A Lack of Imagination
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Now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if this is why I've always gravitated to text-based mediums over visual mediums, including MUs. I never really saw the point of MMO's because if I wanted RP, table top and MUs were just better, but maybe I just thought they were better because the visual aspect of video games isn't as important to my imagination as words are.
Also, I've always placed a really high value on getting into my characters emotional space and scenes with a strong emotional pull to them, and I wonder if that's, again, just a result of how I interact with the world.
And, like others have said, I've always struggled with descs. I spend hours looking for the perfect PB before making a character, because unless I'm looking at a picture of someone, I couldn't begin to toss together an image of what they look like. Even with a picture, it's a struggle, and difficult for me to get away from personality-driven words to describing the actual physical characteristics.
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@faraday said in A Lack of Imagination:
Also interesting, since a couple folks have mentioned it on this thread:
a substantial proportion of those contacting us also report problems with face recognition or ‘prosopagnosia’.
This is also interesting to me because I feel like I'm very bad at recognizing faces -- I don't always realise X is the actor who played Y as well, for example, and I'm always worried I won't recognize a friend or relative I haven't seen in a while when I go to see them again. But the thing with the latter is I virtually always do. I took an online test recently (part of a study, rather than a 'for fun' type) and my result came back as solidly average. So I think I'm actually not notably bad at facial recognition, but because I store them somewhere I can't 'see', I feel a lot worse at it than I really am. I don't have the precision of description for faces to feel confident in connecting what I have with what's really there when I see it.
I'm actually not terrible at remembering hair colours of characters, heights, things like that, but it's a sort of fact file rather than an image. If a mind laid things out like your sort of standard wiki char page, my brain skips the picture and just goes with the table with the 'hair', 'eyes', etc. in it.
I think that, as well as with the continuum people seem to have from 'nothing, just blackness' to 'vivid, detailed, photorealistic' for mental images, there's also differences in the ways people toward the 'blackness' end up processing/storing/accessing data that we'd think of as visual. It's hard to talk about to figure out details, though, because there's a point where I always end up coming back to: I don't see anything, but for a number of things, I just know.
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@faraday said in A Lack of Imagination:
@Ninjakitten said in A Lack of Imagination:
Kinda take a little exception to it being called 'a lack of imagination', though. My imagination is fine, thanks! It just doesn't make actual images.
This is supported by a number of the articles I've been reading. From the researcher who's primarily studied it:
An inability to visualise does not imply an inability to imagine: imagination is a much richer, more complex capacity than the specifically visual ability lost in aphantasia.
I would agree with this. My daughter definitely has a fabulous imagination. She has struggled with therapies based on visualising and also with seeing a future based on the things we are going through. So she struggles to motivate herself with visions of the future. That is why she never came to Australia with us..
That might be a YMMV thing!
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@Apos said in A Lack of Imagination:
@faraday said in A Lack of Imagination:
Meanwhile if you asked me to describe my kitchen, like @Ninjakitten says, I could do so in fact-based terms... the cabinets are brown, the sink is right by the back door, the stove is gas with five burners... but I don't really see a vivid image in my mind. It's more like fuzzy still pictures at best.
It's interesting in that there's definitely degrees, between people that have photorealistic imaginations vs fuzzy imagery vs nothing at all. For me, asking me what color things are in the kitchen is a lot like asking me to remember the calendar date that something happened. I can take a guess. It might be right, might be wrong, I have no idea though I might sometimes get an extremely vague sensation.
What color are my eyes, HMM?
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Tho from the Twitter discussions around this, I learned some people don't think in sentences/words/a voice at all and only images. Like of they're considering having toast they just...think of toast.
And that is fucking weird to me. Like I have a constant inner dialogue going and then other multi-threaded thoughts on top of that about shit I need to do, how to do it, processes, etc. And songs or imagery or whatnot might interrupt or layer over it but I couldn't imagine it not being there at all.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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@Auspice man what. I can hear, see, smell and taste things in my imagination.
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@Kanye-Qwest said in A Lack of Imagination:
@Apos said in A Lack of Imagination:
@faraday said in A Lack of Imagination:
Meanwhile if you asked me to describe my kitchen, like @Ninjakitten says, I could do so in fact-based terms... the cabinets are brown, the sink is right by the back door, the stove is gas with five burners... but I don't really see a vivid image in my mind. It's more like fuzzy still pictures at best.
It's interesting in that there's definitely degrees, between people that have photorealistic imaginations vs fuzzy imagery vs nothing at all. For me, asking me what color things are in the kitchen is a lot like asking me to remember the calendar date that something happened. I can take a guess. It might be right, might be wrong, I have no idea though I might sometimes get an extremely vague sensation.
What color are my eyes, HMM?
Don't hate me if I can only answer that because I can remember the conversation we had about it.
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I've always considered it a good thing I've never had to describe someone to a sketch artist.
They'd come out looking like One Punch Man.
But I can imagine places I've been easily. Or even just heard described. People just become blank blobs.
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@Ninjakitten said in A Lack of Imagination:
I'm always worried I won't recognize a friend or relative I haven't seen in a while when I go to see them again. But the thing with the latter is I virtually always do. I took an online test recently (part of a study, rather than a 'for fun' type) and my result came back as solidly average. So I think I'm actually not notably bad at facial recognition, but because I store them somewhere I can't 'see', I feel a lot worse at it than I really am. I don't have the precision of description for faces to feel confident in connecting what I have with what's really there when I see it.
I had a similar experience with an online test with celebrity images. And yet when I go to a family reunion I sit in front of people I've known all my life and have to second-guess myself like... "Is that so and so?" I'll go to a parent-teacher conference worrying about whether I'm going to recognize my kid's new teacher. There's definitely a challenge there, whatever that particular test may say.
I wonder if the celebrity test was more of a false-positive, because it falls more into pattern recognition. Like I know that's Chris Pratt more because I'm pattern-matching it against a specific image from a movie I saw, rather than something from my own memory.
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@Kanye-Qwest said in A Lack of Imagination:
@Auspice man what. I can hear, see, smell and taste things in my imagination.
Supposedly your tongue knows the texture of everything around you without actually licking it. Imagine licking a piece of wood with bark, or the pavement, or fur, or a glass pane. You should be able to imagine what that texture experience would be like with a decent amount of accuracy even if you've never don't it. Or maybe it was one of those things we licked as babies and we don't remember but our tongue does?
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I read somewhere once a story about a girl who was in school with another girl that had to get off school early because she was "hearing voices" in her head and needed to get "tested" for schizophrenia.
Turned out she was "hearing" her inner monologue... Her thoughts.
She didn't know she was thinking.
ETA: I am including the preamble because it's important to take this with a grain of salt.
I really hope this didn't actually happen. -
I have, well, not hyperphantasia, since that's not a real thing, but I'm only a few stops down the line from eidetic memory. I can usually recall exactly where in a paragraph or on a page something I read was, and when I did the "imagine a ball" test I not only had the image of the pink rubber ball in my mind, but its texture (eraser-like) and its smell. Same with the wood grain of the table it was on (rough, unpolished, no lacquer).
A weird maybe side effect is that imaginary places are structurally related to real places in my memory. This is actually one of the reasons I like Arx so much. I get a seed of description and it explodes into vividness. The Great Cathedral of Arx is a combination of my childhood church and, oddly enough, Bath Abbey. Rinel's house is, I just realized while typing this, a version of my kindergarten art room, down to the location of the door and windows. The Queensrest is, amusingly enough, a hyper swanked up version of a dingy seafood joint in town.
This is probably why the confusion over what "open air" means w/r/t temples drives me absolutely mad.
This sort of stuff also leads to weird things like the Shrine of Petrichor and the Shrine of Tehom being OBVIOUSLY to the left as you head towards the Lowers, while the shrine to the Lost and to the Sentinel are OBVIOUSLY to the right.
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When Sherlocke Holmes played by Benedict Cumberbatch does the mind palace thing are you like "yeah that's how that works?"
EDIT - Basically have you ever experimented with the memory envision it stuff or do you not have to?
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I wish. No, while I can visualize the concept of walking through rows of file cabinets, I don't remember things like that. Like, I'll remember studying for the bar a few years back and standing barefoot on the edge of the bricks at the front of my house because the driveway was too pebbly and uncomfortable while I was talking about mortgages with my friend, and it was probably about 3 or so in the afternoon because of where the shadows were, and the shade was cool and there was a very slight breeze, I think from the south. And when I was taking the bar exam that's how I remembered the timelines for mortgages.
My memories of things are basically a recreation of everything that was going on that I take relevant info from, but they aren't organized like the mind palace is.
ETA: I guess I don't really have the capacity for memories that are restricted solely to information, until they get to the point where it's just thoughtless knowledge. Even then, if I'm thinking about something I know well, like Strickland v. Washington, I'll have the two prongs of the test floating visually in my mind. Things I don't remember perfectly, like 28 USC 2254 and 2255 (just working on a case involving 2255), I remember the Cornell website and layout that I learned the law from.
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@Rinel said in A Lack of Imagination:
I'm only a few stops down the line from eidetic memory. I can usually recall exactly where in a paragraph or on a page something I read was
See, I can do this, but only sometimes. Mostly with text. And it's enforced by things I write down. If I write something down, I remember it, which is why I still handwrite so many things.
But I'm that person who, when I was married and my stepson would be in the house, we'd be getting ready to leave and my ex and the kid would be going around trying to find stuff and I'd just be there: 'Your shoes are there. You left your wallet there. Your...'
It's got a timeframe tho. After a few weeks/months it drops out so that thing I put in the very important very safe place? Fuck if I know what it was other than very important and very safe place.
My ability to imagine places based on their description depends on two things:
the length of the description and the person who wrote it. If it is a very long, meandering, prose-y description, I am gonna get lost in the words and have nfc what is being described. If the writer bounces back and forth and to and fro and starts describing one thing and then goes to describing something else and then comes back to that thing? I'm probably gonna have no clue what they're describing in the end. But if it's 5-8 sentences that hit the points in a neat, organized manner without going all grandiose about the language? I can probably get a pretty clear picture of what's being described.Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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I do have to be thinking about it. I misplace stuff pretty frequently. But if I'm devoting thought to it, even if it's just "I'm putting this here for tomorrow morning," then it's super unlikely I'll forget it.
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@Rinel said in A Lack of Imagination:
I do have to be thinking about it. I misplace stuff pretty frequently. But if I'm devoting thought to it, even if it's just "I'm putting this here for tomorrow morning," then it's super unlikely I'll forget it.
I'll remember for roughly a month. Longer and it's gone.
But faces/people... Those are a big fat nope.
I could talk to you and the instant you walk away, I forget what you looked like. One of my top 3 anxieties is meeting someone for the first time and not knowing if the photo they sent me is older or current or and staring at this tiny picture on my phone and a crowd of people, squinting at every face that goes by.This may be why I'm such a big fan of fantasy hair colors. If you tell me you have pink hair, I will 100% know who I am looking for.
Saying the quiet parts out loud since 1996.
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Faces I remember very well. Names are a perennial nightmare.
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@Auspice Story of my life as well, that. I tag people with some tagline on Ares pages so I can keep them apart. In real life? Same, but on the cell phone. It's not that I don't care. I just literally can't tell people's names and faces apart, and I get them mixed up most embarrassingly.
http://keys.aresmush.com -- Come to Chincoteague, we have ponies.
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@Rinel said in A Lack of Imagination:
I can usually recall exactly where in a paragraph or on a page something I read was
I've always been pretty decent at that. In junior high if you handed me a copy of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (or another book I'd read a few times) and specified a scene I would often have been able to open the book to within a few pages of it. But it wasn't ever visual, it's a sense-of-space/size thing. I didn't see it in my head, I just knew where on the page it was, or how thick the layer of pages should be.
