curious, brains

[wispfox]

Utterly 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.

Comments

[the-xtina.livejournal.com]

Would it be in this vein for me to say that I remember where things are better with my eyes closed?

I also find things in my pocket better if I close my eyes.  I don't know if that's visualisation or shutting out distractions, though.

[dilletante.livejournal.com]

i find it easy to get bogged down in questions like this because the difference between imagining-- even visual imagining-- and seeing is usually pretty clear to me. (then again, i know people who have much clearer visual imaginations than i do, so maybe that's just me.)

often when i close my eyes i see a lot of psychedelic visuals that look not unlike the old dr who title sequence (only without the tardis)-- these get more likely or more intense if i press on my closed eyelids (in the stereotypical "oh, i'm so weary, my eyes hurt" gesture). actually, often they're preceded by photo-inverse silhouettes of whatever i was looking at just before i closed my eyes, but those quickly fade.

often but not always, when i'm starting to fall asleep i get visual images that don't feel forced. they're usually exceedingly random, though eventually they often settle into a narrative, that often leads seamlessly into a dream.

but if someone says "imagine your living room," although i can summon up a visual image of my living room it doesn't really feel the same as looking at it would. and it doesn't usually have a lot of details unless i'm concentrating on those particular details at the time.

and when i navigate in the dark, i maintain a sense of where things are but the extent to which it's visual has mostly to do with the extent to which i can actually see things (it's hard to get a room completely dark).

[starphire.livejournal.com]

While I think the ability to visualize things (such that one can navigate a room eyes closed or imagine seeing something you've not seen before) is kind of a skill that can be developed, there seems to be some kind of prerequisite visualizing capability that isn't learned, or at least not at an age that people can remember suddenly having it. Maybe it's something determined early in life?

Here's a question: do you have an equivalent ability in the auditory or kinesthetic realm? Can you imagine how something might sound, or feel? If so, do you also remember that sense vividly? Some people do, but don't have the equivalent visual ability-perhaps some other sense serves the purpose for you?

[caulay.livejournal.com]

While I can visualize things, it's not what normally happens when I close my eyes, it takes a good deal of effort.

Generally, my imagination is verbal without a lot of sensory connection. When there is sensory components (without specific intention, that is), it's most often smell and/or touch based.

As for navigating a room with my eyes closed, that's normally done by remembering the relative positions. I generally know where I am relative to the objects around me but I don't "see" them in my mind. Instead, I just seem to "tag" regions with an abstract of what space is occupied and what space is free, along with what is in those occupied spaces.

Hmm, I'm having a hard time figuring out how to explain it in words, as language is so tightly intertwined with visual metaphors. Suffice to say, I know where things are and where I am relative to them but it's purely spacial without any visual component at all.

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

I cannot imagine/remember how something sounds, although my recognition of sounds is decent. Ditto on scent.

But I can... sort of... imagine how something might feel. Sort of.

I don't really have vivid memory/imagination for sensory things. I have to wonder if it's because they are generally somewhat overwhelming.

I have a decent imagination, it's just not sensory. It's ideas, concepts, that kind of thing.

[kemsit.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I just tried it. And the answer is: no.

I don't "see" my surroundings at all. As a matter of fact, I can feel myself reaching into my memory to try to remember where things are so I don't bump into them.

When I am traversing a dark room, I generally use the sensation of touch to protect myself and guide myself. But I neither see, nor "see."

Welcome to my brain.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

I think I'm quite strongly visual. And yes, I remember things in terms of what they look like. If I think about the garden out front, the thought is like a little picture of the garden, not in front of my eyes though, it doesn't interfere with what I'm looking at, it's like it's got its own internal screen, except I can't tell you where that screen is, just that that's where I see things I'm thinking about.

It's fairly important to me - I design clothes and crafty things and when I look at a bolt of fabric in the shop or some yarn, or whatever, I'm picturing what the thing I want to make will look like on that internal screen (also some feeling/tactile aspects which are hard to explain if you don't muck around with fabrics).

When I remember sounds/music, I do it the same kind of way, play it inside my brain. The annoying part is that I don't have a fast forward, so if I hear a snippet of a song and I want to remember the title, sometimes I have to continue playing it in my head until I get to the chorus.

Very, very rarely, I hear or see something inside my head I actually confuse with outside reality. Mostly, the remembering/imagining is both like seeing or hearing, but also obviously different.

[australian-joe.livejournal.com]

I am fairly sure I'm not actually seeing the room or my surroundings. But I definitely have a mental model which informs my navigation, it's just not particularly visual.

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! :)

[corivax.livejournal.com]

All of my thoughts are visual, or mostly visual, and I do keep seeing them when I close my eyes. A thought about wispfox is ... um, a rock cairn, sort of? Wow, I have no idea how to explain that. :)

Mmm... brains...

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

That's just really cool. I have some small piece of the ability to hear music in my head that you describe, but by no means the visual aspect of things.

Thank you for sharing!

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

Wow. All of your thoughts are visual, or mostly so? Damn. That's just... wow. I can't even begin to imagine that. :)

And yay, I'm a rock cairn!

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

I'm not consulting a map; I don't see the room's layout; I just know what's there.

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!

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

*nod* Much like me, then. :)

[wispfox.livejournal.com]

remembering where things are with eyes closed: totally in this vein.

And ditto, for searching for things in pockets with eyes closed, but I think that's about distractions.

[australian-joe.livejournal.com]

I'd forgotten this thread until this reply. I'm interested all over again now!

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. :)