Spooky, I thought mental visualization was something everyone had in varying degrees.
For me even emotions and stuff are abstract visualizations. When I think of the term "excited" and I try to 'look' at the feeling in my head, I see a yellow outline of some form like an amoeba that's suddenly getting dispersed like an egg does when thrown into a pan with a flick of a wrist, and immediately starts to crackle against the 'oil', before fizzling out. Except, not like an egg or oil, it's just the closest thing I can describe it as without showing it.
This is so cute. I mean, seriously. I would like to see your animation of this.
I'm thinking it might be worth it to try to animate what every feeling/emotion looks like to me, it's a thought that I've been nursing for a while, but hearing that there are people that don't actually see their emotions in visuals because they can't see in their heads at all makes me more intrigued.
I sincerely hope you're familiar with the term 'synaesthesia'. If not, look it up. I think experiencing emotions as visuals qualifies.
(this happens to me too sometimes, though without animation.)
About the sword thing, I can just make it in my head as if it was on paper or a screen, and change stuff around. The problem comes when focusing on details, there are portions that get lost and bumped out of RAM so to speak, but I think that's just a thing that can be trained. I'd feel mute or blind without that. It's amazing you can do the work you do without that ability.
As someone who can visualize but typically doesn't, I want to train that for memory/concentration purposes. I'm unsure whether it has clear benefit to drawing, though I guess it would be very hard to know for sure (One of the things I'm beginning to suspect from discussing in this thread, is that my sense of visual relationships is running at least partially off my proprioception. Maybe I am mentally replacing part of my sense of 'my body' with the object I'm drawing?)
I have talked to quite a few people about their experiences with visualising things, not just seeing, but also hearing, smelling and so on.
Of course there was some external input at some point to give your brain the memory of something, for example a favourite cake of yours, your mom used to make when you were little.
Most people I talked with would be able to visualise that cake, seeing it more or less vague, but also getting a sense of smell and sometimes taste too. For some it would be pretty much like having taken a bite of the cake a while ago and still having the lingering aftertaste without the cake actually being in their mouth. I get nothing like that, not even vague, just nothing.
Huh.. I just realized -- probably most of my 'visualization' went into audio. I have a pretty detailed memory of music and can 'set a tune playing' mentally; usually it is an active effort to stop it. I usually have one running.
Sorry. I was just wondering whether turning that off would improve performance in other areas.
* 'what is the step-by-step process of sense-perception?'
One or more of your senses get/s input/s from outside, be it light, soundwaves, smell particles, sense of touch etc, and then processes this to make you see, hear, feel, taste, etc things.
Mea culpa. The 'and then processes this' is what my question was intended to get at -- that until we know roughly what is occurring inside of 'and then processes this', and can walk a person through it, there's real doubt of whether [what we are prompting the person to try and do] is genuinely [visualizing].
(square brackets added to make that sentence less confusing.)
* 'Is there really no external input? Are other senses feeding into the visual sense at all?'
As I said, of course there has to be initial input at some point, you can not get the sense of tasting a strawberry if you never tasted one. But someone who can synthesise sense perception in their mind could probably go into an isolation chamber and easily visualise strawberries and what they taste like.
I meant at the time that the synthesization is occurring. But I think it might have been a poor question (since you almost always have some sensory input of the relevant type to compare the experience of X [strawberries] with)
* 'In what ways are two individuals' sense perception comparable, and in what ways are they incomparable?'I would say that they are comparable in that you can hook people up to an EEG machine and see what their brain is doing while they do things like looking at stuff, and then things that would lead people to visualise things, like reading for example. Of course you could always make the argument that you do not know what other people perceive, and my green might be totally different than your green. I however think that from what we know about evolution and neuroscience among other things, we can be fairly certain that most people, those who fall into the "norm" spectrum, perceive things very similar at a sense level.
Yes, I agree with that; their set of -individual- senses / qualia is very similar. I'm not sure I would so readily agree that compound or complex experiences (for example, the entire experience of a strawberry, smell + taste + feel + look.. +sound i guess; or visualizing a polyhedron) are comparable. I think it is like, we are programmers and each wrote our own Strawberry class (model of 'strawberryness'). Some of the properties are comparable, some properties exist in one model and not the other, some properties are mutually exclusive between models.
That (complex experiences) is the category in which I currently have put 'visualization'.
Edit: I would describe the process of visualising the sword in the same way. I could trace my eye around the edges of it but if I want to see the tip I cannot see the hilt. There's definitely a pretty low limit to how much I can visualise at once and to what fidelity I can imagine it.
Edit 2: I'd also add that probably our physical sense of sight is restricted in much the same way, you can see a whole room but you can only focus on one thing at a time.
That reminds me of an interesting resistance I noticed:
I can draw things below real scale or above real scale, with no real difference in the difficulty. But if I draw them significantly above scale, they creep me out. This remains true even when the picture is distanced from me to the point it appears 'correctly' scaled, and inanimate subject matter (eg. notepad, pencil) is -more- creepy than animate is.
