It is real. My partner has it. Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. For example, when she walks through an apartment she can instantly draw a blueprint. Or when we move in multi-story building, she knows exactly where we are conceptually (I always get lost). So, these two things don't seem to be connected.
Interesting. My wife swears she has no visual mind, but she has remarkable spatial awareness when it comes to “this object will fit in that space, and must go through this sequence of manoeuvres to reach it” - she’d have Dirk Gently’s sofa up the stairs in a whistle.
She does get lost in car parks and shops, however, so it appears that either there’s a separate system for navigational reasoning, or she just doesn’t apply it to some contexts.
>Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images.
I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?
As per OP, you "visualise" concepts rather than images. A representation can be conceptual rather than visual. I don't know if I have the condition, but I can draw a shape without seeing that shape in my mind, I can see it when it's drawn though.
There is a lot of evidence that aphants score higher on spatial reasoning tests than those with vivid visual recall and are over represented in fields like math and science.
These two skill sets appear to be divergent, i.e., people are either good at visualizing and recalling fine details or they are good at manipulating/reasoning about spatial objects.
Personally, I have always excelled at the latter and have a strong sense of direction and have scored well on tests that require one to manipulate/rotate objects in my brain.
Perhaps it is. But then you should be able to answer: where is that visualization on disk? And I don't mean the encoding thereof, I mean the actual 2D picture you could glance at and immediately recognize. Not rendered with some image viewing program, but literally looking at the disk/SSD (perhaps under a microscope, if necessary) -- that should be doable, because you're claiming that schemas are inherently visual, and certainly that schema exists on disk somewhere, which in turn implies that those boxes and arrows should be visible on the storage medium.
> Boxes with arrows are clearly visual.
You've changed the topic -- no one is saying that boxes and arrows are not clearly visual. Where are those boxes and arrows sketched into an SSD or in memory? Or, would you assert that a database is schema-less until someone draws up a diagram?
(not the person you're responding to) It's not an image. It's a concept. I don't know how to explain the difference because I also only know it from the explanations of my partner. For example, she says that if she imagines a house it looks like a schematic drawing of a house (almost like if a child would draw a house), not like a realistic photograph of a house.
I'm pretty sure everybody (for certain values of "everybody") visualizes things as schemata; being able to imagine only specific, known, real examples instead of representative composites is a feature of autism. But here it sounds more like you're talking about a highly symbolic/abstracted example of a house vs. a highly detailed/concrete example of a house (rather than the autistic "actual house I have actually seen before"). I don't see how any of these wouldn't still be considered visual mental imagery and I'm starting to think that the people saying there's a semantics issue here might have a point.
When I 'visualize' it's not an image at all. It's the concept of what the image would be showing, which the above posters have called a graph or schematic. But that's an analogy, and not to be taken too literally. I don't visualize a schematic. I instead feel the connections and relationships between concepts. It's entirely non-visual.
I see, it sounded like you were saying you were visualizing a schema[1] (not schematic) of a house but thought it didn't qualify as visualization for some reason.
Does it feel like this is unsymbolized[2] or taking the form of a different mental imagery? (Mental "imagery" can be "visual imagery", or aural, tactile, kinesthetic...)
(Second link is my own re-re-posted comments about the subjective experience of "unsymbolized thought" and doesn't reflect some newer understanding on my end about it -- chiefly, the understanding of unsymbolized thoughts as similar to the aborted motor commands seen in subvocalizing, for example, except aborted much earlier; this explains why it would be difficult to continue doing it if I don't keep it moving along, since each "unsymbolized thought", or thought-granule or what have you, is already the beginning of a process that necessarily leads to some form of mental imagery and corresponding aborted motor command)
I think this is where I go by default, and I've described it before as a low-resolution wireframe. Only the particular part I'm paying attention to is there but I know what's around it and can shift focus as needed.
Almost like rendering a 3D image, but stopping early. I can also go full color with effort but it's generally unnecessary.
This is spatial reasoning, no visualization required. I have always had exceptional spatial reasoning, and while I can visualize it quite well, it is entirely unnecessary for function. My brain contains a detailed model of the topology of space that is quite separate from what the space actually looks like and can reason about it intuitively without visualizing it. This makes things like navigation easy even in places I have never seen before and therefore can’t visualize — I don’t need to know where I am to not be lost.
You're still describing it as an image. I think it would be more accurate to say that you feel the connections between the represented concepts as might be illustrated on a blueprint. But it's a non-visual experience.
Yeah it's nuts. I have an insanely good sense of direction, and an innate intuition for maps and orienteering. I studied physics in collage in part because of the visual (read: spatial / geometric) arguments for physical law just made so much sense to me. Einstein's gedankenexperiment resonated with me.
At the same time I took a drawing class in college, and the professor told us to "imagine the scene, then look at the canvas and draw what you see." I dropped that class because that seemed an utterly useless method of teaching to me. Draw what I see? I see a blank canvas! Now I'm dumbfounded to discover that y'all can hallucinate on command.
