Previously: Generalizing From One Example
There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?
Upon hearing this, my response was "How the stars was this actually a real debate? Of course we have mental imagery. Anyone who doesn't think we have mental imagery is either such a fanatical Behaviorist that she doubts the evidence of her own senses, or simply insane." Unfortunately, the professor was able to parade a long list of famous people who denied mental imagery, including some leading scientists of the era. And this was all before Behaviorism even existed.
The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images.
Summary: I do not have visual mental imagery. I want it. How do I get it? What exercises, if any, will help?
In further detail... Here's Francis Galton's Statistics of Mental Imagery paper. I'm not quite at the 3% level of completely unable to form mental images, but I'm close. In particular there are three times I have vivid, sharp mental imagery, and the existence of such times tells me I have the brain hardware to visualize. It's enough to let me know that I want it all the time. Unfortunately I don't know how to get it. And searching online has proven difficult and frustrating... for example this article is first of all about a different meaning of "visualize", it's talking about some kind of self-help motivational thingy, and second of all it starts by saying "How to Visualize: I want you to relax and close your eyes. Picture a hot, sunny day at the beach."
Full Stop. Halt, Catch Fire and Burn.
That's already too far. For those of us who don't visualize, practice definitely does not consist of pulling up mental images, playing with them in new ways, and expanding our imagination. I'm very good at imagination in some ways, but I lack that first ability to pull up a mental image. That's what I want to learn how to have!
Here is a description of what I can do, what I have tried, what I have learned, etc.
I see vivid visual mental imagery in 3 situations:
- While dreaming. My recollection of dreams has that I see fairly vivid, sharp, whole-scene imagery.
- Just before sleep. When I am in a certain almost-sleeping state, I can tell my mind to picture something - like an apple, or a horse - and I will often be able to see that thing vividly, briefly, and then it morphs into a scene. A beach with an ocean, or a pleasant clearing in a forest. If I try to alter the scene, like putting a beach towel and umbrella on the beach, the scene changes and morphs in some way but seemingly without regard to the changes I requested. Maybe my POV starts moving forward down a newly created path in the forest, for example.
- During meditation. Sometimes I feel like I'm in exactly the same mental state during meditation as I am just before sleep, except without the tiredness. The imagery has the same characteristics in both situations.
- Staying in visualization situations. When I find myself in the just before sleep or meditation state, I stay there for a while and play with imagery. This is fun but I have seen no increase in control over what I visualize and no increase in the range of states in which I can visualize.
- Explicit imagery practice. I have found or drawn simple shapes, like a square or a ball, then stared at the shape, closed my eyes, seen the shape for as long as it stayed visualizable, opened my eyes to refresh, repeat. This straight up hasn't worked at all. I don't visualize it, only have the afterimage, and need to refresh within about a second.
- Object drawing. I have had 3D constructions of blocks and tried drawing them from different angles on paper. This is an exercise I did while growing up during summers. Unfortunately there was no actual imagery or mental rotation involved, I just logic'd out where lines must surely go and drew like that.
- Picturing breakfast. The image is extraordinarily dim, extraordinarily ill-defined (at most an edge or two changing the black-purple-brown background static texture), and not at all natural colors.
- Vividness of Mental Imagery scale. This is a sequence of 100 descriptions of imagery, organized approximately in order from most vivid to least vivid. Of the given responses I identify most strongly with 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, and 99.
Movie: the last movie I saw was Top Gun. Let's check. I can Imagine Tom Cruise's baby face while Seeing static. When I attempt to Mental Imagery him with my eyes closed I get a small change in the texture of the Seeing static, just barely outlining a blob that I wish was in the shape of a head. I Imagine him walking up to Charlie's house, leaving his bike on the curb. I Imagine planes zipping through the sky, and in particular the scene at the end with a half dozen planes in a mass dogfight. When I Imagined the volleyball scene I Mental Imaged part of a stick figure in the static in the pose of someone about to spike, arm up and back, and I got about four stills. Like portions of these figures.
Someone's face: I'll use my wife's. I Imagine where her hair is placed, her left side just entering and hooked in her ear. I Imagine certain little features of her skin. I just Mental Imaged a vague sketch of a head with a clearly female hairstyle (nothing like Samantha's), and Imagined that the hair was yellow (Samantha's is brown), like this picture but without the body, with less vertically full hair, and with less detail. I Imagine comging home and giving her a hug and she has on her pink and black skull pants, a pink robe, and her shoulder is sore and she's holding it, but got no Mental Imagery.
A drawing: I had drawn a flowchart in the office I was squatting in last week. I can Mental Image a horizontally long, almost rectangular brighter blob that persists and has a darker area along the bottom when I think of the whiteboard. Sometimes the darker area is actually brighter. It's distinctly different, in any case. I Imagine and recall the general idea of where boxes are, in particular the start state and two sink states. It takes special effort to Imagine the colors that I specifically used to mean different things in the chart, but I recall them. None of that shows up as Mental Imagery.
I'm having trouble understanding what it means to remember and imagine these things without being able to mental-image them. It reminds me of blindsight, but specific to mental imagery.