At the moment of writing this comment, there are more people reporting vivid sound imagination than there are people reporting vivid vision imagination. That’s surprising to me. I had assumed that vision would be most people’s primary sense, and that people would have the most vivid imagination for what their primary sense was.
Perhaps people are answering with figures for vividity relative to expectations in some sense.
[EDITED to add:] A specific sense of “relative to expectations” that I think is probably the main thing that’s going on here: Vision is an extremely high-bandwidth sense, hearing decidedly less so. If there’s limited bandwidth / processing available for synthesizing imaginary/remembered sense experiences, then we should expect visual experiences to fall further short than auditory ones.
(Of course that’s an oversimplification. E.g., just how high that bandwidth would need to be may depend on what “level of processing” the imagined/remembered experiences get fed in at; we may be constructing fine details on demand and not notice; etc.)
My sound imagination seems a lot more like real sound than my visual imagination seems like seeing.
I suspect I do a lot more visual thinking than verbal thinking, but the verbal thinking is mostly at a conscious level, and the visual thinking is mostly subconscious.
At the moment of writing this comment, there are more people reporting vivid sound imagination than there are people reporting vivid vision imagination. That’s surprising to me. I had assumed that vision would be most people’s primary sense, and that people would have the most vivid imagination for what their primary sense was.
Perhaps people are answering with figures for vividity relative to expectations in some sense.
[EDITED to add:] A specific sense of “relative to expectations” that I think is probably the main thing that’s going on here: Vision is an extremely high-bandwidth sense, hearing decidedly less so. If there’s limited bandwidth / processing available for synthesizing imaginary/remembered sense experiences, then we should expect visual experiences to fall further short than auditory ones.
(Of course that’s an oversimplification. E.g., just how high that bandwidth would need to be may depend on what “level of processing” the imagined/remembered experiences get fed in at; we may be constructing fine details on demand and not notice; etc.)
My sound imagination seems a lot more like real sound than my visual imagination seems like seeing.
I suspect I do a lot more visual thinking than verbal thinking, but the verbal thinking is mostly at a conscious level, and the visual thinking is mostly subconscious.