brains, curious, visualization

[wispfox]

When you close your eyes, do you see something?


I was asked this at Thanksgiving, after a long conversation involving face blindness, the fact that I have no visual memory and only vague glimmerings - after a _lot_ of work - of visual imagination. My initial reaction was utter and complete confusion, to the point of asking if the person only asked to get that reaction from me. It was, in fact, a serious question, although the reaction was itself appreciated.

I see nothing at all. I didn't really consider that other people might see something.

Indeed, this makes me wonder if this is why I am so sound-oriented when navigating a dark room; at least some of the other people in the room apparently visualize the room they are in when their eyes are closed. And were, indeed, perplexed when I said that I _listen_ to get around places that I cannot see, in addition to feeling my way. In fact, making noise so other people know where I am actively interferes with my ability to not run into things, because I am no longer able to _listen_. (I can hear when I am near objects because the sound quality changes, especially walls and doors and such. Less so smaller objects, since they are not at my ear height, I suspect, and are less fully encompassing and thus causing echos that I can hear)

Comments

[dajt.livejournal.com]

I see dark orange. If I put my hands over my eyes to block out the light coming through my eyelids, it's a much blacker orange. In complete darkness I see, hmm, neural static? Black with random hallucinatory flickers, anyway.

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

yeah, that

[randysmith]

Heee. Not that I need to know why you ask, but to answer the question: Sometimes. Sometimes I see stuff with my eyes open that isn't what's in front of me. It's never particularly confusable with "real sight", but I often (usually?) think in pictures or memories. As a random example, when I'm trying to decide on what restaurant to go to, I'll usually have a little camera scooting along the various streets of the towns in question (in memory) to remind me what the options are.

[randysmith]

To be clear about my original question: I did phrase it the way I did in order to sound whacked, but it was a serious question that had to do with visual memory and your instinctive use of it. I can also see nothing with my eyes closed (or some equivalent of dajt's answer), but I often don't; if I don't have visual input, I imagine things visually. I could imagine that the way I phrased the question (and thus the way you did) might confuse people other than you.

[caulay.livejournal.com]

I see what can best be described as "neural noise". Which my visual cortex tries to map into meaningful images.

The image is mostly dark, brown or black, and at first there is the persistence of the bright patches from when my eyes were open for a period of time. These distort more and more as they fade. After a long enough time, there begin to be bursts of colors, usually in waves or lines and normally limited to small regions.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Yes, both literally and figuratively: When I close my eyes in daylight, I literally see moving blobs of light and dark. But with almost no effort at all, I can also "see" things I remember, from the layout of the room in front of me to long-ago faces and places. I'm a strongly visual learner/navigator/rememberer, despite a lifetime of increasingly crappy eyesight.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

V cool! And not something I comprehend _at all_. As evidenced by the degree to which the question originally confused me. :)

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Yeah, our own perceptions shape our perceptions of perception, if you get what I mean. Synesthesia? I don't get that at all, although I'm willing to believe people who say they experience it.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's v hard to imagine things that one has absolutely no experience of. If one has experience that is close, it might be possible to approximate it, but even so. :)

[starandrea.livejournal.com]

::blinks:: Oh, I didn't know you meant something that was actually there! Huh. Here is my immediate reaction: yes. I almost always see a gate ::shrugs:: When I close my eyes, I perceive a gate in front of my vision. There's space on both sides of it, the near and the far sides. Usually I can't make it open.

When I read the cut part of your post, I was like, "Oh! You mean the place where I am?" No, I don't visualize anything that's physically around me. When I try to imagine what's around me, say for the purposes of navigating in the dark, I perceive them as spaces. Objects, I mean, I "see" in my mind as spaces of different... I don't know, temperature or attractiveness or something.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

gate: huh! Neat. When you can open it, what's on the other side?

visualizing as objects/spaces: huh. Not quite sure I follow, but neat. :)

A metaphorical answer

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

I think my brain uses vision in three modes: the window, the canvas, and the cable TV.

The window is what comes into my eyes and registers. So the window shows only red/black splotches when I close my eyes.

The canvas is blank, and requires an effort of will to make things appear. This is where I deliberately imagine things, their appearance, etc. So I could decide whether to make a drawing in real life by drawing it on the canvas first to see what it would look like, and spare myself the effort if it would look ugly.

The cable TV is what is running in the background without my conscious control. My hindbrain or whatever it is that builds my dreams never really shuts up; I just don't pay any attention to it when there's anything better going on, or I'm making something more interesting myself. The cable TV only wins when the window and the canvas are less interesting than the random daydream images taking up CPU time in the back of my head.

When I am trying to get to sleep, I generally am failing when I look at the canvas, and get insomnia. I fall asleep when I watch the cable TV.

Re: A metaphorical answer

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Ooh, I like the way you put this.

For me, the main differences are:

a) my canvas doesn't seem to function all that well. I can visualize slight changes to something I'm already looking at, and I can summon vague recollections of things I've seen in the past, but picturing something new is really tough for me.

b) my cable TV, as far as I can tell, only shows brief flickers of visual images from time to time, although its soundtrack is running pretty much constantly.

c) visual images don't keep me awake nights; it's the inner monologue that does that. No idea how to shut it off, either.

Re: A metaphorical answer

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I do navigate in dark rooms by trying to picture what I saw there when the room wasn't dark.

Re: A metaphorical answer

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Huh. Neat. Actual mental picture, not some other method? :)

Re: A metaphorical answer

[vvvexation.livejournal.com]

I think so, yeah. Huh. I just tried navigating with my eyes closed and I found I have a pretty stable mental image of the room, that even changes appropriately when I move. I didn't actually think my visualization skills were that good, but apparently for familiar things they are, at least on a coarse-grained "here's where the furniture is" level.

Re: A metaphorical answer

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Huh. So you can imagine visual things, but it is an effort of will. Your cable TV is fascinating; not sure that I have it.

Re: A metaphorical answer

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

Well, the three modes sort of blend together; it's a matter of what gets my attention. If I don't steer, my hindbrain does. So I can choose what to visualize, or something will get visualized for me, amounting to daydreams that can more or less tune out actual vision, making vision a background process that only jumps back when my environment reminds me to pay attention to it.

[fourgates.livejournal.com]

I am very low on the visual imagery scale, so I see nothing. Well, maybe some phantom light blobs, but those seem like noise.

I bet you'd like this guy's (http://www.slate.com/id/2154696/) echolocation class.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

With trained ears, you might be able to tell when you're passing an open door in a hallway by the way the sound "opens up" around you.

Huh.

Apparently I have trained ears. :)

An excuse to use this icon again!

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

(I'm assuming you don't mean seeing things because they're bright enough to shine through the eyelids. That's happened to me.)

Generally, 'no'. I put it in quotes because there is some noise there. But I have visual noise when my eyes are open, too. (We've discussed this.)

Sometimes, though, I get the impression of a strong light from just outside my vision in some direction. It's bright enough I feel like my irises should be constricting tightly, but not painfully. It only seems to happen in pretty dark rooms with my eyes closed.

re listening for spaces: I do this a little bit, but you're better at it. There's also a thing called "seeing with your face", which has to do with feeling air currents near walls and doors.

Re: An excuse to use this icon again!

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I don't know if I use air currents or not. If I do, it's less clear than the sound aspect. But then again, spoken input and output are high processing power for me; it could be that it doesn't matter if I'm actually only using something sound-based, it's just that communicating aloud interferes with processing needed for navigation. Dunno. :)

[siderea]

at least some of the other people in the room apparently visualize the room they are in when their eyes are closed.

Oh, if that's what you're asking after, no, not at all. I have almost no ability to visualize. With enough concentration I can sorta do it, but it's utterly unreliable -- I couldn't use that visualization to navigate a room.

But! I have this other, non-visual, but 3D-spacial model in my head, that I can refer to. Don't ask, I can't explain. So I'm pretty good at finding things in the dark (or reaching into a bag, or what not.) The closest I can come to explaining (I just realized) is that I spent most of my life learning and practicing how to reach out and find and manipulate objects without looking at them and without visualizing them, but just remembering where they are in space: I started piano at 6, and I no more visualize a (darkened) room to find things in it than I visualize a piano keyboard to play it (without looking at my hands).

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

Sounds like kinesthetic sense.

I heard long ago that about 60% of people learn by seeing, 30% learn by hearing, and 10% learn by doing, as their primary, most effective method. (Nearly everyone uses every method to various extent, of course.) The "learn by doing" mode is often described as kinesthesia, or spatial perception, although that word implies motion, while I think it ought to apply equally well to motionless spatial perception, or spatial *awareness*, as you prefer.

It shows up with my students, in that some get it when I draw a picture, while others get it when I talk it through, and still others don't get it at all until I talk *them* through the *motions*--literally--I think they grasp it when they move their hands in writing or tilt their head or grasp the object or what have you.

[siderea]

Actually, I'm a gustatory learner so I'm entitled to a IEP that lets me lick my professor's brain. :9

I'm in grad school in a branch of psychology, and I confess I rather don't approve of that paradigm, at least as it's escaped into the wild. It conflates learning modality with mental model with expressive modality -- it doesn't cope well with people like me who depend on visuals to learn, have no visualization ability, and are freakishly verbal in expression.

It also conflates conceptual processes with the concrete sensorium in a way that precisely reminds me of 15th century astrology mapping the magical properties of gemstones to the planets that "rule" them. I've written elsewhere about how I think, and I'm not a concretist, and it doesn't map to the sensorium; that makes it clear to at least me that the mapping to (merely some! of) the varieties of sensory stimuli is kinda arbitrary.

And, yes, it lumps a seven-minimum-sense organism's sensorium into three categories, wherein "kinesthetic" becomes the "other" category into which proprioception, tactility, gross and fine motor execution, empiricism, constructivism, etc are all ignomiously and indiscriminatly dumped. And then it fails to discriminate within a task, which category is really being invoked: if Jenny learns better by writing things down, is that because she needs to see them, or because she needs the kinesthetic experience of writing to remember?

Also, it seems to me to be a likely candidate of the Fundamental Attribution Error. I'm all about personality theory -- it's how I got into the field -- but this whole mapping of learning style preference to individuals sets two different sets of warning bells off in my head. For one thing, I think learning tasks are likely bound to a medium of study by culture, including microcultures. I note that as a musician who can both read and learn by ear -- which is the product of being trained in two traditions. For another, it simply seems likely that modal preferences in learning vary not just by person, but within a person by topic domain. It's not just that Timmy learns better when he can see it written down, he learns math better when he can see it written down, but still needs to read his Language Arts assignment aloud to parse it accurately, meanwhile Tina needs her math verbally presented, and to be allowed to see her LA assignments.

And, for another thing, it seems to confuse comprehension with memory. It seems to me in different areas, I have sometimes conflicting preferences. I can't memorize music from a score (I have to do it by ear), but I can't really understand it without one.

None of which is to suggest it's not great that you're conscientious about diversifying the sensory modalities through which the learning opportunities are provided. That is great. It's just not an adequate paradigm for thinking about how people of all ages really think, learn, express, or experience.

[gentlescholar.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the information. I was already aware of some of those distinctions, such as "how that fact is learned" vs "how that fact is recalled or employed", but some of that was new to me.

Also an excellent point that people learn different subjects in different ways. Actually some of my students come to me because they have a "math mode" which is dysfunctional, and I try to get them to reclassify the math I'm teaching to them as something in another category, so they can use one of their more functional learning attitudes on it.

You are quite right that I lump all the other ways of thinking and learning and knowing as "other" and vaguely put them in with kinesthetic modes because I don't understand any of them or have mental models of them--I'm not even familiar with some of the terms you were using. I just try to remain aware that there *are* other ways and hope to trigger them as needed.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Hmm! Neat. Not sure if it's something I do or not...

[ogre42.livejournal.com]

yup. makes perfect sense to me. I do the same thing. not echo-location per-se, but more that the ambiant sounds and even the lack of sound has a different texture to it.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Texture... that could be a good words for it, although more like... dampened or not for me.

[galaneia.livejournal.com]

I haven't thought about that in a long time.

When I was a kid I used to see swirls of color/light-dark. I also used to enjoy sitting in the sun with my eyes closed looking at the red.

These days I would say that I still notice the light/dark. I don't tend to notice color unless I'm in the sun; when I'm inside the color is a sort of really dark sepia (not the best description).

I don't think I stare at my eyelids for fun anymore, so it's a little hard to judge.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Huh! Yeah, I do (did?) this sometimes, although not often.

[cos]

A dark but not entirely black background/field, with transparent light-shapes, mostly in weak colors, floating around uncertainly. Usually they don't have sharp edges so I couldn't say exactly what shapes they are, but sometimes they do.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Neeeeat. Does anything seem to cause them to change how they float/are shaped/etc?

[cos]

It seems mostly random, but they're probably after-images of things I was seeing, because if I was seeing something particularly bold or bright before I closed my eyes it's always clearly present as one or more of those floating light-transparencies.

Edit: Well, some of them are. If I keep my eyes closed for a while I'll see some circles and lines (they sort of resemble what you might see in a microscope, but with a very different color scheme) that are almost certainly not afterimages.

[kemsit.livejournal.com]

I see different things when I close my eyes. Tonight, it was mostly just dark, with highlights of orange - a lot like my tortoiseshell cat, actually, who is mostly black with subtle streaks of orange.

But other times I have seen shapes, and sometimes there have been moving small bits, which my eyes can follow as they move away in one direction. The dark colors were the background, and the items in yellows or oranges.

And I, too, used to like to see the insides of my lids as they were red in the sun, usually while lying in an open field on top of a discarded mattress, feeling the gentle breeze.

[leiacat.livejournal.com]

When I close my eyes, I see the light if it's bright, or nothing if it's not. I cannot do the trick of closing my eyes and recalling what was right in front of me a second ago.

I can't visualize spaces around me. If I'm in the dark in a place I know, I remember it, but it's all about tactile cues and body memory with a small verbal component. Meaning, in a place that's very familiar to me in the dark (like the upstairs of my house, where I walk with no lights semi-regularly to not wake the sleeping spouse), it translates roughly to "feel the wall, this bump means switch to feeling the other wall, left, three steps forward and there's the corner of the bed to not run into". In less familiar places (even my living room, because normally I turn on the lights to navigate it, and so am not trained to be tactile about it) I just run into things.

One of my main dance partners occasionally dances with his eyes closed by doing the echo-location thing you describe (mostly when there aren't other people on the floor), so to me that is not at all an unfamiliar concept. I can't do it myself, though.

If I'm very, very familiar with something I can "visualize" it, but even then it's highly unreliable. I would never try to get the details right based on it.

Re: closing eyes

[wolfieboy.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'm a bit slow...

People talk about visualization and seeing stuff with you close your eyes but I never see anything other than floaters or other physical things. Tried visualization exercises and nothing happens.