curious, brains
Dec. 5th, 2008 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wispfoxUtterly fascinated by the answers I'm getting to my previous post question, but in some cases at least, I think I phrased the question poorly in terms of what I actually wanted to know.
I don't mean the physical appearance of the inside of your eyelids (although, I note, that I _do_ also see; it's why I need as much darkness as possible to sleep), although those answers are surprisingly varied as well.
I mean... visualizing, imagination, things like that.
My imagination is not visual. The closest I get is motion (gestural communication? body language? Not really sure), and that's really only if my mind is wandering, I'm dreaming, or I'm parsing a figurative statement literally (as I nearly always do before catching the intended meaning).
Do you "see" the room around you if you're trying to navigate it with your eyes closed? Some other similar thing where you're seeing something with your eyes closed, but it is not the inside of your eyelids?
I note that I do sometimes see color/light flashes, when listening to techno and similar. But that's there with my eyes open in that case, too, it's just clearer with them closed.
I don't mean the physical appearance of the inside of your eyelids (although, I note, that I _do_ also see; it's why I need as much darkness as possible to sleep), although those answers are surprisingly varied as well.
I mean... visualizing, imagination, things like that.
My imagination is not visual. The closest I get is motion (gestural communication? body language? Not really sure), and that's really only if my mind is wandering, I'm dreaming, or I'm parsing a figurative statement literally (as I nearly always do before catching the intended meaning).
Do you "see" the room around you if you're trying to navigate it with your eyes closed? Some other similar thing where you're seeing something with your eyes closed, but it is not the inside of your eyelids?
I note that I do sometimes see color/light flashes, when listening to techno and similar. But that's there with my eyes open in that case, too, it's just clearer with them closed.
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no subject
Date: 2008-12-06 06:28 am (UTC)I'm sure that doesn't make a lot of sense. :) I think it's a declarative type of knowledge... a *description* of the room that is sufficiently detailed to help build a basic visual floorplan... but that's not what I use it for. I do not at any time feel that I am *looking* at that map, just holding a lot of description in my head.
When I'm moving through a house in the dark, if I were to consciously verbalise the navigation thread in my head, it might go something like this: "the door is over there. There is a couch I skirt along the way, it will be here any moment now... right, there it is, which means that there's a corner just *here*... yep, so I now have about this far to go in this direction until it's time to slow down and start feeling for where the wall is..."
That might sound like it consumes a lot of CPU, but it's a very low-cost background task that does not intrude on my conscious threads of mental activity. I just know.
This is very much related to my ideas about working memory and caching most of my declarative knowledge that's currently relevant to or associated with whatever I'm doing and thinking. I'm not consulting a map; I don't see the room's layout; I just know what's there.
I *do* sometimes feel that I'm visually searching my mental model of a place - when I'm looking for something and trying to remember where it is. I find it faster to search my visual memories than to search the physical space. This of course does not always work. :) But I can often just search my memory a bit and then go directly to where something is.
That's also very interesting because it's the reverse of what I'm doing when I'm navigating in the dark - I am *not* recruiting declarative memory ("the keys are on the counter") but very obviously searching visual photographs that contain implicit knowledge that wasn't converted into declarative memory. It is exactly the same as flicking through a lot of security camera screens or sampling every 5 minutes of a video file until I spot something.
Yay working memory! :)
no subject
Date: 2009-01-12 09:28 pm (UTC)When I have even a small amount of this ability, this is also how mine works. Not visual at all. This is, indeed, much of how I navigate when driving and walking, it's just very much _not_ efficient or easy for me to do.
dark navigation: fascinating, and so not what I can do. But you knew that!
no subject
Date: 2009-01-13 06:56 am (UTC)I'm trying to decide how I would tell the difference between, say, a first-person-view of my surroundings that I knew so well I had internalised to the point where I scarcely noticed I was referring to it, and the same information converted entirely to declarative knowledge.
In fact - and I bet this will mess with your head! - I think it is sorta both, but not in the way you might expect. I think it works like this:
a) learn the environment very well
b) convert to declarative knowledge ("there is a couch approx this distance in this direction")
c) this itself is held in working memory to the point where I get a secondary image of it, almost, which I maybe can navigate visually.
So I *can* have a visual map, but it is built from the converted geospatial data rather than directly visualised and remembered. If that makes any sense!
I am fairly sure it is indirect in this way, because if somehow I build in a mistake into my converted-to-declarative, that mistake features in my hazy further-derived occasional mental map. :)