Can I do it just till I need Glasses ?
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MOD NOTE: Please bring the conversation back to the TS's original focus.

 

Stephen Pinker had a discussion of visualization in his book “How The Mind Works.”

He asks the reader to visualize a purple cow. Then he asks a series of questions that would be trivial to answer if visualization was anything like looking at a picture. Questions like “which way is the cow facing?”. I could not answer any of the questions. And this must be the usual case, because his point was that visualization is not remotely like looking at a picture.

Edited to add: This is from memory of a book I read 20+ years ago, so is probably not completely accurate, but I hope I got the point of it right.

 

This is a quote from the wiki “Hyperphantasics are significantly more likely to work in traditionally creative roles within "Arts, Design, Entertainment, Sports, and Media" in comparison to their aphantasiac counterparts.”

I’m sure any one of us can imagine the smell of an apple pie, baking then being cut with the thick heavy syrup and cinnamon and butter wafting around. The serving knife makes an uncomfortable scrap of metal on metal and the feel of the flaky crust as it’s being cut, then the hard dollop of vanilla ice cream melting. The sound of the fork cutting through until that sharp tap against the china. Are you standing at the countertop, walking towards the table or perhaps sitting at a restaurant? The noise around you….

Sometimes it’s useful other times, like anything, a distraction. Do you need to smell solder or remember the feel of the tweezer gripping an IC to design a circuit or derive an equation? Or are they just annoying distractions? Sometimes I like to work in the dark, it helps me focus on my work at hand.

I wonder if it’s a skill we develop by reading a lot. I read a lot as a youngster. Sometimes quickly and other times slowly to savor all the sensory details.

isn’t this just normal?

 

Stephen Pinker had a discussion of visualization in his book “How The Mind Works.”

He asks the reader to visualize a purple cow. Then he asks a series of questions that would be trivial to answer if visualization was anything like looking at a picture. Questions like “which way is the cow facing?”. I could not answer any of the questions. And this must be the usual case, because his point was that visualization is not remotely like looking at a picture.

Edited to add: This is from memory of a book I read 20+ years ago, so is probably not completely accurate, but I hope I got the point of it right.

When my daughter was about four she came up to me with a crayon drawing of an orange cat. I was curious if she would make the connection between the object the drawing represented and the typical properties of that object. So I asked her "Does the cat have long hair?" and she looked at the drawing and said "Yes." I would have agreed that the cat in the drawing looked like it had longer hair that you usually think of a cat having, so I figured she was comparing her drawing to her mental image of a cat. I then asked, "How many legs the does your cat have?" and she answered "Four", even though her drawing was at an angle that only included three legs. So I'm thinking that she's answering based on her expectations of the real thing. Then I asked her, "Does the cat have soft hair?" She looked at the drawing for a few seconds, turned to me, and in a tone of somewhat strained patience said, "Papa, it's only a drawing." I've often wondered if that response was because she recognized that the map is not the territory and, therefore, the drawing wasn't able to capture everything about what it represented, or whether it meant that she couldn't imagine non-visual things (or at least not tactile things), In the years since I've become pretty convinced that it wasn't the latter, but largely the former. In her mind (at that time), all cats have four legs, and therefore she could extrapolate that property as applying to her drawn cat. But she new that some cats have very soft fur and some don't, so she wasn't able to do that for that question. I've wondered if the pause was because she was essentially trying to instantiate a specific cat in her mind and was unable to do so.

 

I've known some engineers who drove the drafters nuts. Not even a sketch to work from, just some vague verbal instructions and when drafted the engineer would then start in with No, No, NO, that is not what I want. After about the third time, I swear I could smell blood in the air!