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: 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. :)