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.
I am having the same trouble. I appreciate that Guy is distinguishing between Imagine and Mental Image for us to make it clear that they are different for him, but I’m not sure exactly what the distinction is. Especially for something so visual like, “Tom Cruise’s baby face.”
When I imagine that I automatically picture something. I think of images I’ve seen of Tom Cruise in movies or on movie posters. If I try to focus on just his face in isolation of any surroundings, then my image starts to feel more blurry. I think there’s a limit to the resolution of my mental imagery—and it seems that imagining the context as well helps—but I don’t think I can imagine things without picturing them at least to some degree.
Interesting. I never complained about my visual memory, yet what you describe matches my experience in similar circumstances. I don’t ever get anything close to the dream-like-quality images while awake. How do you know that you don’t have visual mental imagery, as opposed to being overly negative about what your mental imagery looks like? Another question: do you find drawings and diagrams helpful, or do you wonder what other people see in them?
It’s hard to know the difference between “I don’t have visual mental imagery” and “I’m overly negative about what my mental imagery looks like”, of course. The three things that most strongly lead me to believe I don’t have visual mental imagery are
the huge difference between what I see when nearly asleep and what I see normally
To my astonishment, I found that the great majority of the men of science to whom I first applied, protested that mental imagery was unknown to them, and they looked on me as fanciful and fantastic in supposing that the words ‘mental imagery’ really expressed what I believed everybody supposed them to mean. They had no more notion of its true nature than a colour-blind man who has not discerned his defect has of the nature of colour. They had a mental deficiency of which they were unaware, and naturally enough supposed that those who were normally endowed, were romancing. To illustrate their mental attitude it will be sufficient to quote a few lines from the letter of one of my correspondents, who writes:--
“These questions presuppose assent to some sort of a proposition regarding the ‘mind’s eye’ and the ‘images’ which it sees….. This points to some initial fallacy…… It is only by a figure of speech that I can describe my recollection of a scene as a ‘mental image’ which I can ‘see’ with my ‘mind’s eye’….. I do not see it… any more than a man sees the thousand lines of Sophocles which under due pressure he is ready to repeat. The memory possesses it, &c.”
discussions with those who claim they do have visual mental imagery, and their incredulity about my descriptions of my experience—incredulity that does not feel like they would simply describe their own experience differently. My sister, for example, is a writer, and when I described my lack of visual mental imagery said that she finally understood why I didn’t seem to understand the beauty of certain prose she’d shown me, because its beauty was mainly in the images it inspired.
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.
I am having the same trouble. I appreciate that Guy is distinguishing between Imagine and Mental Image for us to make it clear that they are different for him, but I’m not sure exactly what the distinction is. Especially for something so visual like, “Tom Cruise’s baby face.”
When I imagine that I automatically picture something. I think of images I’ve seen of Tom Cruise in movies or on movie posters. If I try to focus on just his face in isolation of any surroundings, then my image starts to feel more blurry. I think there’s a limit to the resolution of my mental imagery—and it seems that imagining the context as well helps—but I don’t think I can imagine things without picturing them at least to some degree.
Interesting. I never complained about my visual memory, yet what you describe matches my experience in similar circumstances. I don’t ever get anything close to the dream-like-quality images while awake. How do you know that you don’t have visual mental imagery, as opposed to being overly negative about what your mental imagery looks like? Another question: do you find drawings and diagrams helpful, or do you wonder what other people see in them?
It’s hard to know the difference between “I don’t have visual mental imagery” and “I’m overly negative about what my mental imagery looks like”, of course. The three things that most strongly lead me to believe I don’t have visual mental imagery are
the huge difference between what I see when nearly asleep and what I see normally
descriptions of mental imagery differences and changes like cousin_it’s aural imagination and fburnaby’s note and e.g. this passage from Galton’s paper:
discussions with those who claim they do have visual mental imagery, and their incredulity about my descriptions of my experience—incredulity that does not feel like they would simply describe their own experience differently. My sister, for example, is a writer, and when I described my lack of visual mental imagery said that she finally understood why I didn’t seem to understand the beauty of certain prose she’d shown me, because its beauty was mainly in the images it inspired.