I feel like I’m not comprehending the text if I’m not visualizing it to some degree. It’s like I require the visualization to remember things. Symbolic/diagrammatic is also visual for me. Basically all of my sensory modes have to have a visual tag for me to remember them easily. I struggle to remember music without a lot of repetition. It induces the visual tags as I hear it, but it doesn’t seem to round-trip properly. Maybe if I knew musical notation well enough to transcribe what I heard, I could do it that way and remember, but I don’t.
Visualizing mostly happens naturally for me in the process of thinking. But more difficult material requires a slower, more conscious effort. I have to pause and think. That doesn’t work while skimming, and it takes brain power away from other things. I feel like I’m not as aware of my visual field when concentrating, even if my eyes are open. I always had trouble keeping up with the lectures in school. I ended up zoning out and just reading the textbook. But I often watch YouTube lectures at 2x. This works because I can pause it if I need to think, or rewind if I missed something important while thinking.
When doing algebra, or refactoring code, I’m doing symbolic manipulation in my head in a visual way.
I think my imagination (and memory) might have been somewhat more vivid as a child. Now I can get away with lower-resolution abbreviations. But I also feel like I have better control now. As a child, I used to occasionally have chaotic visual thoughts that would sometimes become obsessive and hard to stop, like a day-mare. I can arrest such thoughts within seconds of choosing to do so now, and they’re rare. I can also visualize three dimensions pretty well now. That took some practice, but it’s a skill I started to develop while I was elementary-school age.
I’ve been a music teacher for a decade and a serious classical pianist. One thing I found over time was that for me, music is kinetic. When I listen to classical music, I feel vastly more engaged and connected to it if I can sit in my chair and conduct it (creatively, not like a metronomic baton-waver), or dance to it, and try to also express the emotion on my face. It helps me gain a spatial sense of the music. After I’d gotten lots of practice at that, I was eventually able to get the same effect with smaller and smaller movements, until finally I could go there without having to actually move. If you try it, I’d be curious to hear if it works for you.
It takes a conscious act of will to engage my visual imagination while reading, and I can easily go many months of intensive daily study without hardly activating it at all (which is NOT good). When I do engage it, though, one change I notice is that I no longer hear the words in my head, and I don’t experience the sort of locked-on stare at the text that happens when I’m not using my imagination. It’s like my eyes are resting more softly on the text, and I’m not making a conscious effort to hear every word, but rather am 75% focused on constructing a mental image or movie in my mind.
Once I get started, a lot of the movie/image just extends itself via intuition; I quickly start to realize that parts of the text are things I’m already picturing and thus can skim past, others are irrelevant to the mental movie, and others are meant to add or change something in the movie.
I feel like I’m not comprehending the text if I’m not visualizing it to some degree. It’s like I require the visualization to remember things. Symbolic/diagrammatic is also visual for me. Basically all of my sensory modes have to have a visual tag for me to remember them easily. I struggle to remember music without a lot of repetition. It induces the visual tags as I hear it, but it doesn’t seem to round-trip properly. Maybe if I knew musical notation well enough to transcribe what I heard, I could do it that way and remember, but I don’t.
Visualizing mostly happens naturally for me in the process of thinking. But more difficult material requires a slower, more conscious effort. I have to pause and think. That doesn’t work while skimming, and it takes brain power away from other things. I feel like I’m not as aware of my visual field when concentrating, even if my eyes are open. I always had trouble keeping up with the lectures in school. I ended up zoning out and just reading the textbook. But I often watch YouTube lectures at 2x. This works because I can pause it if I need to think, or rewind if I missed something important while thinking.
When doing algebra, or refactoring code, I’m doing symbolic manipulation in my head in a visual way.
I think my imagination (and memory) might have been somewhat more vivid as a child. Now I can get away with lower-resolution abbreviations. But I also feel like I have better control now. As a child, I used to occasionally have chaotic visual thoughts that would sometimes become obsessive and hard to stop, like a day-mare. I can arrest such thoughts within seconds of choosing to do so now, and they’re rare. I can also visualize three dimensions pretty well now. That took some practice, but it’s a skill I started to develop while I was elementary-school age.
I’ve been a music teacher for a decade and a serious classical pianist. One thing I found over time was that for me, music is kinetic. When I listen to classical music, I feel vastly more engaged and connected to it if I can sit in my chair and conduct it (creatively, not like a metronomic baton-waver), or dance to it, and try to also express the emotion on my face. It helps me gain a spatial sense of the music. After I’d gotten lots of practice at that, I was eventually able to get the same effect with smaller and smaller movements, until finally I could go there without having to actually move. If you try it, I’d be curious to hear if it works for you.
It takes a conscious act of will to engage my visual imagination while reading, and I can easily go many months of intensive daily study without hardly activating it at all (which is NOT good). When I do engage it, though, one change I notice is that I no longer hear the words in my head, and I don’t experience the sort of locked-on stare at the text that happens when I’m not using my imagination. It’s like my eyes are resting more softly on the text, and I’m not making a conscious effort to hear every word, but rather am 75% focused on constructing a mental image or movie in my mind.
Once I get started, a lot of the movie/image just extends itself via intuition; I quickly start to realize that parts of the text are things I’m already picturing and thus can skim past, others are irrelevant to the mental movie, and others are meant to add or change something in the movie.