due to a side-effect of medication, and they struck me as being quite dreamlike.
I suspect that my incapacity for mental imagery was strongly influenced by the fact I was born blind, and had no usable vision until the age of three. However, so far as I know, that doesn’t explain my incapacity for other kinds of sensory imagination.
I am a fairly skilled singer, with a good pitch sense, yet I would not say I can ‘hear a tune in my head’. Rather my experience is that I ‘just know’ what intervals sound like, how the tune flows. I can hum or sing it for you from memory, but I cannot ‘play it back’ in my mind. When I try, what I really end up doing is making motions in my mouth and throat as if I were singing very faintly. It’s as if the information is encoded somewhere, but gets decoded only at the point of action. In much the same way, though I can’t draw well, I can roughly draw complex shapes from memory—like the outline of the contiguous United States. But I am not aware of experiencing that shape in a visual way in my mind; it is somehow encoded.
I used to believe, as this excellent post says, that my experience was universal and that all talk of ‘visual imagery’ was metaphor, but I was convinced otherwise by deep conversation with a close friend who is an eidetic imager.
I am also new, like Garth, and I also completely lack visual imagery.
Unlike Garth, I don’t even see things when I dream—I dream in thoughts, which for me are textual or feeling-based. Afterimages are hit and miss for me. Also, unlike Garth, I was not born blind; my vision is completely fine and corrected to normal with glasses, which I wear all the time. I am also a fairly skilled singer and have good pitch sense, however this is a skill that has developed from practice. My experience in this is similar to Garth’s, as is my experience in drawing.
I am extremely bad with directions to get somewhere, but have no problem navigating to a place once I’ve learnt the way. I think this may indicate the difference between imagery and procedural memory. Interestingly, I have /fantastic/ semantic memory. As a recent example, I crammed/studied for a test over the course of 2 hours after missing 8 or so hours of lecture. I got a 85⁄100 on the test, simply by remembering which answers fit textually.
Hi Garth, Welcome to Less Wrong!
I have to admit, I was skeptical about the existence of those without visual imagination, but after reading your post it seems that that skepticism was derived from a lack of understanding. I couldn’t comprehend the vehicle by which thoughts would be transmitted without a visual component, but your description has gone a long way towards clearing that up. Thank you for your excellent contribution.
Hmm, that is very interesting. I’m fairly good at imagining stuff but not to the point of e.g. looking at Rubik’s cube and then solving it blind.
I have a theory here. The mental imagery requires two things:
A: forming mental image somewhere in your brain—akin to how Boeing will simulate aircraft in computer. B: perceiving it consciously.
Some people might lack B but possess some form of A which they could not consciously access. I’m pretty sure that A can work without B in myself—e.g. good mechanical design can just pop in my mind, the kind of good mechanical design that absolutely requires some sort of simulation to produce. Yet I did not consciously imagine variations of that design.
The most important part of A for me is ability to imagine system and the rules and evolution of that system. For example I can even imagine configuration of conductors, and then imagine electric potential and electric field around them, from just the differential equations (i simply know how nabla squared times a looks). I can do that in 3D, and i imagine the 3D itself, not the 2D projection (which i can imagine if i need to). It’s a lot like imagining soap film surface (it obeys same equations).