I was astonished to learn years ago that some people read without “hearing” the words on the page; even today, though I know that this happens, it strikes me as odd. I even dislike reading the word “quay” because my first reaction is that it should rhyme with “way,” and I know that it doesn’t. Ditto with names that don’t correspond to their spelling (Menzies, for instance—pronounced “mingiss” by Scots). And, perhaps relatedly, I have great difficulty visualizing anything, and never visualize anything clearly. I’m sure that there are genuine differences in visualizing ability—there are people who easily spell words backward by visualizing them and reading them off from right to left; I could no more do that than levitate. Richard Feynman somewhere described people at MIT learning to estimate the passage of time in different ways: some by counting (in their heads), others by picturing a moving tape with numbers on it.
I am the same—when I read, I hear my own voice speaking the words, and am also a poor visualiser of sense data in its sensory form.
The odd thing is that I am highly discriminating in terms of music, art, food (you might call it fussy, I would say I have an eye/ear for true quality...).
Even stranger is that I am an architect, and for the last twenty years I have been developing and practicing (as best I can) imagining non-existent three dimensional forms and relationships, and being very particular about them.
I do have fuzzy mental pictures, but what I really experience is more of a ‘gestalt’ of the character of the ‘right’ solution- which I then sketch and attempt to integrate into the technical/practical aspects of the design often testing back against the ‘feeling’ of the imagined result. I happen to think that I am quite good at making things which are considered beautiful using this method.
My dreams (of which I remember very few) are experienced as narrative—again more experientially than as pictures or words.
The interesting thing about this thread is that it would seem that there is a wide range of ways in which individuals experience the mental ‘currency’ brought into consciousness by any given concept or word—yet there is wide acceptance of the quality of certain types of writing. Thus individuals reading Dickens, say, will happily converse together, but are likely to be experiencing the narrative in radically different ways.
I was astonished to learn years ago that some people read without “hearing” the words on the page; even today, though I know that this happens, it strikes me as odd. I even dislike reading the word “quay” because my first reaction is that it should rhyme with “way,” and I know that it doesn’t. Ditto with names that don’t correspond to their spelling (Menzies, for instance—pronounced “mingiss” by Scots). And, perhaps relatedly, I have great difficulty visualizing anything, and never visualize anything clearly. I’m sure that there are genuine differences in visualizing ability—there are people who easily spell words backward by visualizing them and reading them off from right to left; I could no more do that than levitate. Richard Feynman somewhere described people at MIT learning to estimate the passage of time in different ways: some by counting (in their heads), others by picturing a moving tape with numbers on it.
I am the same—when I read, I hear my own voice speaking the words, and am also a poor visualiser of sense data in its sensory form.
The odd thing is that I am highly discriminating in terms of music, art, food (you might call it fussy, I would say I have an eye/ear for true quality...).
Even stranger is that I am an architect, and for the last twenty years I have been developing and practicing (as best I can) imagining non-existent three dimensional forms and relationships, and being very particular about them.
I do have fuzzy mental pictures, but what I really experience is more of a ‘gestalt’ of the character of the ‘right’ solution- which I then sketch and attempt to integrate into the technical/practical aspects of the design often testing back against the ‘feeling’ of the imagined result. I happen to think that I am quite good at making things which are considered beautiful using this method.
My dreams (of which I remember very few) are experienced as narrative—again more experientially than as pictures or words.
The interesting thing about this thread is that it would seem that there is a wide range of ways in which individuals experience the mental ‘currency’ brought into consciousness by any given concept or word—yet there is wide acceptance of the quality of certain types of writing. Thus individuals reading Dickens, say, will happily converse together, but are likely to be experiencing the narrative in radically different ways.