lukeprog comments on Being Wrong about Your Own Subjective Experience - Less Wrong
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Neat. Your conclusions don't surprise me much, but I hadn't heard of the evaluating-your-mental-imagery exercise before. It's obvious to me now that my mental images are very foggy; they're mostly concept with a small amount of visual detail attached. However, I'm sure this a faculty that can be improved. Before I started my music training, songs stuck in my head were tuneless, basically the lyrics in rhythm but in a kind of monotone. After 7 years of being in bands and choirs, I can now hear tunes in key in my head (imagining melodies involves feeling them in my throat a little, as if I were singing them) and I can even "hear" chords by superposing several notes. (Composers such as Mozart had incredible capacities to do this, which I will probably never be able to mimic...my imagined melodies still lack "texture" i.e. the difference in sound between a flute, trumpet, voice, etc). Presumably I or anyone else could do the same with mental images by doing some kind of art training.
As an aside, in a novel I wrote, there is a community of children that use echolocation to 'see' objects underwater in flooded houses.
Titchener wrote at length about exercises that he thought could improve people's ability to accurately report (to themselves or others) the character of their own subjective experience. But Titchener is long and boring, so I recommend the summary of Titchener's recommendations in chapter 5 of Schwitzgebel's book.