Visualizing

I was driving and listening to the local mostly-annoying NPR radio station, but they had an interesting interview with a book author. It was about his novel or some poetry or something.

What was interesting was his recalling a conversation that he'd had with his wife. She was takling about a plant or something and asked him to visualize it. He was astounded that she, or anyone, could close their eyes and *see* something they were thinking about.

I was shocked to learn that there are people who can't form a mental visual image.

Close your eyes and consider a nice white ceramic dinner plate with a beautiful deep red apple sitting in the center. Can you see it? From the side and from the top? Do you see the stem? The colors? Imagine it slowly rotating? See the fruit fly?

If the world is divided between people who can visualise and people who can't, that could explain a great deal.

Or people who have a dialogue going on in their heads all the time. Apparently that’s most people.

But then again, none of us knows what it’s like to be somebody else.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yes I can see the fruit fly around the room if I want. Not sure where the fly went. The human imagination is not bounded by reality.

There are definitely such people, and I've met them. The example that springs to mind was a History Teaching Assistant I met in college in the 1960s. It turned out that he had been an EE Undergrad, and discovered that he could not visualize the electrons in motion, unlike his colleagues. This TA was wise enough to know that this was crippling - he would never be able to compete with those who could visualize electrons. So he switched to History.

Joe Gwinn

If they can't visualise (or visualize if you prefer), then, if I may invent a few new words, can they hearalise? smellalise? touchalise? tastealise?

As long as they don't analyse in public.

The statistics would be interesting, whether the non-visualization thing is common or maybe very rare. I'll have to google that some time.

There is a small fraction of the population that don't like music, for example. That includes me. Some people absolutely can't remember faces. I know a guy who can only recognize people by their hair.

I'd expect that among CE/EE graduates, good visualizers would tend to be more EE and less visualizers more CE. Things vs words.

That would suggest a good interview question.

I was drafted once (never served) and took a test to join the Marine Corps. One part involved looking at a flat thing with various squares painted with patterns, and then imagining a box that was folded up from the flat thing. I guess that visualizing things would be useful to a Marine.

I think the original IQ test was for the military.

I've absolutely no idea how a musician does that but I know it can be done because I can look at the tune on this page

I recall someone once saying that the utterance of a single word causes activity to ripple across the cortex. No surprise there since such an activity requires complex coordination of myriad muscles.

I've no idea how I know what a spoken word will sound like but I learned to produce them from an early age.

From their experience of doing it previously.

I can if I want.

Sure I can. Was there a question here?

I think the issue there is what it means to visualize. I can temporarily replace the image of this computer screen with an image of an apple on a plate. I can even make the apple lift off the plate if I want. Obviously none of this is happening in front of me. There has been no change in what's in front of me and what's in front of me is still being processed (you might say unconsciously). I know this because I know I can safely drive a car while imagining floating apples.

The Air Force recruiting people had some sort of "pattern test" in addition to other stuff, back in 1960-something. At least for people wanting to go into electronics school.

Of course it does. That's what I meant. Practice makes perfect.

Ok so you are trying out something new. Nothing wrong or unusual there and nothing I disagree with. I sometimes do that on the piano.

I do too but it appears that there are some people who cannot.

So perhaps some people have no imagination.

I find it hard to believe that that can be literally true but maybe it can for some people.

Thank you for your thoughtful insights.

It seems that different people do indeed have different abilities to imagine in different ways, maybe visual images or words or other senses.

People are very different.

Or fly airplanes.

Many may just have never tried hard enough. In their dreams almost all people do though.

Yesterday I did a bike ride with the guys. Very hot weather and half way through the ride I had this image in my head of a large stein of Pilsener, with foam and with the condensation water dripping down the outside of the glass. It gave me a lot of extra punch to get to the brewpub faster.

It was. Staring in WW1, when there were millions of new recruits to sort into jobs.

There is another kind of visualization that is very common and quite useful: Most people who take an internal combustion engine apart and reassembles it can diagnose mechanical problems from the sound made by the engine as a vehicle drives past - one can "see" the moving parts as they are making the noise in that engine. Most auto mechanics can do this, and so can I.

As for the EE who went into History, the usual path for people who cannot visualize is Mathematics. But even that benefits from visualization.

My father was a degreed aeronautical engineer. But he really didn't visualize things like auto engines and cooling systems at all specialty was theory, and aeronautical engineering has far more complex math than EE.

.

Plus lots of classical physics. I never asked him if he could visualize fluid flow from the math, but I bet he could.

Joe Gwinn

He happens to be right. The idea was invented in France in 1904 and used to sort educationally sub-normal kids so that they got the kid of educational help that they needed and could get some advantage out of.

The US military picked up the idea in 1917 to sort the flood of conscripts they were getting into the kinds of jobs where they'd be most useful. The average IQ of front-line infantry men ended up at 80.

It was the first large scale application of the idea, but the military didn't invent or develop it.

In message snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com, john larkin <jlarkin_highland_tech@?.?.invalid> writes

I can do that easily. I can also modify objects in my head. It's a shame I can't do a hard copy. I can also "auralise" sounds, but I suppose most can do that. I can't do smells or taste. I suppose there might be people who can do that.

Brian