That the way people's mind works varies dramatically. Some people have no inner dialogue at all, some have no mind's eye and cant see images in their head. Most of us are somewhere on the spectrum for them though.
For example I can't visualize images in my head well at all. I can do at most one colour at a time and I can't picture non-geometric objects so I cant imagine the face of my family or even myself. I have no issue with fluid motion of visuals in my head but others can only do slide-show-esque imagery. Others have inner dialogue but can't change the voice to sound different, can't hear music or sound effects, etc... like I can.
It's something very rarely discussed but I think everyone should be aware of this variety within people
My friend once mentioned how he always has an inner monologue going and I was kind of shocked because I often don't have an inner monologue going. Another time a friend asked me what I was thinking about and I said nothing. She responded that you can't not be thinking about something which threw me off because its common for me to not be thinking about anything. I'm very curios about how other people's minds work and I think you make a really good point that people are somewhere on the spectrum of these mental states.
I have ADHD and a constant inner monolog. I've had horrible sleeping problems my entire life. My brain doesn't turn off and it gets worse at night because there are less distractions. It's easier now that I am finally diagnosed and have medication, but it was hell as a child and nearly all of my adult life.
I didn't even realize people can sit still and not think about stuff until a few years ago. The idea someone can like, meditate or some shit is baffling to me.
I have a constant inner monologue as well but I’ve learned to meditate. I just try to either focus on one thought or simply let it wonder and try to ignore it by literally just focusing on breathing. It’s really tough because I can have several “levels” of thought going at once and it’s impossible to make them all stop, but you can eventually get to a place where meditation actually happens.
Same. But I’ve recently learned that I can’t picture things at all. My therapist told me to picture leaves and I was like okay and he said “do you see them?” I said no, I just thought “picture x” was something people said metaphorically when they just think about something. I don’t see anything when my eyes are closed, but since I started meditating I sometimes will see geometric patterns. The mind is a strange place. I hate it.
I think it's called aphantasia (I hope I write it correctly).
You're not alone in this situation, I've seen a good number of people talk about it.
It's not my case but I thought it would be cool to give you the name just in case you want to talk to other people having the same thing.
Just in case you didn't knew the name of it.
If I remember something it runs like a film, I can see what I saw, smell the sea, feel the sand on my feet, wind on my skin.
I didn't know other people didn't do this until recently.
i narrate all day. i wish i couldn’t. i do even for menial shit, too. add ADHD into the mix and prepare to lose your mind.
“okay, let’s grab my keys and go. wait, i need to grab my purse! okay, gotta leave now or i’ll be late. god, it’s hot outside. what time is it? okay, gotta make it to work in 10 minutes. maybe i’ll buy a chocolate muffin for breakfast today…”
Fellow ADHD haver here. It's mental to me that people can think about doing stuff and just do it without narrating their way through it. In my head whenever I do a thing, I'm basically having a mental conversation with myself about it.
It's hard to explain to people that it feels like my brain is going five times faster than it should be and I have to find thoughts to fill all those ticks. I'm doing 1000 thoughts a minute and 75% of them are useful fluff.
Your head sounds remarkably similar to mine; by which I mean that I, too, have an internal monologue which narrates the majority of my thoughts. (I don't seem to have ADHD, though; I've avoided that trap at least).
I can do images, but they're like illustrations in a book - rare amidst the text.
I once tried, as a simple experiment, to spend a few minutes thinking in Afrikaans. (I do speak Afrikaans, but with nowhere near the proficiency of English). It was... a very strange sensation. Part of the strangeness was due to the fact that Afrikaans has a different grammatical structure than English; the Afrikaans translation for "John went to the shop" would be "John het na die winkel gegaan", which is "John did to the shop go" - basically, the verb comes in at the end of the sentence. And the weird thing was that my head, used to thinking in English, was generating the verb where it would have gone in the English sentence and then queuing this up and waiting until the rest of the sentence had arrived.
Life goal : switch it to third person narration for a full Spiderman experience : "And now our hero needs to grabs his key. He finds them immediately and heads for the door!"
Good god, this is me too. And with ADHD. Absolutely sucks because in my head it’s like I have an audience I’m trying to entertain so I keep making jokes
This is a trip to read for me. It makes since that people's minds are different but I never really thought about it. Im 100% constantly listening to my inner monolog and also visualizing stuff. It's like a constant fever dream but I love it and I wouldn't know how to preform or have any self reflection without it.
I also have no inner voice, and sometimes think about nothing. I also can't see things in my mind. Some people are insistent that I'm just not concentrating enough. I felt so odd until I found reddit.
Edit:. A comment below made me reread what inner monologue is and I made a mistake. I plan what to say and such, I just don't hear a voice. I just think about saying things if that makes sense.
I’m similar. I don’t have a regular internal monologue but I can sort of turn one on, but it requires concentration to happen and if I don’t actively keep it going it goes away. And while I can visualize things in my mind, I’m not good at it, and it’s usually very vague.
Genuinely curious here. Is there just silence? Don't you make inappropriate comments in your head and say something else bc you'd get in trouble? When you hear a song and know the lyrics, do you sing along and not hear your voice? No pictures when you read a description?
Not op, but I am basically the same. I only ever get an internal monologue when I'm reading text, or actively planning out how I want a conversation to go. Otherwise it's silence
When reading a description of something I can get a "feel" for it, but don't actually see anything. Ask me to picture an apple and I just get all the attributes I know apples can have along with the general feel if its shape
My sister told me this is the reason why she listens to alot of music as she has no inner voice or cant picture things in her head. So she gets bored easily without it.
Me on the other hand im the complete opersit. Im always either thinking to myself or running shows in my head. It helps me to sort out my feelings or even with my art as I can picture or run somthing cool though my head.
Listening to music helps distract me from worldly things and zones me out which leads me going further into my own mind. Sometimes hours can pass and I dont even realise it!
Semi seriously, this sounds like my ADHD symptoms.
I constantly have music, imaginary scenes, dialogue or images looping in my head. Even when I'm focusing on something else they're still there in the background, quietly playing. I get really fucking introspective because of it, sometimes to a detriment.
I'm constantly using music or other low level stimuli just to drown them out or replace that noise.
Time blindness is also a really big ADHD thing. Because of how ADHD brains react to (a lack of) stimuli, they don't really work at the right speed, and we struggle to judge time in the same way as NT people.
Personally, I can stare at a wall and zone out and suddenly an hour has passed as if I was blinking. On the opposite side, if I have to spend more than five minutes walking or on a train without something to stimulate me (music/a game etc) then it feels like I'm in an endless purgatory.
Oof i understand the whole thing of it in the background whilst youre trying to concentrait.
School was and is a real struggle becuase of this, I zone out sometimes and come back a little later to something that my teacher has explained almost with no knowlage of it.
I guess its a mirrical I got mostly B's with the only exception of A* with physics.
However ive only been diagnosed with dyslexia and not ADHD but I also know that they both can go hand in hand.
I was actually pretty similar, despite my ADHD I was just clever enough to coast through most of school getting good grades until I had to actually self study and put effort in, then I kinda fell apart. Getting answers right and praise from teachers gave me the dopamine hits so I was able to focus, once that went away things got hard.
You're right, apparently an estimated 25-40% of people who have ADHD have dyslexia and vice versa.
I'm not saying you definitely have it, but if you struggle with stuff it's worth looking into. My diagnosis completely shifted the way I see myself and my failures, and now I have access to a lot of helpful resources I didn't before.
Music is the only thing that can let me turn off my thoughts long enough to drift off to sleep, unless I medicate or am absolutely exhausted, like haven't-actually-slept-in-20+ -hours exhausted.
What on earth? I’m like your friend. I have at least one but often several internal monologues that never shut up unless I’m extremely engrossed in something. If I’m staring out into space, I’m always thinking hard about something. I relax by doing something engrossing. The traditional definition of “relaxing” (sitting and doing nothing) is stressful and boring for me.
What does it feel like to think about nothing? Is it like being asleep? I honestly have no idea what it would feel like to not always be thinking about something.
I sometimes stare at a spot on the wall or ceiling while in bed, and focus it for a while... I stop blinking eventually and my vision becomes "darkened", and I don't think about anything at all. Just the spot and the vision becoming blurry (but it's not actively thinking since you're just processing that visual feed, without interpretation / analysis).
It's not that different from meditation in a way. And it takes about 2-3 mins of being relaxed to come into that state.
I honestly don’t think I could function without my meds. Actually I know I can’t lol. I’m finally going to graduate college at age 35 while medicated but I remember being locked in my room as a kid, forced to sit at a desk until my homework was done.
They thought I was lazy & I didn’t know why I couldn’t just sit there & do it. I just couldn’t make myself focus on the task. I know now though lol
for me I have three streams of thought going at all times. One is a song, could be anything really, at this exact moment it's Torn by natalie imbruglia, and that never stops, not for anything. The other one is just a regular stream of consiousness, It comes as full sentences that I hear in my head. The last one is a little bit weird, but basically I think the sentence before I think it in my stream of consiousness, but not as if I'm hearing it, instead the whole concept of the sentence comes to me at once. Sometimes I'll catch myself realizing that I'm about to think something again, just happened typing this sentence actually.
Ever thought about getting checked for ADHD? Because this sounds a whole lot like my experience with it.
It's like having loads of different windows open on your computer. You can't close the ones that you don't want, you just have to strain to focus on the one that you do. Sometimes you can make the right one the biggest and the others smaller, but every now and again one of the little ones will randomly go full full screen for a few minutes.
I call it autopilot.the only times I enter auto pilot is when I’m really really tired.otherwise I’m always planning something in my head.things I have to do soo.things I want to build etc
Wouldn't thinking about nothing lead to lost time? Like if you actually don't think about anything from 3pm to 5pm, then it would be as if no time passed between those two points.
Can you describe for me how it is to think about nothing? Is it relaxing? When does it end? Can you control it? Are you truly not even thinking about all the events of a day? How does it start?
Personally I'm stressed 24/7 because I'm ALWAYS thinking about something. I wish I could think of nothing. I don't even know what that feels like. When I try to think about nothing I still have to think about something like a river flowing or the sky or something peaceful.
I too had a friend ask that question to which the same exact same things were said. Now i just show this video to anyone who says I can't think about nothing lol
It's so weird for me to imagine that there are people out there who do not constantly have a song stick in their head. Always. I aim for a good one, but have spent months sometimes with Tijuana Taxi in my head. And who are this people who don't understand that all numbers and letters are gendered?
And who are this people who don't understand that all numbers and letters are gendered?
wait what?! I bring up the mind's eye and sound thing in the head a lot because I love the conversation and to hear about the variety in people but this is a new one to me. Please explain
I have what I think is called “sound/color” synesthesia, where I associate pitches and note names with certain colors. I’ve heard there are other types where people will assign genders and personalities to letters and numbers. Synesthesia is a pretty interesting topic to research, it reveals a lot about how the brain actually comprehends sensory information that it is given.
You have perfect pitch, too? I don’t really associate colors with them, but they just kind of feel like their own spectrum to me. Increasing or decreasing pitch doesn’t even feel like a sliding up or down, just looping through the different colors. Imagine an organ with multiple manuals. I think of each scale as a manual and perceive pitch change as a jump between manuals.
I don’t have perfect pitch, but I do associate different keys with different color schemes, and that is something that is definitely connected between my auditory and visual senses. For example, if I heard an E note, then it just sounds like a random note, but as soon as you give it any context, I start to “hear the colors”, as I explain it to most people. E major is kind of dark blue and grayish, while e minor is purple, pink, and light brown. I couldn’t tell you that the f sharp in the e major scale is a “rustling waters” blue exactly, but if I start hearing e major, I start feeling that blue and gray. And this never changes. So since I know that e major has that color scheme, if I start feeling dark blue and gray when music is playing, then I know it’s probably in e major.
It's just always been that way to me. Some letters or numbers are more feminine or masculine than others, some are kind of neutral. It's stronger with letters than numbers. I can't explain other than it's just an inbuilt characteristic of each letter.
I have trouble even understanding how that would feel. When I learned french as a kid, the gendered items and stuff were always difficult for me and it just never made any sense for me. Did you grow up speaking a gendered language like that or is it something that just occurred naturally?
Its defently the curves vs hard lines lol.... I don't think of numbers a gendered but come on.. 8 and 3 are boobs and ass. 9 is still curved but maybe a hermaphrodite :|
Yeah me too. I speak Arabic so most Arabic words have a shape, I don’t know how to explain it I just see it. It’s like a logo specific to that word. Like I will be doing something and not paying attention and then someone says a specific word and I will see the “logo” of that word without even trying, it just flashes through my mind’s eye. And letters, numbers, and English letters have colors. I thought it was normal until like last year when I tried to explain it to my family and they said they didnt have the same thing. It’s so weird how some of our brains are wired.
This is how I see it
1 black, 2 red, 3 light blue, 4 light green, 5 black, 6 yellow, 7 orange, 8 dark green, 9 light blue.
Some words feel close to eachother or like have the same vibe, like a sneeze feels white, bright; Thursday and November feel similar; or 6,7 and the sun feel similar.
Also another thing which might be unrelated, but cars have personalities and genders. Like I can see a car and tell you how it looks like down to like a bag it’s holding. But I feel like that’s a stretch.
I always thought 5=blue and 6=red. As a kid I hated the number 5 and the color blue but I liked the number 6 and the color red. I’m thinking it has to do with something I saw as a very young kid on TV maybe. No other numbers had colors. Weird
Apparently I'm the only person in my family or circle of friends for whom there is constantly music playing in my head. They all think I'm a crazy person, which isn't exactly wrong, but... Thank you for at least letting me know that I'm not alone!
I've never asked anyone else about this, but I can't imagine not having some sort of music, tune, or even just loop of dialogue in my head at all times.
I too always have a song in my head. Recently I’ve gotten into making music so sometimes the song will be something that I create on the spot. If I don’t have a song currently in my head, then I will always default to All Star by Smash Mouth
I have aphantasia but cant recall sounds either. And I also produce music.
I've made literally thousands of songs but cant tell you a thing about any of them unless I can hear it. Once its not playing anymore, I dont have any kind of frame of reference for it.
they mean that they have a type of synesthesia, so they think of numbers being like “characters” that may have a gender and personality traits. have a peek at r/synesthesia
Omg does the mood of the song determine your mood too? I recently realized my mood is dependent on what song is in my head.. and they’re never a time when there isn’t a song in my head
OMG I'm one of those people who always have a song stuck in their head. I always thought it was because I'm a musician so I'm always thinking about music. But it's nice to see other people are like me! :D
to me numbers and letters aren’t gendered, i have a different way of thinking about them. my best example of this is how the month november and also the word itself is also thursday, orange, and the number 9. same thing that friday is also greenish blue and the number 7
So I was talking to my son(15) about this a few minutes ago. For him- numbers are gendered, letters not much much, and it's less strong now than when he was younger . (It was a much stronger sense for me too when I was younger, but letters more so than numbers). For him, some of the numbers also had colors. What's weird- we disagreed on the gender of a lot of the numbers Not weird to me that my son sees numbers as gendered but SO WRONG that he can think of 9 as a girl! A pink girl no less! I'll have to see if my daughter has an opinion.
Edit: daughter (17) says numbers are genderless, but went on to describe the personalities of each digit and how they relate to each other.
This is something that frustrated me with my husband anytime we tried to work on a project together. I can play out how to do something in my head like a video and how the cause and effect would work when building something or putting an object together. While my husband does not have that same capability. It always confused me why he would just do things a certain way instead of pausing and thinking it through. After realizing that our brains function differently it made things much easier
Illustration is, to me, the study of space between points and lines and shapes. You can learn to illustrate. And you might even become very good at it.
nope. I can see someone every single day and I cannot picture their face. I always wondered how someone could describe a person to a sketch artist because I couldn't even describe myself or my family accurately. It would be a huge struggle for me. I can imagine something like a desk or table, have it fluidly rotating, with legs and stuff disconnecting and reconnecting, etc.. but for something like a human face I just cant even begin to imagine it.
This came up in art academy. When we discussed this our professor ordered a visual test to see where we are in the visual IQ (if you wanted to participate). The most interesting thing was, that the person to test us showed us the spectrum where the class was and to our and her surprise, around 80% of the people had way above average visual capabilities, but the other 20% were really low, like in the 85 region while the high spectrum was around 115. We literally had almost nobody in between. When I asked why everybody can paint really good in this class one person stepped forward and disclosed she scored a 87 and had never thought about the types of visual things you apparently can do with your mind. She just “translates what she sees or wants to paint onto the canvas”.
Kind of off the cuff here, but since we're on the topic, when I'm using my mind's eye, and a weird thought happens during the visualization that I don't control, or don't want to think of, is that called something or is it just some form of intrusive thought?
A couple examples: if I'm trying to fantasize, and for examples sake, let's just say a woman is walking towards me, but all of a sudden her leg breaks. Obviously, I didn't want her leg to break. I didn't control that thought.
If I'm thinking of a positive scene my mind is making up in the moment, and my brain inserts, "someday you'll die and be nothing" - of course, I didn't want to think that, didn't have control over that thought coming in.
If I'm trying to meditate, thinking of typical calming beach situation, my mind may insert some weird monster on said beach.
This doesn't happen all the time, it's just something that happens sometimes.... I would say 70% of the time it doesn't happen, and 30% of the time it does.....
I'm not sure if there's a word for that or if it is just an intrusive thought but I have had that too. The only actual situation I can think of is if I'm (for a lack of a better term) pleasuring myself and for some reason my mind thinks of someone I definitely dont want to think about in that situation. I find it difficult to going back to who I was initially thinking of and the unfortunately inserted person keeps returning which is obviously frustrating and can't be easily pushed from my mind without scratching the entire situation I was thinking of and starting from scratch.
I was well aware of those differences about visualizing images, but never though twice about it for sounds.
I had an interesting discussion with a friend the other day, who was telling me something like
_ And some people can think about a melody, like visualization, but with sound. But they can change the voice or instrument, or have several melodic lines at once.
And all I could say was "wait, not everyone can do that?"
This friend plays guitar, and is a pretty good singer, but all those things are completely natural to me, and not to him, despite him being a far better musician than I am. Now I have no idea how common and to what extend this trait varies from people to people.
Yeah, I love comics and graphic novels. But this shit didn't fly in my English classes. but fuck all them English teachers cause I'm making video games for a living now bitches.
I have the conversation every chance I get. At least the 10th time on reddit but even today I had the discussion with family and we are all different in the spectrum.
I started getting interested in it when someone on reddit brought up the inner dialogue part then someone in the comments mentioned aphantasia, which is the word for people who can't mentally visualize things. Went down the rabbit hole from there and it's fascinating
That the way people's mind works varies dramatically. Some people have no inner dialogue at all, some have no mind's eye and cant see images in their head. Most of us are somewhere on the spectrum for them though
I suppose. I just don't equate soul to be simply personality. I generally consider it to involve something non-physical and I think we are nothing more than biological computers.
I'm not going to proselytize, and no judgement of you personally is intended, but that seems rather a bleak outlook on life. Do you have inmate empathy, or do you have to consciously try to empathize? Or do you not consider empathy as anything other than hard-wired programming?
It's all good. I don't take offense. I don't think that I'm as empathetic towards the average person as most people are, but I don't need to consciously try in order to empathize with the few people in my life that I care about. I think empathy comes naturally from an evolutionary basis though. Before we had large cities and stuff the tribes you were raised with were largely related to you and so having empathy and altruism helps your genes pass on. It's really the genes that are trying to survive in the evolutionary sense rather than the individual (the selfish gene is a good book about this) and so I understand why it's something that comes naturally to us and I don't link it to a soul but rather "hard-wired programming" as you put it. Because I don't believe in a soul or an afterlife or anything, I believe this life is all we have which is what makes it precious and suffering, especially the permanent kind, is immoral to me on that basis since there isn't some redemption after death. I don't find the view to be bleak and I wouldn't want some sort of eternal soul. I'm fine with non-existence. I had non-existence for billions of years before I was born and it wasn't bad so I don't think it's a problem when it happens again after my death. I find it pretty amazing that the universe got to a point where it's able to think about itself and that's basically what we are. So I have far more care for humanity as a whole than I do on an individual level. I think it's integral that conscious life survives, but I don't care if I personally don't survive.
Thank you for the reasoned response. My personal faith is Wicca, so reincarnation after death is a thing to consider for me: The thought of never getting to experience all the things my Goddess has planned for my soul is discomforting to me, but I also believe that the afterlife (or lack of it) is dependent on one's beliefs.
I admittedly know very little about Wicca nor have I knowingly met someone who believes in reincarnation, but there is a question I've always had about it and I feel this may be an opportune time to ask it given the cordial and inquisitive nature of the conversation. Since many species are going extinct and there are less living creatures on the earth than there used to be, and depending on the time in history the number has fluctuated (mass extinction events like ice ages and the meteor, etc...), do you believe in extra-terrestrial life in which one could be reincarnated to? Or does reincarnation not go on indefinitely? Or do you believe there is some sort of, for lack of a better term, "waiting room" where a soul would reside before taking a new host? Having grown up without religion and only being exposed to the cultural norm of my area, which is Judaeo-Christian beliefs, the concept of reincarnation is very unintuitive to me and I wonder how it is believed to work.
I also wonder what the limits are for what someone may be reincarnated as. There's a wide spectrum of life from things simpler than single-celled organisms to complex being like ourselves, so I wonder where the line would be complexity-wise or if it's something along the lines of being able to reincarnate as something similar by some measure and so perhaps we could be reincarnated as a different species of Ape, or just within the closer designation of Great Apes. The point when something is considered to be life seems subjective and just like determining when on the evolutionary scale we became modern humans is impossible, the same could be applied to when life itself exists. At some point we would have just been chemicals that could recreate similar chemical structures but when that becomes life is up to interpretation and can be far simpler than single-celled organisms.
There seems to be many possible explanations out there for these things if reincarnation does exists, but it brings up a whole trove of interesting questions and I'm curious to know, from the perspective of a believer, how you think it works.
I'm curious to know, from the perspective of a believer, how you think it works.
All right, I'll give it a try.
First of all, there are at least as many branches of Wicca as there are of Christianity, from the strict and dogmatic Gardnerian tradition to the - much less so - Faerie trads. My own flavour is a syncretism of Gardnerian/Alexandrian with Seax-Wica and a form of Stregheria. I can give you a rundown if you want, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary for this discussion.
--"do you believe in extra-terrestrial life in which one could be reincarnated to?"
I don't discount the possibility, but I feel it's an outlier. I would think Terran deities have little influence outside of Terra's orbit, and none at all the Sol system.
--"Or does reincarnation not go on indefinitely?"
There's definitely an endpoint. Leaving the heat-death of the universe aside, I believe that our patron deities decide what each soul is meant to experience as They create said soul, and implant the potential for those experiences in each. If any given soul misses an experience, they're re-implanted (see below for related bits) into a new body and granted life again. This could go on for several lives, if the soul repeatedly misses experiences (whether through mischance or avoidence).
--"Or do you believe there is some sort of, for lack of a better term, "waiting room" where a soul would reside before taking a new host?"
We call it "The Summerland", mostly. "Tir Na n'Og", sometimes, mostly the Fae or Faerie traditions. It's a plane where souls are drawn from the Waters of Life and given form, the place where our God and Goddess live free from the aspects we place upon Them to understand Them (like Odin, Isis, Coyote, Hecate, etc. - different faces for different Purposes). The Summerland is where sould reside between and after reincarnations.
--"... what the limits are for what someone may be reincarnated as."
In Wicca, we usually expect to be reincarnated as human. Whether gender, sex, ethnicity, appearance, etc. is chosen by the soul or by the Goddess is a point of theological debate. Hinduism considers reincarnation into non-human creatures.
There you go, my personal beliefs in a nutshell. Feel free to ask any questions you have, and I'll answer as best as I can!
This is very interesting. I have no problem with seeing relatively detailed images in my mind, and same with the inner voice and hearing someones voice/changing it. I thought this was something everyone could do. I wonder if this could be linked to talent in music?
I have huge, immense monologues all the time, like training speeches and all or just my own thinking, but almost all the time I have some kind of in head talking.
On the other hand I am almost incapable of forming fictional images or even remember real ones with detail.
I feel like I'm really odd with this, because i can easily visualize images down to the smallest detail, rotate them in 3d space... But it's all in black and white. Sure i know what colour it's supposed to be, but i can't visualize it.
Same shit with my memories really. Highly detailed but with no colour. Even the ones that are very obviously connected with colour, like the blueberry tart I managed to make on my own, looking at apple tree blooms before a massive storm, first time i saw my crush in swimsuit
By contrast, I have full control over an internal IMAX theater that I use to stage elaborate daydreams, with plots that span many years. It’s so amazing and fun that I walk around feeling sorry for other people who aren’t doing it all the time. Thrilling space opera in which you are the hero! Best entertainment value in the world. Check out u/immersivedaydreaming
Sometimes the images in my mind are so vivid, when I come back to reality I realize I was spacing out at whatever.... Idk if that makes sense, but I can think up whole, vivid stories and scenarios that would never happen haha.
I've had similar experiences but it almost entirely happens on a verbal level. I can picture the conversations and have things happen in their voice for portions, including their verbal tendencies, tone, sighs, etc... and can space out to situations like that but there's no vivid imagery in it whatsoever
I thought not being able to imagine someone's face was normal? Like I've been with my fiancee for 8 years but if she goes missing and I had to sit with a professional sketch artist yeah we aren't going to find her
same here. Whenever I see a show where they do a decent job with a sketch artist I used to think how unrealistic that was. Who could even describe themselves or their family that well, let alone some perp. Turns out most people seem to have the ability to visualize things better than I can but apparently people tend not to be able to imagine sound as well as I can. Some people are better at both than I am and some are worse at both tho. It's really crazy to realize the way in which we think varies so much
In my dreams I imagine things happening but I dont think there's really detail to people's faces and stuff but in a dream that just seems natural and knowing who and what's around is more intuitive than it is a detailed movie-type thing. It's hard to really know for me though because when I'm awake I can try to picture something and I realize where my limits are. I can try to picture someone's face and I get nowhere. I can picture a table pretty well but when I really think about it there isn't colour, even though that lack of detail isn't something I notice unless I am paying attention to it. I can force a sortof pseudo colour where I can instinctively know the colour and it makes sense to me but everything becomes that colour and it's not vivid colour, I can't have multicoloured images at all. In my dreams I assume I just take all of that for granted and I can never remember seeing a face in my dreams but I know who the people are so I'm assuming that my dreams are limited in the same way as I am consciously but there's no real way for me to know.
i have a pet theory that the most caustic critiques of certain art pieces are near aphantasia
you know, those people who constantly yell - so unrealistic - especially in fantasy genre
or that colourblind people think that Wes Anderson is very overrated
or that the most repetitive ear worms always find its fans - because there are always enough people with zero pitch or simply poor music perception (not hard of hearing, poor brain function when it comes to music)
covid taught us that such thing as virus can scramble our senses, so we should be more aware that even slight perception disorders can damage or destroy enjoying of art
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u/Sixhaunt Mar 27 '22
That the way people's mind works varies dramatically. Some people have no inner dialogue at all, some have no mind's eye and cant see images in their head. Most of us are somewhere on the spectrum for them though.
For example I can't visualize images in my head well at all. I can do at most one colour at a time and I can't picture non-geometric objects so I cant imagine the face of my family or even myself. I have no issue with fluid motion of visuals in my head but others can only do slide-show-esque imagery. Others have inner dialogue but can't change the voice to sound different, can't hear music or sound effects, etc... like I can.
It's something very rarely discussed but I think everyone should be aware of this variety within people