There’ve been a couple isolated instances where I had unusually vivid imagined experiences – the first was a dream with really lifelike sensory input (specifically touch), and the second was that I heard a voice so clearly that I could almost have convinced myself I was hearing it. These highlight to me how very unlifelike my usual inner life is. I can think of sounds, get songs stuck in my head, find notes without vocalizing, and even sometimes combine a harmony line with a melody line in my head, but it’s not really anything like the experience of hearing. Similarly, the experience of visual imagination is really not anything like the experience of seeing.
I always knew that other people had different inner lives from me since my sister’s brain is completely different from mine and we fought about it a lot growing up. But it’s hard to imagine what other people’s inner lives are like – probably related to the fact that it’s hard to describe my own.
There’ve been a couple isolated instances where I had unusually vivid imagined experiences – the first was a dream with really lifelike sensory input (specifically touch), and the second was that I heard a voice so clearly that I could almost have convinced myself I was hearing it. These highlight to me how very unlifelike my usual inner life is. I can think of sounds, get songs stuck in my head, find notes without vocalizing, and even sometimes combine a harmony line with a melody line in my head, but it’s not really anything like the experience of hearing. Similarly, the experience of visual imagination is really not anything like the experience of seeing.
I always knew that other people had different inner lives from me since my sister’s brain is completely different from mine and we fought about it a lot growing up. But it’s hard to imagine what other people’s inner lives are like – probably related to the fact that it’s hard to describe my own.