Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
scientificamerican.com
Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
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Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
#2> “Mental images fill our daydreams, fuel our fancies, and color our memories. People often experience these images as richly detailed, making the imagination seem like a talented artist quickly painting a lifelike scene before our mind’s eye. Our results suggest that while the imagination may indeed be a good artist, it’s on a deadline, and stingy about paint.”
Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
#3> “Mental images fill our daydreams, fuel our fancies, and color our memories. People often experience these images as richly detailed, making the imagination seem like a talented artist quickly painting a lifelike scene before our mind’s eye. Our results suggest that while the imagination may indeed be a good artist, it’s on a deadline, and stingy about paint.”
Reminds me of those videos where a comic book artist draws a character in 1 minute, 10 minutes, and 100 minutes (sped up of course). Cool stuff but also hilarious at the 1 min sketches.
Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
#4This brings to mind the whole Aphantasia¹ concept (briefly mentioned in TFA), where some people don't see images in their mind. It always amazes me how people's minds can be so fundamentally different. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be born blind, but being sighted and still not being able to create mental imagery seems almost stranger.
Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
#5Jokes on them, I'm rotating a fleet of high quality shapes in my head.
Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
#6This brings to mind the whole Aphantasia¹ concept (briefly mentioned in TFA), where some people don't see images in their mind. It always amazes me how people's minds can be so fundamentally different. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be born blind, but being sighted and still not being able to create mental imagery seems almost stranger. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
I have aphantasia and didn’t realize it until adulthood. Both my brother and I have it (or lack it), though neither of our parents have aphantasia.
When people spoke of “daydreaming” I always assumed it was just a metaphor for being deep in thought, as it would be clearly impossible for people to visualize things without dreaming or hallucinating… boy was I wrong!
Apparently some folk can even look at a wall and imagine a scene playing out like a movie. Blows my mind every time I think about it!
Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
#7This brings to mind the whole Aphantasia¹ concept (briefly mentioned in TFA), where some people don't see images in their mind. It always amazes me how people's minds can be so fundamentally different. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be born blind, but being sighted and still not being able to create mental imagery seems almost stranger. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
The idea that people’s minds can be so different is something I didn’t realize until a couple of years ago and has been a lightening bolt moment for me in better understanding myself and others!
I believe I have aphantasia, and the idea of being able to visualize things on demand seem so strange to me that it’s hard for me to even imagine (isn’t it distracting?).
When I heard things like “count sheep to fall asleep” or “imagine yourself on a beach” to relax, I had assumed this was a figure of speech, but apparently people are doing this literally!
I’ve spent some time trying to practice visualizing things mentally and sometimes if I relax and try not to think about it I’ll get a glimpse of something (last time I tried I got something like looking at a forest from the sky) but the moment I try and focus it disappears in a snap, so I feel like it’s closer to dreaming than visualizing something mentally.
Related to this, I have plenty of audible conversations in my mind (either with myself or other people) and I’ll often have a song playing in the background of my mind (although music seems to be limited to just remembering things I’ve already heard) apparently some people can’t imagine sounds or voices which also seems equally bizarre to me.
Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
#8Something I find interesting about visualizing things in my mind's eye: I can't get a grasp on where, exactly, I'm seeing them. I'm not seeing them in front of me, to my left or right, above or below, behind me, inside me... they just seem to exist off somewhere completely different.
When I imagine a scenario like the one the paper talks about, the person coming into the room and knocking a ball off a table, I feel like I can see it happening from all angles all at once; if I try to repeat the scene in my mind, my perspective keeps jumping around. I can force myself to watch it from a single angle but it's trippy being able to watch something from multiple angles.
I don't generally visualize colors, but for some reason it's easy for me to imagine textures. Maybe this is in line with how early empiricist philosophers described vision as being a combination of sight and touch?
Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
#9This brings to mind the whole Aphantasia¹ concept (briefly mentioned in TFA), where some people don't see images in their mind. It always amazes me how people's minds can be so fundamentally different. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be born blind, but being sighted and still not being able to create mental imagery seems almost stranger. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
The idea that people’s minds can be so different is something I didn’t realize until a couple of years ago and has been a lightening bolt moment for me in better understanding myself and others! I believe I have aphantasia, and the idea of being able to visualize things on demand seem so strange to me that it’s hard for me to even imagine (isn’t it distracting?). When I heard things like “count sheep to fall asleep”…
And on the other hand, sometimes completely different people have uncanny similarities in their mental nooks and crannies — such as your mental audio track; same thing here (:
I'm reminded of this old thread, about kids on road trips imagining some little figure running/driving alongside, leaping over obstacles (I definitely did the same): https://old.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/comments/2te8jz/dae...
I'm sure there are more like that which people just haven't thought to mention to one another.
Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details
#10This brings to mind the whole Aphantasia¹ concept (briefly mentioned in TFA), where some people don't see images in their mind. It always amazes me how people's minds can be so fundamentally different. Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to be born blind, but being sighted and still not being able to create mental imagery seems almost stranger. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
The idea that people’s minds can be so different is something I didn’t realize until a couple of years ago and has been a lightening bolt moment for me in better understanding myself and others! I believe I have aphantasia, and the idea of being able to visualize things on demand seem so strange to me that it’s hard for me to even imagine (isn’t it distracting?). When I heard things like “count sheep to fall asleep”…
I had a similar lightening bolt moment a couple of years ago while pondering differences in intelligence, capability, and sanity when I realized that just like our faces have subtle differences in things like feature size, symmetry, proportionality, tissue texture, colour, like, all physical characteristics that go into facial beauty that the exact same thing is going on just a few inches away underneath the surface in our brain.
Those same subtle differences in physical structures are responsible for so much of the variation in human personality/intelligence that we experience, and yet we perceive it totally different than physical beauty because we can't physically see it.
A big part of dating is about sussing out whether or not someone has a sexy medulla oblongata, or a girthy corpus callosum.