Can you remember a face and see it as if it’s really there in front of you? Yes? And now, can you change that image – like mold it, change its color, bend it to your will? Lucky you!
I can’t visualise visually, not anything really, in the way – the literal way – that I would like to be able to. What I can do is imagine that I visualise something. It’s like I know how things look, and I can draw it out, but it’s not like I can switch on an internal screen to project even the simplest images, similar to stills or film projection.
I can imagine what it would be like though.
Handling visual concepts and building, creating, describing visuals in my mind, I can do. I just can’t visualise it literally. Proverbially, yes. I can imagine a proverbial bear, running after a proverbial hunter. I get flashes, a few details, instants that disappear when I would like to hold on and look a little more. That is why I say I can’t visualise, only “almost” visualise.
A nice metaphor is the scan line of an oscilloscope. For an instant, it shows a shape. It disappears as quickly as it was drawn, leaving a faint after-image for a second. And, it was more like an outline than an image with shades, colors, texture.
I wonder, do I have “aphantasia”?
When you ask me to imagine an apple, I get flashes, like memories of visual traits, that I recall or synthesize by thinking about “an apple”. I think I briefly saw a partial image of an apple, but it was more like an apple drawn by an oscilloscope. It was a bit more than just lines though. But any detail you ask me about, I create on demand – it appears for a fraction of a second, as if invoked by thinking, and then is gone. I cannot sustain a mental image at all, though my mind’s eye is not exactly “blind”. For a comparison with eye vision, I feel like I can only blink my eyes open for 1/10 of a second, every minute or so, and I have distorting glasses on with tunnel vision as well – so what I see is very brief, distorted and incomplete.
If I would have literal inner visualization, my memory and conceptualisation would probably work very differently. Easier perhaps. And with inner visualisation, I would have the magical power of creation. Of visuals, in my mind. Which I could then put to paper. Or build. Not that I can’t create and build – just…not… by literal visualisation.
I want to test this. I want to know whether everyone else I know has a virtual canvas to paint anything on, in their mind. And what their experience of that is, compared to mine. Can they hold on to a remembered face, and study its details? Can they envision buildings and places just as if they were there?
If so, that would seem so unfair. I have this brilliant, special mind (to me) but am unable to literally visualise, while most humans have this amazing gift without truly understanding its powers??
That being said, I’m not one that really envies others. My mental processes of visualisation and creation may differ from yours and most people. They may contain a workaround that I have used all my life, which has now become an expert quality in my mind. Perhaps I can do things you cannot. I can trace back my mental impulses and discover how intermediate steps are linked, what triggered what, when, how and why. I’m great at free association. I truly believe for me this is a skill which is above average compared to other people. I think I haven’t found anyone who is better with this particular skill, yet. But I haven’t looked hard either.
This may just be simple self-overestimation though. I have not discussed this topic with that many people. I would need to have many conversations just to be sure.
I don’t feel handicapped by a lack of visual imagination, unless I’m trying a visualisation exercise. I just can’t seem to do it right. When I did exercises or tests like that, I concluded that I simply can’t do it and absent further reference at the time, the thought and its sentiments ended there.
There must be a spectrum to it, like from “inner eye blind” to “vivid and detailed inner depiction”. Though I wonder, don’t people just imagine they are literally seeing with their mind’s eye?
I do get images though but more like images that come with thinking. I think and my memory is triggered, the pathways which get excited with that thinking easily connect to related imagery, the same way you would think of a sound or smell. Now that I think of it, after listening to a cassette tape of Queen – A Night at the Opera, in my teen years often enough, I can now play the entire album inside my head, into my mind’s “ear”.
Not in stereo though. Apparently I have a monaural mind’s ear.
