View Full Version : Weird psychology question regarding visualization.

SenorBeef Do a little excercise.



Imagine a big wheel, like you'd see in an old fashioned mill, or one of those giant wheels that propel river boats. Picture it from the side.



Now, imagine the wheel gradually speeding up, until it's going fairly quickly.



Now imagine that wheel slowly and gradually stopping, and reversing direction - don't replace the image with another wheel which is going the other way, but make sure the image you have already does that.



Easy to do? I would imagine so.



But I have extreme difficulty doing it. I spent 10 minutes last night trying to do that, and gave myself a nasty headache in the process because I was focusing so hard. It wasn't that I couldn't picture another wheel going the other way, but I couldn't make the current one stop. Whenever I tried, as silly as it sounds, the "torque" of the wheel in the visualization would go up, and it would overpower my attempts to slow it down.



So, I can't even control the visualizations in my own head, without extreme difficulty. Is there a name for this? Is it indicative of some other psychology condition, like OCD perhaps?

ReuvenB I can't do it either, and I'm having a similar problem to yours. I can make it slow down, but never stop.

I wonder if it's universal, or a small subset of the population has odd problems with it?

And for the record, I tried to do it before you described your difficulty doing so, so it can't just be the power of suggestion.

panache45 For whatever reason, I'm having no problem with this. I start with a stationary wheel, get it going clockwise, slow it down to a stop, and start rotating it counterclockwise. I can even get it going clockwise again.



Maybe you're experiencing some sort of visual inertia, based on lack of context. Would it help if you visualized a bicycle wheel, with the bike slowly moving forward and backward?

Fringe I can't do it. At all. What's up with that?

picunurse I can do it, easily. panache45, do you think in "pictures"? Its possible the visualization is easier for "picture thinkers" as opposed to "word thinkers" (or how ever the heck the rest of you accomplish your think.)

:Shrug:

chrisk I can do it pretty easily I think, but I'm a strongly visual thinker myself.



picunurse: I've heard (from my brother, who goes on about things like this a lot,) of at least four 'systems of perceptive thought' -- visual (pictures), audio-tonal (sounds and pitches of music), audio-verbal (words), and kinesthetic (touching and manipulating objects mentally.) All four have different strengths and weaknesses, and most people use at least two often, in varying proportions. Just thought I'd mention that.

Yllaria Do you have problems controlling other images? If not, some non-verbal part of your mind may just have an opinion on what to do with that particular image. I've participated in a few guided meditations and it amazed me how I could control some things and could not control others. It was interesting.

One And Only Wanderers I can't do it. At all. What's up with that?



Me too. I've never been able to visualize.

picunurse I can do it pretty easily I think, but I'm a strongly visual thinker myself.



picunurse: I've heard (from my brother, who goes on about things like this a lot,) of at least four 'systems of perceptive thought' -- visual (pictures), audio-tonal (sounds and pitches of music), audio-verbal (words), and kinesthetic (touching and manipulating objects mentally.) All four have different strengths and weaknesses, and most people use at least two often, in varying proportions. Just thought I'd mention that.

Thank you! That's very enlightening. I am mainly visual, but I'd have to say I use audio-tonal and to a lesser extent, kinesthetic.

Balthisar What?!? People can visualize literally? Like visuals you see when you dream? I'd always thought that asking, "can you visualize something" was just a petty phrase. Like when you ask me to visualize this wheel, I can't see the dang thing at all. I could describe the characteristics that I imagine if told to think of a mill-wheel, for example. Or the contrary (as an engineer, all the time is the contrary) someone will describe something to me as a concept (let's build such-and-such), and I won't "see" it in my head, but I know exactly what it looks like without seeing it. You can tell me to rotate it 90% along a certain axis, and I'll know what it looks like, but I won't see it. So when asking me about mill-wheel motion, I would say that I can visualize it, but not actually really mean that I can see it. And I certainly can't see it in motion -- I can only think about what motion is and know what changes from instantaneous moment to instantaneous moment. In that respect, since every "frame" is motionless, stopping the thing is no problem for me.



So, am I nuts? Or am I thinking now that "visualzing" isn't really what I'm thinking you're all saying -- you can really see this stuff? And why can't I? What have I been missing my whole life?

Punoqllads So, am I nuts? Or am I thinking now that "visualzing" isn't really what I'm thinking you're all saying -- you can really see this stuff? And why can't I? What have I been missing my whole life?I don't know about others, but for me, visualizing an object is pretty close to seeing. Zoom in, zoom out, rotate, distort; all that. If I'm really concentrating on visualizing, my perception of the ouside world closes down pretty hard even though my eyes remain open.

InvidiousCourgette So, am I nuts? Or am I thinking now that "visualzing" isn't really what I'm thinking you're all saying -- you can really see this stuff? And why can't I? What have I been missing my whole life?I am with you Balthisar. I am pretty pissed about this. Some folks can think of a wheel and actually see it? WTF. Have I been dealt a duff brain or what? It might be worth another GQ, but what is up?

UncleBeer What?!? People can visualize literally?

Yup. And actually it isn't all that uncommon. My girlfriend can't visualize either. She suffers migraines quite badly and has to visit her neurologist frequently. She spoke to him about this quite recently and he was not only unconcerned, but told her that it isn't extraordinary at all.

UncleBeer Whoops! Obviously you already know what I stated above, Balthisar. I read that all important word "can" in your post as "can't." Apparently I have trouble visualizing things that are right in front of me.

InvidiousCourgette Yup. And actually it isn't all that uncommon. My girlfriend can't visualize either. She suffers migraines quite badly and has to visit her neurologist frequently. She spoke to him about this quite recently and he was not only unconcerned, but told her that it isn't extraordinary at all.

Is this related to why I have always been confused by those police identikit suspect drawings you see? I have always thought I would have next to no chance telling anyone what someone I saw looked like if I only saw them briefly. Can you folks who visualise bring up an image of someone you have seen?

GargoyleWB I take it so much for granted that I often get surprised when people don't (or can't) visualize.



I'm similar to a previous poster...I visualize as a "separate vision" but complete with color, motion, even tactile sensations like force and texture. Depending upon the degree I sink into it, my mind either multitasks with what my real world is, or sort of overlays my visualization simultaneously over my vision, or my real world perception just kind of grays out and gets nearly completely replaced by my visualization. It is also fully controllable, the waterwheel spinny thing is easy, although when I did it there was a Grimms-esque ogre that was poking his finger in the spokes of the wheel and spinning it forward and backward while befuddled fish poked their heads up out of the wheel's water buckets as the water sloshed about. But that's just me, if I need to visualize a wheel rotating forward and then backward, it helps a lot to also visualize a logical reason for the wheel to be doing so.



I think that this is one reason that many people simply don't enjoy reading fiction novels. When I read a novel, I visualize very intensely at the same time I am reading, I *see* the shadows cast by Sting in the caves of Moria, they aren't simply words on a page that I am parsing.

SenorBeef When you visualize something (at least me), you don't actually see something in a visual sense. If your eyes are open, the input stays the same, you're looking at whatever you're looking at. The visualization comes at a non-physical level - there's a layer in the perception center of the brain that handles it, or something. I thought it was something that everyone could do .. it's hard to describe it exactly.



It can be helpful to close your eyes, as the lack of other stimulus can let you focus even more.



It's hard for me to believe that other people can't visualize, maybe they just misunderstand what's meant by it.. or maybe not. If someone asked you what side of your desk, or something, that your stapler sits on... couldn't you create a picture of your desk from memory and then look to find out where it was? How else would you do it?

SenorBeef Is this related to why I have always been confused by those police identikit suspect drawings you see? I have always thought I would have next to no chance telling anyone what someone I saw looked like if I only saw them briefly. Can you folks who visualise bring up an image of someone you have seen?



Sure - any visual memory. Same as an auditory memory, really. If you can remember what someone said, in the voice that they said it, then why not what they look like? Huh. Never knew there were people that couldn't.

bouv Can you folks who visualise bring up an image of someone you have seen?



Of course I can! I'm actually amazed that there are people who can't "see" things in their head. What do you think of when masturbating? I usually think of my really hot ex-girlfriend. Do you people see words like 'fuck' and 'stick it in my poop chute'? :confused: Maybe that's why some people need porn, since they can't imagine it at all.

missbunny Its possible the visualization is easier for "picture thinkers" as opposed to "word thinkers" (or how ever the heck the rest of you accomplish your think.)



I would consider myself more of a word thinker but I had no problems visualizing the image. I can easily make it into different colors - blue spokes - no, red! And I can see the water rushing underneath and the whitecaps caused by the turning wheel. I can see the wheel just floating by itself or attached to a boat.



I can't, however, for the life of me, make one of those colored dot pictures turn into something though. No matter how hard I try.

Balthisar It's hard for me to believe that other people can't visualize, maybe they just misunderstand what's meant by it.. or maybe not. If someone asked you what side of your desk, or something, that your stapler sits on... couldn't you create a picture of your desk from memory and then look to find out where it was? How else would you do it?



That's what I'm getting at. I always thought of what I did as "visualization." But it's seeming to me that reading the OP is causing me to no longer understand what is visualization. Now I think it's like explaining blue to blind person...



As mentioned by GargoyleWB, I love to read novels. I don't "visualize" them in the optical sense (I'd always thought I "visualized," just not as described in the OP) -- but I can imagine the feelings in the scenes often enough. Hmmm... now that I think about it, I went through all seven Dark Towers, and have no idea how Roland looks. So maybe I'm not visualizing correctly? Or at all?



As for looking for things on my desk, well, I'd tend to think more geometrically. I don't see an image of my desk with my stapler. I remember my desk as an object located at a point in space, with various other objects in relation to it. But now that I mention it, do I really do that, or is my self-analysis screwing me up?



Okay, here's another -- I'm a map person. I can look at my start and end points, drop the map, and go. Give me directions, and I'm just screwed. Doesn't this mean I'm a visual person or something? So why can't I visualize?

Ruby I had no idea that everyone couldn't visualize. Man, the things you learn around here.



For those of you who can't visualize, can you "see" objects in your head, but just not in motion? If I said, "tomato", what do you think of?

InvidiousCourgette I had no idea that everyone couldn't visualize. Man, the things you learn around here.



For those of you who can't visualize, can you "see" objects in your head, but just not in motion? If I said, "tomato", what do you think of?It is a red thing. In my fridge. Regardless of whether it moves or not. Wow, I got dealt a bad hand. I wanna visualise stuff!

Hampshire I always visualize thing in my head and was suprised when my wife couldn't.



She had a 2-D drawing of a proposed closet organizer for a 6' wide closet that was divided into three 2' sections. We agreed that it would be too crowded. I said we could just drop off the last section and just expand the first two to 3' sections.

She looked at me like I was from Mars. I even covered up the third section with my hand and told her it would look like that but wider. She still couldn't grasp what I was saying.



One thing that I can't do however is draw a continuous clockwise circle in the air with my right toe and draw a number 6 on a piece of paper.

Lissla Lissar I can visualize, but only dimly, in indistinct images. I can't see faces except in brief glimpses. I think I'm tactile/verbal/auditory, and then visual.





I can make the wheel stop abruptly and go the other way, but I can't make it slow down. Interesting.

Punoqllads It is a red thing. In my fridge. Regardless of whether it moves or not. Wow, I got dealt a bad hand. I wanna visualise stuff!It could be worse. You could be tone-deaf.



Actually, if you were both tone-deaf and unable to visualize stuff, then you could be on TV as an American Idol contestant. Or at least in their promos.

StarsApart Wow, this is an interesting thread. I have no problem visualizing things (and I didn't know other people did), nor do I have a problem with the task in the OP. But... I have problems with similar things. Sometimes, when a mental picture gets stuck in my head of something moving, it won't stop or get out, no matter how hard I try. It just sits there in the back of my mind turning or whirling or whatever.



I don't hear in my thoughts, though. (Perhaps because I'm hearing impaired?) I understand what people are saying in my memories and so forth, but I don't "hear" it the same way I "see" things in my head. Sometimes they show up like closed captioning on TV or subtitles on DVDs. Same goes for touch, and scent. All I do is see.

ouryL I can do it easily, so much so that I can't imagine why you can't. Maybe it's because I did as a child, as I sometimes do now, actually watch mundane stuff as they do their thing. :D

ReuvenB After a bit of practice (something to do before going to bed) it seems I can do it if I concentrate hard enough AND have some sort of background noise. If it's silent, I can't do it at all.

Maybe I really am a freak.

*shrugs*

Scott Plaid This is making me think about myself. I can look at a screen, at the same time as I mentally visualize a wheel doing exactly what has been discussed. It is a little fuzzy around the edges, and perhaps due to watching cartoons, I now have the mental image of such things in my head occurring inside my head.



To those who have problems visualizing things, how do you remember events? As a series of pictures and brief video recordings, emotionally, or how?

Trigonal Planar I'm very aware that there are quite a few people who cannot visualize. I'm an engineering student and it never ceases to amaze me how many people get confused when, say the prof draws a cut-away view, on the board. I on the other hand can see it immediately, rotate it, scale it, etc.



Then I have to sit there and attempt to explain how "no, no, that bit there is a disc that rotates out of the board...that pole over there is aligned radially to the disc and doesn't move...." etc.



However, despite my visualization skills, I cannot draw worth a damn. I can never get my hands to "trace out" what I see in my brain.

kayT How do I remember things? In WORDS. Everything in my head is WORDS. I may have a hint of some picture brush through my mind but it's not known; to KNOW it it has to be in WORDS. The idea of pictures of things in your mind is completely incomprehensible to me. I guess I basically don't believe it. I think you are describing something to yourself in words so vividly that you think you see it. But my brain does not have any pictures in it.

elfkin477 I can picture the wheel...but only because I've seen this happen before; water drips off the blades as the wheel slows to a stop before going the other way. Probably in a movie. (why is the wheel intially going counter-clockwise? hmm) If I hadn't seen it before, I'd have a lot more trouble doing it, because I think mostly in words. So much so that it took me forever to figure out what people mean when they said suchandsuch a children's book caused kids to use their imaginations which seemed odd to me because the kids weren't writing the story just reading it- I finally realized this didn't click because don't usually picture anything when I read, but a lot apparently do. I love to write but don't really picture things that I'm writing about either, actually; I'll get a few "postcard" images, but not like a movie how some people describe. Dreams and fantasies, on the other hand, are movie-like, go figure.

Balthisar I'm very aware that there are quite a few people who cannot visualize. I'm an engineering student and it never ceases to amaze me how many people get confused when, say the prof draws a cut-away view, on the board. I on the other hand can see it immediately, rotate it, scale it, etc.



Then I have to sit there and attempt to explain how "no, no, that bit there is a disc that rotates out of the board...that pole over there is aligned radially to the disc and doesn't move...." etc.



However, despite my visualization skills, I cannot draw worth a damn. I can never get my hands to "trace out" what I see in my brain.



Interesting, as an apparent non-visualizer, I have no problems with any of these technical tasks. In fact I excel at them, and it's what I do for a living. And most of my hobbies are technical in nature. But your prof is drawing things, making them visual -- I don't get what's not to get in that situation?



Drawing -- heh. My drawing's always been very non-artistic and completely technical in nature as far back as I can remember. I can draw just about anything in wireframe, but ask me to make it artistic? Might at well ask me to understand poetry (that artistic poofy stuff). Now I'm not at all unartistic -- I'm a rather good writer. I can force things to look nice in Photoshop.

chrisk By the way, for the record, even though I say I'm a 'strong visual thinker', I'm not one of the people who ordinarily can project mental images with the same size and clarity of things I actually SEE. Sometimes that happens, or nearly happens. Normally it's just somewhere between 'dim sketchbook with vague colors' and 'thinking on a white piece of paper.' Even at the latter extreme, which is I think the same thing Balthisar means when he says "I know exactly what it looks like without seeing it," that qualifies as visualization to me.



You're thinking about it in terms that would correspond to the visual sense, as opposed to any other sense -- that's what counts to me. How closely those thoughts match up with *real* vision can vary widely.

Balthisar Oh, just thought of something: here's the acid test, you visualizers: can you count the number of paddles on the mill-wheel? You know, once you cause it to stop (for those than can :dubious: ). I can't count 'em. I can cheat, and think about it how I would build it, and come up with a number there.



So, visualizers, are you just super engineers able to throw everything together in a quick image, or do you only "see" items that you've seen in the past?

The Hamster King The idea of pictures of things in your mind is completely incomprehensible to me. I guess I basically don't believe it. I think you are describing something to yourself in words so vividly that you think you see it.



No, it's not just words ... I can really, really see it. The proof is that I can manipulate the visualizations in ways that I couldn't if it was just words.



For example, if I'm doing level design for a videogame I can look at a 2-D sketch of the level and translate it into a 3-D model in my head. Then I can imagine standing at any point in the model and make design decisions about how the architecture will affect gameplay. And then I can translate those decisions back into corrections on the 2-D sketch. The experience is kind of like using a CAD system or other 3-D visualization tool.



Or ... another example: I wrote the screenplay for the cutscenes in my current game. While I was writing it I visualized the entire story shot-to-shot. I wasn't just hearing the words the characters spoke, I also saw all the camera angles and cuts and edits. It was like watching the movie in my head before it was even storyboarded.

Roadfood But I can visualize a spinning wheel. It's a bit indistinct and not really in color and it lacks the kind of detail that other posters have talked about, but I can definitely "see" it in my mind. I am jealous now, though, of those who apparently have photo-realistic visualization ability.



And, like another poster, I've thought that if I ever found myself in one of those "describe a person to the police sketch artist" situations, I'd be pretty worthless. I'm not even sure if I could get the artist to end up with an accurate picture of someone I see every day. I mean, I know what my wife looks like, but when I visualize her face, it's not like looking at a photo.



Sounds, on the other hand, I have no trouble with. When I "auditorize" a song, I hear it in my head in great detail. I can distinctly "hear" the different instruments, the subtleties of tone, the nuances of the singer's voice, etc. And I can control what I mentally hear pretty easily. I'm not immune from getting a song stuck in my head, but it's easy to replace it with some other song, if I want. Are there people who have trouble doing that, like there are people who have trouble making the wheel spin the other way?

The Hamster King I am jealous now, though, of those who apparently have photo-realistic visualization ability.





It's not all roses, though. Back when I was an engineering student in college I discovered that my comprehension of math was constrained by my ability to concretely visualize the problems. Once it turned into purely abstract symbol manipulation I wasn't able to do it anymore. My sort of visual brain really can't handle anything more abstract than calculus.

NinetyWt Wow. I guess I, too, took "visualizing" for granted.



Y'all would really hate my daughter, though. If she's studied a text for a test, as long as she can remember what page the needed information is on, she can turn to the page and read the paragraph. In her head.



I think she's a freak of nature. ;)

Chronos I had no problem with this exercise, but that's because I subconsciously added another element to my visualization. I put the wheel on a rubber band instead of on a shaft, so when it was spinning clockwise, it was winding up the band, which eventually wound up tight, stopped the wheel, and reversed it. I wasn't actually visualizing the rubber band itself, but that's the motion I was visualizing.

Askia Okay-- Senorbeef. Not only am I able to fairly easily imagine the water wheel, from the back of the wheel, or the side, or an overhead view, or an underwater view looking up at the paddles diving and rising from the water surface and an above water panoramic view, I can hear the slosh of the water, I can smell the wet wood, I can taste the air.



Moreover I find I can imagine it easier to envision all this with my eyes open than when I close my eyes, at least at first. I imagine the water dripping noisily off the paddles and hitting the river, I can feel the heat of the day, the smell of the blackwater river.



When I stop the wheel and count the paddles, there are twelve. The same as the slices of pie, or the numbers of a clock, or ths partitions of the Chinese Zodiac.



Weirdly -- when I imagine this in my mind's eye, the scene is never still. I'm approaching the water wheel as if peering from a camera on wheels, sometimes from a crane shot, sometimes hand held, sometimes not.



It helps that I have a solid frame of reference -- there was a water wheel on the river (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edisto_River) at the city park down on the other side of town where I grew up. I used to climb out on the thing when my Mom wasn't looking. When I imagine the wheel, its tethered to the bank without a riverboat -- unless I want to imagine a riverboat. Then the riverboat's there, instantly. It looks like the one in Karma Chameleon.



When I reverse the wheel in my mind, I see and I hear the wheel creaking to a halt, the water sloshing off the paddles and sides, the groan of the engine as it kicks into reverse, the chug of the wheel as it moves determindedly backwards.



My question: for those of you who visualize well, how many of you consider yourselves skilled visual artists in say, drawing, painting or photography? Or working with clay? How many of you can draw well from still life, or recreate the images in your mind?

delphica Oh, just thought of something: here's the acid test, you visualizers: can you count the number of paddles on the mill-wheel? You know, once you cause it to stop (for those than can :dubious: ). I can't count 'em. I can cheat, and think about it how I would build it, and come up with a number there.



So, visualizers, are you just super engineers able to throw everything together in a quick image, or do you only "see" items that you've seen in the past?



Oh man, this thread is killing me because I never knew that some people didn't visualize things before. Life is so cool because you really can learn something new every day.



Anyway, I thought this question was so interesting. I'm a good visualizer, but unlike Balthisar I'm not very good at moving the visuals around so I can examine them. In my mill wheel vision, there's lovely stream throwing up some mist, and some nice shrubs on the bank that make it difficult to see all the paddles. Once I get the image (which is almost immediately after someone says "picture a mill wheel") it's difficult to change the image to do anything productive with it. I would have a hard time counting the paddles on a mill wheel that I saw in person (what with climbing around by the stream and everything), so it seems the same when I visualize it.



Mr. Del just pointed out to me that I don't need to count all the paddles on the wheel in the first place, I can simply count the ones on the top half and times it by two. Dude, I can't even do that with a real wheel. I understand the concept and everything, but the execution is difficult.

picunurse I can do it easily, so much so that I can't imagine why you can't. Maybe it's because I did as a child, as I sometimes do now, actually watch mundane stuff as they do their thing. :D

It started sooner than that. Its at least partly genetic.





I'm curious about how others remember what they've read.

For me, if what I read was descriptive, I remember it in the pictures or the "movie" that reading it created.

But with technical stuff I "see" the text.



Any variations on that theme?

picunurse Askia I'm artistic. I can paint from memory (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v483/picunurse/Art%20work/jamaca7mile.jpg) or from total imagination (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v483/picunurse/Art%20work/neverbeach.jpg)

I have trouble doing line drawings, partly because I'm left handed, and partly because my hand doesn't always understand what my brain tells it to do.



NinetyWt She's NOT a freak! I do that too.



Pochacco YES! Math was torture. The numbers wouldn't "stand still!" I drove my algebra teacher nuts, because the equations were easy. They became "maps" in my head, but the numbers wouldn't cooperate. I'd draw out hugely complex equations, and make a simple subtraction error, every time.



kayT If its any consolation, I have trouble believing you too.:D Its like being told that other people have a sense of xzourmth, but it gives them the same information as my sense of smell.

Triskadecamus Wow. It was really hard to slow down the wheel, at first. I used a stone mill house, with a breast shot wheel, moving relatively slow, from a pretty steady flow of water. Big mistake. The thing is massive, made of wood, and fifteen feet or so in diameter. That thing had massive momentum.



So, I made it a tiny little model of a mill wheel. Piece of cake. I can flip that sucker back and forth no problem.



So, I tried it again with the full sized version. No dice. It takes several minutes to stop it, and I had to put in a movable sluice to dump the water onto the back end of the wheel to get it to move in reverse.



Talk about hide bound visualization! Now I know why I don't invent stuff.



Tris

Triskadecamus Oh, and twelve pieces, Like slices of pie!



What kind of cheapskate cuts a pie into twelve pieces!



Tris

E. Thorp Y'all would really hate my daughter, though. If she's studied a text for a test, as long as she can remember what page the needed information is on, she can turn to the page and read the paragraph. In her head.My mother tells me she got through high school that way. I've always wanted a photographic memory (not to mention perfect pitch).



I don't visualize well, but my wife does. She has vivid dreams and I have dull ones; she memorizes poetry easily but can't remember phone numbers, and I'm the opposite. When it comes to foreign languages, she remembers the vocabulary and I understand the grammar. Add the two of us together and I guess you'd get one decent brain.

Chronos Interesting. Previously, I was just imagining the wheel by itself, floating in space. That thing, I have no trouble reversing. But I just tried it with more detail, with an attached mill building and a flowing stream, and found it much the same as Triskadecamus: I could abruptly reverse it (and the stream), but I couldn't slow and gradually reverse it without some sort of mechanism for reversing the stream (nor could I imagine the stream not moving at all). I think that this might be due to my habitual thinking and observing of physics: I can visualize things behaving physically, but I have a much harder time with nonphysical behaviour.



And the wheel doesn't have any number of spokes (not "I can't count them", not "It doesn't have spokes", but "it has spokes, plural, but not any number of them") unless I concentrate on that aspect, but when I do, it has twelve of them.

NinetyWt I'm really enjoying this thread.



After discussing with Hubby, he tried to make the wheel run backwards, but because of his practicallity he resisted trying to make the water run backwards. :p



He's the kind of person who can look at the shafts running out of a gear box and tell you what the gears look like inside; he's very intuitive about levers and forces and what-not.



Another thought I had: who else tastes and smells the object brought up in conversation? One poster had a question along the lines of "If I say tomato what do you see"?



Not only do I see the luscious fruit, I can smell and taste it along with the visualization. Certain words evoke the senses in me. Example: say "knife"; not only do I see a visualization of the knife, I can feel its steely hardness and the sharpness of its edge. Say "fuzzy kitten" and I can feel its wamth and hear its purr.



Good or bad? Some days my senses drive me CRAZY. I'm particulary hyper-sensitve to noise; I can hardly bear the TV. There's a flourescent fixture in the kitchen which gives off a high-pitched keen. I'm the only one in the house who can hear that. :dubious:



OTOH my son has an exacerbated sense of smell. He says *everyone's* breath stinks. Poor thing.

NinetyWt Oh, I forgot, both Hubby and I said (at the same time) that the wheel had twelve spokes. :eek:

Askia What kind of cheapskate cuts a pie into twelve pieces! Evidentally you've never taught kindergarten.

SenorBeef Interesting. I also had 12 boards, or whatever, on my wheel.



I guess that's just a natural shape for such a wheel.



It's interesting what we've discussed about it being bound by the laws of physics. If you imagine a tiny wheel, say, three inches in diameter, and you're running it under a faucet, it's very easy to visualize moving the faucet and having it go the other way. But if we're talking about a river, it's very difficult. That's interesting. As you're in control of your own mind, presumably, it should be just as easy to do either, but we're bound by what our minds accept as realistic.



In any case, the circumstances of the visualization play a role.



Try this. Imagine a glowing ball of light, and imagining it travelling in circles indefinitely. Now try to take that ball, and slow it down, and reverse its direction/cycle. Now we're not bound by physics, this is purely an abstract idea. How does it change your perception or ability to control it?



I have as much difficulty controlling the ball, personally, than the wheel, even though I'm inventing the rules for it.



Also, I have no visual artistic talent whatsoever, when I'm concious.



However...



I've always been amazed at watching someone draw something. It starts off as just a bunch of lines, but gradually it turns into a full picture. That process is remarkable to me.. I can't do anything like that.



But in my dreams, I've watched other people do exactly that - a line here, a line there, a few minutes later a full, detailed picture is formed. So my brain has the capability to do such a thing, I just have absolutely no access to it conciously. That might be an interesting topic for another thread.



I don't think I'm anything special when it comes to visualization, but I do think I have an auditory, specifically musical, talent when it comes to auditorization (? whatever the equivelant of visualization is). I can remember every detail about a song I haven't heard in 5 years pretty easily, and play it in my head in an almost audio-realistic quality. I'm a bit sketchy on the percussion, though, that's one part that I have some difficulty with. But in any case, I listen to a lot of complex, detailed music, and I can often remember every last detail, from subtle notes to seperate instrumentations, for stuff that I've heard few times and/or haven't heard in a very long time.

UncleBeer So, visualizers, are you just super engineers able to throw everything together in a quick image, or do you only "see" items that you've seen in the past?

I can direct my imagination to construct abstractions.



My question: for those of you who visualize well, how many of you consider yourselves skilled visual artists in say, drawing, painting or photography? Or working with clay? How many of you can draw well from still life, or recreate the images in your mind?

Artistic, me? Not really. I'm fairly proficient at technical drawings, but haven't got a lick of artistic drawing skills. Except for photography, which doesn't require motor skills to translate abstract images into a physical rendering. I can view a real-world scene, adjust the image in my head to a more aesthetic state (zoom in/out, adjust the focus of fore and background images, frame the image pleasingly) , and then use the camera to create the modified image.



This has proved to be a most interesting topic.

Balthisar I'm still having trouble determining if I'm visualizable. May I am, but I'm not thinking of it like all of you talented artists. Like Chronos, I pretty much take the OP literally and think of just the wheel. But I see that everyone else is attaching scenery to it automatically.



Hmmm . something universal about the 12 spokes. I was considering 12 paddles which would be 12 spokes. Interesting especially as I approached this structurally rather than visually (I think). What's even more interesting, though, is that of all of the mill-wheels that I've seen up close and personal (this is Michigan; they're everywhere), they have considerably more spokes -- say 30 to 70. Yeah, really.

Dung Beetle I can visualize and control the wheel, although it's not in such a detailed manner that I can count the spokes, unless I put in quite a bit of effort. (How do you non-visuals dream?)



I can also hear music in my head, and change it. I draw fairly well. If I read something in a book and I need to look it up again, I usually know whether it's on a left or a right-hand page, and whether it's near the bottom or the top. Gee, you'd think I'd be a lot smarter.



However, I have no sense of smell.

Triskadecamus I too have little plastic arts ability. I can photograph well, and have many well received pictures distributed among friends. I don't draw at all. I can't sculpt anything recognizable. I don't paint.



But I can design complex sets of objects in my mind, including mechanical linkages, color, textures, materials, etc. I don't make claims on the esthetic superiority of my designs, but they are complete and detailed enough that I cannot think of something, and then go buy it, because the ones available will be substantially unlike the image in my mind, and therefore unacceptable. In fact, when a friend recently brought me "the exact teapot you described, except for the color" I was stunned. She had found an extraordinarily similar object to my description. It was very dark brown, instead of black, and that seemed esthetically an improvement to my mental image. Generally, I will have an image in my mind, and then shop around and find that the actual "state of the art" is far afield from my image. Naturally I think my image is superior. :)



The various characteristics of an imaginary object are exact, if defined at all, similar to the "number of spokes" in Unc's wheel. I get sixteen spokes, if I think of it at all, probably because it's easiest to construct, geometrically, and the wheel is large, and needs more than twelve. At times such an imaginary object will have specific characteristics which are entirely hidden from direct "observation" even in my imagination, but will be defined, and specific in my mind. The type of wood in the wheel is currently undefined, although probably pine, since I seem to recall that soft pine is better suited to construction involving flowing natural sources of water. There are no metal parts, since rust would be a problem, and stainless steel is incongruous in the construction nineteenth century technology. The mill house is dressed field stone, with log lintels, and roof beams. The interior floor is rough cut heavy planks, and wooden gear works. (No wonder this sucker took so long to stop!)



At this point it is hard for me to decide how much is "looking" at the already imagined object, and how much is inventing the content of new "views" of the evolving object. Some of each, I think. Yes, some of each, as I just decided/realized that the millstones are missing, without awaiting grain, or finished flour. It's sort of a historic reproduction, with no viable market to support. Since I myself have never seen a working water mill, and have seen preserved examples, that makes it easier to imagine one similar to my experience. The miniature mill wheel was a kid's plastic toy. Only one moving piece, the wheel. Colored though, brown building, yellow wheel. Injection molded, snap together plastic crap. You could blow on the wheel and make it move. (twelve spokes!)



I don't think I have ever examined the nature of my visualizations before. It's a revealing study. I will have to try that out in my fiction, to see if I can feel the individual elements a bit more, and at least "enter the frame" a bit before I start writing. I think it could be a great help.



Thanks for a very interesting thread!



Tris

The Hamster King Try this. Imagine a glowing ball of light, and imagining it travelling in circles indefinitely. Now try to take that ball, and slow it down, and reverse its direction/cycle. Now we're not bound by physics, this is purely an abstract idea. How does it change your perception or ability to control it?

I find it much easier to control the ball of light than the wheel. I had a hard time getting the wheel to SMOOTHLY reverse until my wife told me how she was doing it. She visualized the river itself slowing down, stopping, and then reversing and that made it easier to get the motion she wanted with the wheel.



(It's kind of interesting that this visualization skill seems to be attached to our innate sense of real-world physics. It's much harder to visualize something that doesn't behave plausably.)



Like many people posting to this thread I find it kind of amazing that everyone can't visualize like this. My entire internal mental life is organized around images, so much so I can't even comprehend what a language-based thought process must feel like ... .

Lissla Lissar Nope. Can't. It's just going faster. Incidentally, that's what happens when I get fevers and hallucinate- I either see/feel falling, or things moving around in circles faster and faster. It's very disturbing.



As one of the non-visualizing people, I can say that I have an amazing memory for words in strings. Patterned words. I can memorise poetry like nothing, and I can remember whole chunks from books verbatim, because of the rhythm of the words. I can tell you how the words feel, and if they feel right, then I've remembered correctly.



I have the damndest time trying to learn other languages, because learning things one word at a time is much harder.



My mental life is verbal and tactile. I design and sew historical costume, make chainmail, spin, weave, do fifteen types of beadwork, and bellydance. I've got a weird verbal/kinasthetic disconnect. I can show you how to do all the physical stuff, but I can rarely manage a good description.

picunurse Balthisar, try putting the guided visualization aside for a moment, and examine your interaction with this thread in general, and the specific people you notice in it. Do you "see" the what others describe? Do you put faces, and or surrounding to the individuals? When I ask, what did you have for breakfast? how is it called up in your mind? As a list of items, or as a picture of your breakfast?

If pictures are part of any of your answers, you are able to visualize. IMO

dotchan Bookworm with very active imagination here. (I also suspect I'm not entirely normal, but to quote a certain Mrs. Gump, "What does 'normal' mean, anyway?")



I can imagine the wheel, no problem. On it's own, just rotating, or attched to a millhouse, whatever. (Although I think I might be cheating with reversing the wheel...I simply "walk around" to the other side, and voila.)



I get tunes stuck in my head very easily. I can also imagine entire conversations between any number of people--and when I'm very exhausted, I can almost "hear" them talking (but I can't necessarily make out coherent words).



I draw (not very well) and write (not very well, either). In fact, my biggest frustration is that I can never seem to get what's in my head onto the paper (or the computer screen).

Punoqllads I can't count the number of spokes in my waterwheel just because there's so many of them, and it's moving too fast to count them. If I try to reduce the number of spokes to some countable number it winds up with only 8 spokes.



Now it's speed, on the other hand, is kind of freaky. I timed it while it's moving at "normal" speed, and I swear that it does a complete revolution between 3 and 3.25 seconds -- close to pi.

Balthisar Balthisar, try putting the guided visualization aside for a moment, and examine your interaction with this thread in general, and the specific people you notice in it. Do you "see" the what others describe? Do you put faces, and or surrounding to the individuals? When I ask, what did you have for breakfast? how is it called up in your mind? As a list of items, or as a picture of your breakfast?

If pictures are part of any of your answers, you are able to visualize. IMO



Hmmm... that's a good test, but now I'm going to not be successful because I'll over rationalize everything. What I think I really need is for someone to conduct a word association test with me, and I'll figure out if I'm "word based" or "image based."

Askia Except for photography, which doesn't require motor skills to translate abstract images into a physical rendering. Not... completely true, actually. You point to anything in your line of sight, and you decide how to frame the subject, you decide on the physical distance, you consider available light and shadow, you adjust the focus lens and decide sharpness and softness. If the subject is live, you can get them to pose: sit, stand, rotate, show varying facial expressions. Manipulating the abstract image becomes an actual physical action once you get into the darkroom and work with the negatives: you can further enlarge, crop, and manipulate angles, use filters to develop contrast. I guess I should have also left room for people who manipulate images using PhotoShop, too. My point: I feel that people who do this kind of thing with an artistic bent have conditioned their portion of their brains to more easily see possibilities, even to the point of being partly nonsensical.



People with technical skills maybe able to do it, too, but seem to do so by manipulating overall dream logic. For instance: I was struck with how many people here said they had to stop or reverse the flow of the river in their minds. When I reversed the wheel in my mind, it was going against the flow of the river, which is why I made a point of describing how noisy it seemed. I didn't put 2 and 2 together until I re-read the thread.



This IS an interesting thread!



Is this so-called spatial intelligence? (http://www.ul.ie/~mearsa/9519211/newpage2.htm)

Sunspace I"m another one of these weirdos with pictures in the head. :) Sound, smell, colour, touch, taste, the works, if I want. I dream the same way too. I've dreamed in occaision in cartoons, with different paper and drawing styles as well. Once I dreamed in Labview, the graphical programming language.



Actually, I didn't know that some people didn't imagine pictures in the head until this year when my counselor told me that he thought in words.



Some people may ask, what language do you think in? A lot of the time, I think in pictures and then describe the pictures. I can choose which language to use, or just draw the picture (no words needed). When I was in high-school physics and chemistry, I often took notes in cartoon form--this helped with things like electron orbitals.



Oddly, I don't do as well in word logic puzzles... I find myself trying to turn it into a picture.



And I don't do well Just Following Instructions, such as filling out a formula and getting an answer. I'm a lot happier if I can have some context that allows me to put the parts of the formula into a picture that makes sense.

ParentalAdvisory The wheel in the OP wasn't a problem for me either. I was even able to animate the water in relation to what the wheel was doing. :confused:



It's hard for me to believe that other people can't visualize, maybe they just misunderstand what's meant by it.. or maybe not. If someone asked you what side of your desk, or something, that your stapler sits on... couldn't you create a picture of your desk from memory and then look to find out where it was? How else would you do it?



I don't think it's so much that someone can't place where their stapler is on their desk when asked. I bet a lot of people can do that. Now get the same people to imagine the same stapler animating itself into stapling random papers on the desk, and having the piles of paper sort themselves automatically. Now that's the power of visualization.

UncleBeer Is this so-called spatial intelligence?

I think that's part of what's being discussed here. I went through a good chunk of the exercises at that site at each of the threebeginner, intermediate & experiencedlevels; probabaly about 40 of the images. I got only one wrong; and very few did I have to study for more than a few seconds.

UnwrittenNocturne Count me as one of those people who is totally unable to visualise at all. I can even stare at an object, close my eyes, and be unable to 'see' it. I will have a set of descriptive words, but no picture.



If, for example, you say to me, "Visualise a wheel", I simply cannot do it. I can describe one in great detail. I will give you colours andd textures, size, dimensions etc.., but in no way am I 'seeing' it in my head. What I have instead are a set of language based descriptions. I often wondered if other people had the same problem. Now I know they do

davenportavenger Interesting, as an apparent non-visualizer, I have no problems with any of these technical tasks. In fact I excel at them, and it's what I do for a living. And most of my hobbies are technical in nature. But your prof is drawing things, making them visual -- I don't get what's not to get in that situation?You are visualizing. People don't actually physically "see" what they're visualizing, in the same way as you do when looking at a tangible object, or even like a dream. Rather, it's more like remembering a scene from a movie. Maybe doing that would be easier than imagining the water wheel (I had trouble with that, because I've never seen one in person and only seen one once or twice in moving pictures--it was easy with a bike wheel though); imagine a scene from your favorite movie in your mind for a few minutes and then visualize one of the actors breaking script and doing something that is not in the movie. For a visual thinker, this should be easy to "see."



I can visualize really well; I can call up specific scenes from movies or books at will and see the action clearly. It's also pretty easy to translate visual mind images to text; I think I'm naturally inclined toward fiction writing because I spend all day thinking up imaginary things and then using my textual skills to translate them. (It's a one-way transmission, though--I have no practical artistic skills, and can only write text-based reports of the visual images in my head.)



I can't recreate speech or music at all, though. When I visualize one of the scenes from a book in my head, I'll see the characters, but the words just stay words, kind of like closed captioning. It's the same when I'm recalling conversations or the auditory bits in movies--it gets translated into text, and associated with the visuals. To relate this to music, one of the reasons I don't like instrumental music as much as music with lyrics (and why I'm not a huge fan of that either--I really do think I'm incapable of enjoying music on the same level and to the same extent as other people) is that to me the instrumental is just aural sludge, with nothing for me to grasp onto mentally. The words are like an "anchor" that allows me to project a visual image onto the song. No hearing problems, just complete ineptitude with anything auditory. I'm totally tone deaf too. Win some, lose some.

Greenback I think that's part of what's being discussed here. I went through a good chunk of the exercises at that site at each of the threebeginner, intermediate & experiencedlevels; probabaly about 40 of the images. I got only one wrong; and very few did I have to study for more than a few seconds.

Same here UncleBeer. Very little effort to complete those.





NinetyWt: I can do your daughter's trick too. I still don't understand how everyone else gets through exams having to actually memorize stuff. I just read the book off the back of my eyelids and write the answer down.

Red Stilettos all of the mill-wheels that I've seen up close and personal (this is Michigan; they're everywhere), they have considerably more spokes -- say 30 to 70. Yeah, really.

My visualized wheel has at least 30 spokes. When someone first suggested to count the spokes, my reaction was, "yeah, right". It was just way to big of a task to be worth the effort. Now I can envision a smaller wheel with 12 spokes and count those.



I don't think anyone will be able to answer this, but just to think about: for those of you who don't visualize and think strictly in words, what do you think your thoughts were like before you could read? Maybe you used to think in pictures, but found that words are more efficient?

blowero I guess I'm right in the middle. I can visualize things, but the images lack detail. When I dream, I don't feel like I actually "see" colors, but neither do I "see" only black & white; I just "know" what colors things are. I "know" what people look like in my dreams, but I could not draw a picture of their faces from memory. I remember dreams more as a time-compressed impression of things that happened, as opposed to a vivid, detailed "movie". Colors usually don't seem important in the context of the dream.



There does seem to be a "momentum" phenomenon or propensity for things to remain constant in visualizations. When I read a novel, I automatically construct a visualization of the scene in my mind. Sometimes the author adds more details to the scene which conflict with the initial image I made up, and it's virtually impossible for me to change that image. The road to my house runs due North, but when I first moved there, I hadn't actually seen it on a map, so I thought it was going East. To this day it never "feels" like North.



I wonder if the "wheel" thing is more difficult because of the symmetry. It's hard to visualize a bicycle wheel slowing down and reversing, but if I imagine it with a valve stem or a reflector or some other assymeterical part, it's easier to see that part moving in a circle.

picunurse You are visualizing. People don't actually physically "see" what they're visualizing, in the same way as you do when looking at a tangible object, or even like a dream. Rather, it's more like remembering a scene from a movie. Maybe doing that would be easier than imagining the water wheel (I had trouble with that, because I've never seen one in person and only seen one once or twice in moving pictures--it was easy with a bike wheel though); imagine a scene from your favorite movie in your mind for a few minutes and then visualize one of the actors breaking script and doing something that is not in the movie. For a visual thinker, this should be easy to "see."





<snip>

(My bold) YES WE DO! At least I do. What I visualize is not floating out in the world, its in my head, behind my eyes. Its not vague, or colorless, It is distinct and natural looking.

Please don't generalize. You are not in my head, nor will you be invited. My visions are my own.

You can do yours however you see fit, but please don't speak for all people.

ParentalAdvisory ^ Yup.

kimera I can clearly 'see' things that I've never seen before or haven't seen in forever, except for faces. When I think of my mom, I see her in my head, but her face, although I can see it, I could never describe it to you while I could describe everything else about her. Same with imaginary people, the rest of their features I can describe perfectly, but when it comes to the face, I have trouble putting my pictures into words and describing them satisfactorily. I have a terrible memory for faces and I have not recognized my friends on several occasions, so it's probably connected that.



I love doing these experiments with my friends since everything thinks differently. I knew one girl who thought in association. I would say "stop" and she would think of and visualize a stop sign. "Train" would make her think and see "train tracks." Another girl would see things that she knew. For example, if I said "house" she would see her own house compared to others who saw general houses. Some people would be able to taste/smell different foods if I named them. For example, if I said 'pickles' to them, they would taste pickles. I can feel the taste of pickles in my mouth just by reading the word. Even abstract concepts would have visual representations for some people. Yellow made some people see the sun. When I visualize, it is in colorful videos that can involve all the senses. The video quickly moves from the exact to emcompass more details. For example, "cow" makes me instantly see a single cow, then right after the 'camera' pulls back and I see the cow in a field with other cows eating grass. As I have more time to visualize the scene, I see the blue sky overhead and the fence surrounding the cows. The more and more time I have to think of a thing, the more details get added to it. I have a very active fantasy life that is full of imaginary characters who do and say all sorts of things. When I think of my characters, I could tell you everything from the biggest details (he's in a coffee shop) to the smallest ones (the counter top has slight smudges of green ink). Unfortunately, I can not express what I see in my head properly to other people. I have no way with words and my artistic skills are next to nothing. It can be rather frustrating at times.



Sit down with a friend sometime and have them randomly say a bunch of different words to you. You'll learn a lot about your own thought processes that way.



And for the record, my wheel also had 12 paddles.

Civil Guy I'm mid-way, I guess. My wheel has some momentum, and doesn't stop all that easily, and only reverses kind of jerkily. The flowing water idea helps some, and it possibly helps if I don't over think the thing.



Another one that helps to reverse the wheel is picturing a car wheel traveling through a dip, going up the far slope, slowing down, and reversing.



Why twelve spokes? Well, twelve is a nice, round number. Zodiac, hours on the face of an, ah, analog clock. Not too many to count, just count three for the first quadrant and viola.



I've had a good memory, but it seems like it might be getting weaker here at middle age. Or maybe it's just that I've seen, ah, more than I can recall ::nods towards the Jimmy Buffet parrot heads::.

groman An interesting sidenote that when I was about 16, and claimed to be proficient and "natively fluent" in two languages (English and Russian) people would often ask me "But what language do you THINK in, that's the one that's truly your native language", and I'd just stare at them as if they were idiots.



I do not think in a language about things not related to languages. For example, if I am not trying to express myself in my head, or modeling dialogue, or thinking about a book, inscription, speech, etc. language does not come into it. You could say I am thinking in my brain language, and certain abstract concepts(i'm really good at higher abstract math, like differential geometry or abstract algebra, but suck at calculus) are separate in my mind from pictures, but they are definitely not in a linguistic language.



For me it is trivial to visualize a wheel and then reverse it, if I want a river to flow and then reverse flow I need to close my eyes but I can still do it effortlessly.



No I cannot draw worth anything.

Askia groman. Okay -- but when you DO express yourself in your head -- talking to yourself, arguing with yourself, cheering yourself up, etc. -- do you observe a preference or predominance for Russian, English or some sort of "Spanglish"-type blend of the two?

hyjyljyj Personally, though I can imagine a wheel turning one way and then the other (like a reversible ceiling fan), I am unable to mentally flip objects around in space and imagine them backwards, or anything like that. Those tests where they show you a flattened box or flattened 3-D shape and then ask what it would look like folded up on the lines completely baffle me. So do the ones with the three random patterns of geometric shapes that ask which shape follows next in the sequence. I haven't the faintest clue of how to approach them. I just answer "C". I can't predict the gear rotation direction questions or tell which way to turn a cord to untwist it just by looking at it. Ever. An upside-down screw is a trial-and-error exercise each time.



However, I can't help but feel the folks saying they "cant' visualize" and are missing out on something in life are being too hard on themselves and taking the word visualize perhaps too literally. It simply isn't true that you can't visualize. I'll prove it to you.



Think of getting in your car and going to the store.



Well done--you just "visualized" being in the car and visualized the store. I think very few people actually "see" the car and the store as if they were actually looking at them, though some can. For most, the information coming into the visual cortex via the optic nerve is just too overpowering for the brain to shut off in favor of what the mind "prefers" to "see" at a given moment. With training and relentless practice, top athletes learn to visualize game situations and see themselves actually making the perfect play at any given time. But you couldn't even function at all in daily life if you couldn't visualize future actions and events. You couldn't go to the bathroom if you couldn't visualize what it's like to head for the bathroom. Everything you ever do is thought of first, on some level, and then carried out. Every project you've ever completed, every item you've set out from home deliberately to acquire and then succeeded in obtaining, everything is the result of your visualization. Congratulations! You are not missing out on life after all.

groman groman. Okay -- but when you DO express yourself in your head -- talking to yourself, arguing with yourself, cheering yourself up, etc. -- do you observe a preference or predominance for Russian, English or some sort of "Spanglish"-type blend of the two?





I rarely mix, but this heavily depends on the language I've been using throughout the day, if I was home and talking to my parents, I may talk to myself in Russian, or if I was at college, then it is English.

Johanna Aldous Huxley, in his psychedelic classic The Doors of Perception, confessed "I have always been a poor visualizer." Nonetheless, he did get some trippy visual effects on mescaline. It's interesting, in a somewhat perverse way, to read an accomplished author and intellectual reflecting on psychedelic visuals despite his inability to visualize. His visuals didn't stay on the visual plane but were immediately translated into metaphysical ideas.

kaylasdad99 I had no idea that everyone couldn't visualize. Man, the things you learn around here.



For those of you who can't visualize, can you "see" objects in your head, but just not in motion? If I said, "tomato", what do you think of?Depends.



NO, I do NOT see adult-sized diapers. I mean it depends on how you pronounce the word.



If you pronounce it "Toe-MAH-Toe", I see a large (usually red) berry.



If you pronounce it "Toe-MAY-Toe", I see Betty Page, in a provocative pose. :D

Chefguy Count me as someone who was not aware that there are people who can not see a tomato in their mind's eye when someone says the word. How very odd, but it sure explains a lot about some folks' apparent lack of imagination.



I have a (sometimes) annoyingly keen sense of smell. I paint, I'm an excellent photographer, I've done caligraphy, and can construct something in my mind before building it on the physical plane.



On the other hand, one of my sons (who is musically talented) has difficulty in visualizing. I noticed this when he was visiting a few years ago. There is a mountain here called "Sleeping Lady" by locals, "Mt. Susitna" officially. I took my son (who interestingly was also subject to migraines when younger) and daughter up to an overlook and said "There's Mt. Susitna. What does it look like to you?" Simultaneously, my daughter said "a sleeping lady", and my son said "mountains". No matter how much we tried to point out how the shape was reminiscent of a supine form, he couldn't see it. I thought he was putting us on, but now am not so sure.

Duggy Fizzle Whenever I'm on the phone speaking to someone, I can almost "see" the person directly in front of me and I can watch their lips move and the changes in their facial expressions as they speak. Anyone else do this?



If I've never met the person I'm speaking to I can come up with a pretty good idea of what they look like.



Also, if I'm going to a location I've never been, I play a game and try to visualize everything about this place before I get there and then compare the picture in my mind to the location itself. Of course, I'm usually well off base, but I'm surprised by how detailed I can make the picture in my mind.

Chefguy Is anyone aware of any studies on this? I would be curious to know if there is a relationship between reading ability/preferences and the ability to visualize. I would think fictional books would be tedious to someone who can't conjure up the images to go along with it. It would also be interesting to see a study based upon visualization skills and political affiliation.

Crescend I was just thinking about that, Chefguy. I can visualize quite well, although like some people earlier in the thread I run into trouble when I try to picture something that is fundamentally 'wrong' to my sense of physics. (Although I can generally get it after a bit of mental readjustment - somewhat of a 'which way the gears spin' sort of thing)



However, I've noticed that although I love reading novels with vivid, descriptive prose, I can't make head nor tail of poetry. With few exceptions, the sort of concepts and images that a properly crafted poem is supposed to evoke just don't 'happen' with me. If someone walks me through it and shows exactly how certain 'attributes' mentioned in the text combine to form a second-order concept, I can 'get' it, but never on my own. I think of words as either the image of the word on the page, or as the image that the word describes, but rarely in terms of concepts. If I think of something on my own, I generally have no trouble putting it on paper, but I can't absorb meta-data that other people created. For example, I have no problem writing code or mathematical formulae, but reading something someone else wrote is a massive headache for me. Usually, it involves a series of 'passes' where the symbols are visualized in turns and slowly parsed, so that the objects they represent are assembled into a cohesive whole in my mind's eye.



I've often had situations (usually when studying for a memorization-heavy course, such as physiology or biochemistry) where I would remember either the image of the page or the biological pathway (usually as a sort of node-tree structure), but not the series of concepts that the words evoke. Like groman I also natively speak English and Russian, and I've found that my mind works like he described: my mental 'language' is dependent on the situation, and the concepts involved. Anything that relies on visual thought is not mentally verbalized.



Interestingly enough, one of my major issues in learning is that I am internally strongly visual, but externally strongly verbal. I have great trouble absorbing anything on a page (leading to that dual visualization issue mentioned earlier) but learn very quickly when listening to a description of an object or a process. This occurs to such an extent that I can stare at a page for hours and not learn anything (although I may memorize the shape and perhaps even the words on the page), but if I read it aloud, I often learn it on the first pass.



Weird stuff.

look!ninjas I can see it, and I can make it slow down, stop, and reverse, but it's dim and very hazy, not concrete like other Dopers' descriptions. What is clear to me is the sound of it, the running water, the slapping sound as the paddles hit the water, birds twittering in the distance. Weird.

look!ninjas NinetyWt: I can do your daughter's trick too. I still don't understand how everyone else gets through exams having to actually memorize stuff. I just read the book off the back of my eyelids and write the answer down.



I can't speak for everyone in the thread, but I hear the words, as opposed to seeing them. Which is why I've usually done most of my studying by reading aloud. It might have driven my college roommates crazy, but it worked for me. Also, if I write something down, I'll almost always remember it. But it's an auditory memory; it isn't visual or tactile. That appears to be how my imagination works best.

Scott Plaid Interesting,look!ninjas, but I--Holy crap! Look, there's some ninjas!

::Sometime later::



Ok, now that that is done, I was wondering. Who's voice reads the words?

Mr. Goob Wow, I see everything in my head. This morning I was with some friends and we were building a footbridge over a creek to get to our paintball field. We have a pile of pallets, normal sized and some heavy duty 12 long ones. In my head I was putting them together like puzzle pieces to see what would assemble with minimum work.



When somebody else was describing their idea I kind of glaze over while I'm putting it together in my head. One guy was doing a poor job explaining how he thought it should go. My exact words were "I can't see it."



I do the same thing with construction projects around the house, or planting gardens, anything really. I build it in my head.



I can techinically draw very well, blueprints and such. Draw a face or something, not a chance. I'm also an excellent photographer. I was helping a friend for a while doing videos for weddings, he said a few times how well I framed things and got some great shots.



I can see a person in my head but don't know how I'd ever explain it a sketch artist. Go figure.



As to the OP, I pictured a wheel free floating in space. As each person described a style or color or background I can change my wheel at will. Do a cut-away, size scale all that tech stuff.

Ruby I recall reading a study a few years ago (sorry, no cite) about male vs. female ability to reconstruct an object from memory. The test was to draw a bicycle and I think the subjects were young, like early teens maybe.



Overall, the boys were exponentially better at drawing a properly scaled bicycle with correct placement of the seat. wheels, and gears; whereas girls had a very hard time with it.



IIRC, the conclusion of the study was that boys were more spacial thinkers. Not sure I buy it, though.

picunurse Ruby made me think of something else, possibly related (maybe not.) I can estimate size usually within an inch or less. If we're building something, I can look at a pile of boards of different lengths and never choose one too short for the application. Even if the project is still on paper.



Chefguy, There is a secluded complex of buildings not far from our house. Its a neuro-physiology research institute that studies how children learn.

Their name escapes me. I think it was an acronym, so I had no frame of reference to hold on to it. If I have time tomorrow, I'll drive by and get the name.

They do have a website that has hints of their current research projects. (It got lost when I got my new computer, sorry)



One was about how the toddler brain processes language while learning to speak and how it relates to retaining memory. Their preliminary theories speculated that one needs speech and sensory input to develop memory.



I wonder if they might have done any studies of how we think. Of course, their mission statement speaks only of study subjects between birth and 4 years old. If I am remembering correctly. I'm pretty sure the aren't yet able to translate EEG or any of the endless brain scanning technology into language, so maybe not.

Hoopy Frood I am a very visual thinker. I have no problems picturing the wheel. I have no problems picturing a mill or a paddleboat attached to the wheel. I can picture the colors and can hear the sounds and smell the scents of the surroundings. I can see the wheel moving in one direction. I can stop the wheel. I can reverse the direction of the wheel whether or not I stop it first. But, I can't for the life of me slow it down.



Or at least I couldn't, until Chronos mentioned the rubber band thing. If I view it as one of those spinning toys where the string twists up and then the wheel reverses itself, I have no problems.



I can also visualize many concentric wheels turning in alternate directions, and can visualize a car tire spinning forwards attached to a car, while the spokes in the hubcap spin the opposite direction (like you sometimes see at night due to the strobe effect from streetlights).



I have also been told that I have a very good eye for picture taking, though I lack any formal training (I use a digital camera, so I don't have any experience developing anything). My older sister is a part time professional photographer and has given me many compliments on the photos I've taken.



But I can't draw, sculpt, paint, or anything similar to save my life. I have the same problem as Trigonal Planar. What I see just doesn't translate into paper. I guess that's why I find artistic photography easier. I capture exactly what my mind sees as interesting.



I am also a visual thinker where it comes to occupation. I work as a software engineer, and when coding, I am almost visualizing what the code is doing as I write it, in both the aspect of what the user is going to see, and the aspect of how each section of code interacts with other sections. If I do say so myself, I'm very good at what I do for a living, and I think the fact that I can visualize what I'm programming is why this is so. Programming (like almost all other engineering disciplines) is just as much of an art as it is a science.

Corner Case When reading the OP I imagined a simple circle with an indistinct number of spokes. I rotated it as described, wondering what the final question would be. It surprised me to learn that some people don't visualize everything. During a demo they had you close your eyes and someone put an object in your hand. You had to guess what it was. It was easy because each surface filled in my picture. The rod became a pen when I felt the curvature, then the clasp. I visualized the ball on the end of the clasp with a shadow underneath and a reflection on light off of the top curve. I couldn't image any other way to do it.



As I read the threads I too created scenes of paddlewheels and bayous and rushing rivers and croaking frogs. I shifted to a new image and POV with each new poster's ideas. They pop into my mind now as I try to remember what I want to post here.



What I see in my mind is photo-realistic. It overlays my current vision but I can walk or drive while doing it. I do think my awareness of what is actually occurring is impaired when I do this, but I usually control this and do not let it intrude too much.



When I look down at my keyboard for some typing or glance over at the screen, the quiet dawn with the paddlewheel and the croaking frogs is "overlaid" as a very very dim image. I can concentrate on those reeds and see their detail. Having read this thread I notice that I'm looking at the keyboard keys but really seeing only the reeds until I shift focus. I hadn't paid attention to this shifting of focus and can only describe it as I did - an overlay. Also, anything outside my field of vision is blurred, just as in real life. Looking at the reeds has the paddlewheel blurry until I pan over to it.



Also, when I'm looking down at the keyboard, I don't rotate the river scene to fit the horizontal plane of my desk. I tried just now and I can have any POV I want at any angle, but I realized I prefer observer points of view. Imagine yourself diving into a pool. I prefer to visualize any POV that watches, not one from a "diver" POV. I can do it, but I mentally blink when hitting the water.



I saved all this in Notepad in case of hamster attack and visualized the file name as "Visualization.txt" in Arial before I needed to enter a filename. When I need to write something centered on paper I visualize it as a shostly image and adjust the font and spacing until it's what I want and then I "copy" it. I draw well, but I find it hard when I focus so much on one part of the image and don't take the other parts into account. What's in the POV is sharp and the other parts are fuzzy so I often miss a proportion when I try to do one half of a face before sketching the other half first.



My wife asks me to drive somewhere we've been before and I figure out how to get there by visualizing driving the route at faster-than-light speed, basically reviewing snapshots one after another. In junior high I remember riding the bus and imagning myself running alongside like the superhero Quicksilver. I actually imagined enough detail that I noticed my heart rate sped up and my breathing grew short.



And it's not just real world things. I can visualize that stapler on the desk standing up on gumby legs, growing fangs and attacking. I wrote a story in school about appliances coming to life and had to visualize what happened to be able to write the story. I can make the paddlewheel do whatever you want, but it's a little difficult to make it rotate against the river; the water splashes and creates a great churn against an opposing wheel. The physics has to work by default. But I can imagine a paddlewheel rotating against an unaffected river; as if the wheel were some ghostly manifestation. And I can also stop one "side" of the wheel and have the other side continue, thus twisting the paddles into an impossible shape for wood.



When I type and read these posts, I hear some voice - I think mine, but not as nasal as when I actually head my voice - speaking the words, at narrative speed, and with inflections and emphasis. Remembering what I read I think that I'm somewhat remembering the actual mouthing, articulation, head motion, etc. but I wouldn't swear to it. I do notice that my tongue tries to form words as I read quietly to myself.



If someone sad, "Imagine being sad," I would have to call up some scene in which I felt sad and then the emotions would actually wash over me. If I couldn't call up the emotion (like being on stage and embarrassed to try) then my scene switches to one in a movie where some character had the emotion and I just "watch" it.



Now for the freaky part. When you close your eyes do you notice the light shining through that gives the blackness a red tint? Then do you notice the after images, the little white spots of adrenaline and other chemicals that shoot around sometimes, the striations and patterns like those you can imagine in the snow on your TV screen? Well, maybe seven times in my life I've gotten a little further. A little quarter inch area in my vision streams some of those threads together and for just a moment I've actually watched an image that my mind is creating.



I'm not actually projecting anything. My mind must be creating a mental image that it's also letting me sense through my visual cortex, or something like that. At first it was a 1/4 second movie and looking at it made it disappear. Practice let me relax and just watch it. My best experience was about 2 seconds and I could actually pan across the image. It was a stream of consciousness thing where a face smears into a tree and the tree smears into a mountain, etc.

look!ninjas <snip>Ok, now that that is done, I was wondering. Who's voice reads the words?



Depends. Most often, it'll be my own voice, at least for written notes and stories written in the third-person. Other than that, it just depends. If I'm reading an interview with someone, and I know what their voice sounds like, I'll hear their voice. If I'm reading a letter from a friend, I'll hear their voice. If it's male or female dialogue or a male or female narrator, I'll hear some sort of generic male or female voice. Anything written out phonetically will be heard with an accent - Trainspotting, for example, has varying strengths of Scottish accents. And if I'm writing fiction, the characters will all start to develop different voices and ways of speaking as I get to know them better. It really just depends.

Scott Plaid Thanks for the responce, it is very enlightening. You know, perosonally, when I was a kid, I would sometimes find that my imagination was having various memorable voices narate what I was reading, such as Darkwing Duck treating my history book as if it was a book-on-tape.

Excalibre I don't think anyone will be able to answer this, but just to think about: for those of you who don't visualize and think strictly in words, what do you think your thoughts were like before you could read? Maybe you used to think in pictures, but found that words are more efficient?

I don't remember anything before I learned to speak, and I think that the two may be related. But being able to read is not a precondition for using words - are you imagining that those of us who think in words are actually seeing them, as if on a printed page? My thoughts are in ideas and words, but never pictures. Sounds, yes; smells and tactile sensations as well, sometimes.



The closest I can come to pictures are either vague impressions (really more clearly related to the emotion that would be inspired by the event) or sort of like a very washed out, jerky movie. Things aren't distinct in my mind unless I'm concentrating on them, like in a dream where you look away from something and it changes. Now my visual imagination doesn't necessarily change when you look away, but it's as though I have a very small amount of "storage" for imagery, and I can either imagine an entire scene vaguely, or focus in on one object, with everything else a background blur.



I feel like I remember things in ideas, which are easily then translated into words. I might have a flash impression of a person's face, but if I were to describe them, it would be based upon ideas about their appearance that I have tucked away. I don't see a red-haired woman with freckles and glasses; I know that the person I'm describing has red hair, freckles, and glasses, so I describe her that way.



Music, though, is easy. I'm not sure exactly how well I can recreate a piece in my mind; I don't have the phonographic memory (if you will) that some are reporting. But I can "envision" people's voices, imagine hearing a particular person saying a particular thing, remember - with what at least seems like note-perfect recall - what my favorite pieces of music sound like, etc.





Those tests where they show you a flattened box or flattened 3-D shape and then ask what it would look like folded up on the lines completely baffle me.

I always assumed those were impossible for everybody. I mean, now I'm supposed to be able to do origami in my head? I don't think any of those puzzles are really visual, though. The above is probably kinesthetic (since it involves heavily manipulating an object.) The geometric squiggles usually just require you to analyze them - in the sense of "taking them apart" and considering only the individual parts of the squiggle - I don't think it's directly visual.





However, I can't help but feel the folks saying they "cant' visualize" and are missing out on something in life are being too hard on themselves and taking the word visualize perhaps too literally. It simply isn't true that you can't visualize. I'll prove it to you.



Think of getting in your car and going to the store.



Well done--you just "visualized" being in the car and visualized the store. I think very few people actually "see" the car and the store as if they were actually looking at them, though some can. For most, the information coming into the visual cortex via the optic nerve is just too overpowering for the brain to shut off in favor of what the mind "prefers" to "see" at a given moment.

Please don't tell the rest of us how we think. Not only can I not resurrect a single visual memory of driving to the store, but when I tried to "visualize" it, it rapidly turned into a birds-eye view of the car backing out of the driveway and then faded away completely. The bits I saw were just the best mental pictures I could make from the ideas I have stored away about driving to the store - I couldn't tell you, without looking, which side is the gas gauge and which side is the temperature gauge on the dashboard. Unless you're using "visualize" to describe something that has nothing to do with actual vision, then I don't have the capacity to visualize what you're talking about.





But you couldn't even function at all in daily life if you couldn't visualize future actions and events. You couldn't go to the bathroom if you couldn't visualize what it's like to head for the bathroom. Everything you ever do is thought of first, on some level, and then carried out. Every project you've ever completed, every item you've set out from home deliberately to acquire and then succeeded in obtaining, everything is the result of your visualization. Congratulations! You are not missing out on life after all.

Yeah, but it's not thought of visually. I don't think in pictures. I "visualize" going to the bathroom only if you mean "visualize" to describe something entirely different. In fact, going to the bathroom is pretty much an autonomic process. I don't need to plan it out in advance in any respect whatsoever. What, do you need to have a little mental picture of the toilet and how it works in order to use it successfully?





I would think fictional books would be tedious to someone who can't conjure up the images to go along with it.

Statements like these demonstrate, I think, just how deeply the differences extend. I love reading fiction, and I can't even understand why you would need visuals to go along with a book. I might vaguely picture certain scenes if a book has an abundance of physical description, but for the most part, there are no visuals when I'm reading a book. I can't even begin to comprehend why that would bother anyone. It sure doesn't inhibit my enjoyment of a book. The only way I can describe reading a book is that I read ideas - the words translate directly into ideas, feelings, and so forth, and rarely spend much time as physical images.

GillianBoardman I can visualize the mill wheel, or the wheel on the paddle boat in a still frame of the the mill or boat, but I can't make them move in that form. To get the wheel to rotate, I wound up thinking of something that looked like a ships wheel floating in space. When I made it spin it was counter-clockwise, and it just kept going faster. I was finally able to stop it after great effort and much scrunching of my eyes, but not to make it spin clockwise. I have worked on visualization purposefully, for yoga classes and other mental exercises, but I'm still not very good at it. My "monkey mind" insists on chattering. In words, all the time. Unless I'm reading, or writing, which doesn't shut it up, but does focus it. That's not true, I can also pay attention to a speaker, but not without great interest in the topic, or extreme effort. I'm one of those annoying people who wants to talk in the movie, or during the show. I don't do it, I have been socialized, but I really really want to. I was the despair of many a teacher with my smart ass replies to the lesson.



On the other hand I am a voracious reader, mostly of fiction. I don't picture the scenes and characters in my head, I hear the words. I get exasperated with long drawn out descriptions of scenery. I want to get on with either the characters' thoughts or actions. So now, I give myself permission to skip them, which I didn't used to do. I read every word on the page usually, and I'm a very fast reader. But now, especially when re-reading a book, which I do often, I no longer read the long physical place descriptions.



Also, I have only vague fuzzy pictures of people I love in my head, and I'm constantly being told that I'm not very...well, I've temporarily lost that word, but it means that I don't notice the things going on around me very well. I'd make a terrible police witness.

porcupine Yup. And actually it isn't all that uncommon. My girlfriend can't visualize either. She suffers migraines quite badly and has to visit her neurologist frequently. She spoke to him about this quite recently and he was not only unconcerned, but told her that it isn't extraordinary at all.

That would be me.



I've never been able to form pictures in my head. I had a hell of a time with my drafting class in college. I can recall sounds quite clearly, but visualizing is pretty much impossible. I once had a conversation with a friend who was quite good at doing math in her head. She told me that she could just see the numbers, as if she were writing them on paper. My brain just isn't wired that way, and up until that time I thought everyone else was like that, too.



There is an exception, though (besides dreams, which are frequently quite vivid). I recently developed migraine auras, which is a visual disturbance that precedes a migraine. They're basically hallucinations, only it's generally apparent that they're in fact not real. The aura is often still there when I close my eyes, so my brain is obviously capable of creating images, and my interpretation of what I'm seeing affects what it looks like (e.g. if I think "that looks kind of like a horse," it turns into a horse), but under normal circumstances I can't bring up images in my head.



As for the person who commented earlier in the thread that people who can't visualize might not enjoy reading fiction, that's definitely not true in my case.

rogerbox I always visualize thing in my head and was suprised when my wife couldn't.



She had a 2-D drawing of a proposed closet organizer for a 6' wide closet that was divided into three 2' sections. We agreed that it would be too crowded. I said we could just drop off the last section and just expand the first two to 3' sections.

She looked at me like I was from Mars. I even covered up the third section with my hand and told her it would look like that but wider. She still couldn't grasp what I was saying.



I've heard it said before that men are overall better at spacial reasoning than women. I've had some truly awful experiences trying to move furniture for women. They couldn't visualize what the furniture would look like in place A, they need to SEE it there before they decide it really needs to be at place B....then you move it and really it needs to be at place C. It is VERY frustrating as someone who could easily picture what the cabinet looks like in places A, B, and C, and decide which spot would be best.



My mom was also fascinated by my stepdad's ability to pack the back of the car with stuff to help move, because she cannot picture what the best way to fill the car up will be beforehand.



I'm sure there are plenty of women who could kick my ass at either of these things, but I have definitely noticed this myself. Apparently studies trying to find differences in this are controversial:



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_psychology#Spatial_abilities



I would consider it feminine for a guy to not be able to pack a box tight or know whether he would like furniture in a spot before seeing it actually be there, so I bet it is largely social conditioning instead of an inherent difference between the sexes...

rogerbox Wow. I guess I, too, took "visualizing" for granted.



Y'all would really hate my daughter, though. If she's studied a text for a test, as long as she can remember what page the needed information is on, she can turn to the page and read the paragraph. In her head.



I think she's a freak of nature. ;)



There have been people with prodigious memories examined by science, but there really isn't such a thing as a photographic memory. She probably memorized the books and uses page numbers for reference to help find the information, but no one can snap a photo of a page and read it at their leisure later...they have to read the page first.

GargoyleWB I don't know about others, but for me, visualizing an object is pretty close to seeing. Zoom in, zoom out, rotate, distort; all that. If I'm really concentrating on visualizing, my perception of the ouside world closes down pretty hard even though my eyes remain open.



Same here. I've always been curious how much of this is a trained practiced skill, or how much is hard-wired ability.



As a test I quickly did the OP's waterwheel test immediately with no trouble. Just for fun, I also included dancing meerkats on the wheel paddles to provide a physical source of power.

Becky2844 I take it so much for granted that I often get surprised when people don't (or can't) visualize.



I'm similar to a previous poster...I visualize as a "separate vision" but complete with color, motion, even tactile sensations like force and texture. Depending upon the degree I sink into it, my mind either multitasks with what my real world is, or sort of overlays my visualization simultaneously over my vision, or my real world perception just kind of grays out and gets nearly completely replaced by my visualization. It is also fully controllable, the waterwheel spinny thing is easy, although when I did it there was a Grimms-esque ogre that was poking his finger in the spokes of the wheel and spinning it forward and backward while befuddled fish poked their heads up out of the wheel's water buckets as the water sloshed about. But that's just me, if I need to visualize a wheel rotating forward and then backward, it helps a lot to also visualize a logical reason for the wheel to be doing so.



I think that this is one reason that many people simply don't enjoy reading fiction novels. When I read a novel, I visualize very intensely at the same time I am reading, I *see* the shadows cast by Sting in the caves of Moria, they aren't simply words on a page that I am parsing.



Same here, and like Punoqllads. And I was going to add that I think I'm a "word thinker," but are both of those being used like in your example of "seeing" the shadows you're talking about reading, GargoyleWB?

Becky2844 I can picture the wheel...but only because I've seen this happen before; water drips off the blades as the wheel slows to a stop before going the other way. Probably in a movie. (why is the wheel intially going counter-clockwise? hmm) If I hadn't seen it before, I'd have a lot more trouble doing it, because I think mostly in words. So much so that it took me forever to figure out what people mean when they said suchandsuch a children's book caused kids to use their imaginations which seemed odd to me because the kids weren't writing the story just reading it- I finally realized this didn't click because don't usually picture anything when I read, but a lot apparently do. I love to write but don't really picture things that I'm writing about either, actually; I'll get a few "postcard" images, but not like a movie how some people describe. Dreams and fantasies, on the other hand, are movie-like, go figure.



That's interesting because I like to write, and have Tips stuck up on my bulletin board. The first one says, "Make a mind-movie."

Becky2844 Haven't read all the posts yet but, this is freaky! And it triggered a memory of when I was around eight years old. I'm one of those people who can't do math---at all. But it wasn't always that way. Up until somewhere around the 3rd grade I was just doing "regular." But around that time I was going thru some intense emotional stuff and for some reason envisioned two black lines in my head. And I could never get them even. No matter how I tried, one would always be the slightest bit longer. I couldn't get it out of my head, I couldn't stop trying, and it was driving me crazy. I taked to myself, I prayed, I begged the powers that be to make it stop. And finally it started getting less and less until it stopped.

Before that happened I was doing fine in math. Afterwards it might as well have been Chinese. Did I lose that ability to keep from losing my mind?

rogerbox It sounds like an obsessive compulsion, like people who have to avoid walking on cracks or taking even numbers of steps in buildings. I doubt the lines are related to math, math just got harder after 3rd grade and you couldn't keep up?

Cartoonacy Uh-oh. My fault for posting a link to this thread in another thread. I didn't realize anyone would reanimate it after six years of inactivity.

Becky2844 I'm going to have to start looking at the dates...how does an old thread get revived?



Anyway, I can certainly buy the OCD....among other things that were going on. But I hate to think I just got stoopid. :p

BigT I actually find that this sort of thing hurts my head ever since my Klonopin withdrawal.



But my real astonishment is with people who can actually see things. I would assume they were hallucinations. I can't imagine seeing things that aren't there without it being incredibly frightening.

Jinx In general, this must be why some people can picture some things (esp. abstract concepts) while others cannot. I had no problem visualizing the wheel as you describe, but there have been other times when, yes, it physically hurts (as you mention) to picture something. It's like, your brain just doesn't want to "bend" that way...like a yoga for the brain!

Inner Stickler Excalibre and I have the same brain blueprint, I think because that's exactly how I work. All this stuff about "When someone asks you where your stapler is, don't you visualize your desk?" No. I know where my stapler is, or at least the last place I put it in the same way that you know that 2+2 equals 4. It just is. When I visualize a water wheel, I see a indistinct wheel. The number of spokes is indeterminate and if forced to come to a concrete decision about them, I'd probably settle on the last number I came across. Any pictures or movies in my head are pretty much incidental to my actual thought processes. (I don't see words on a page either. I don't really think of any senses being used when I think. Stuff just happens.)

rogerbox Anyway, I can certainly buy the OCD....among other things that were going on. But I hate to think I just got stoopid. :p



I meant to post this but I was at work and pressed for time. Your post about being obsessed with the lines and not being able to not think about it reminded me of a WEIRD experience I can barely describe.



When I was a kid I had a FAVORITE breakfast that I could only eat at Grandma's during the summer because it was too unhealthy for my mom and stepdad to get: Eggo cinnamon waffles in little waffle shapes, with butter and this super thick syrup called Al Aga.



Anyways one morning when I was maybe 12, I thought that there is corn in the waffles, 