Mental pictures
 

I was talking to someone, and she said she doesn't have mental pictures. I don't think I do either because...I can't see things mentally if I try to envision it, but I will only know what something looks like. It is like...I can perceive what something looks like through a different mental sense. But definitely no picture.

I realize it's impossible to really test this myself, because maybe just knowing what something looks like is the mental picture or something...It's basically impossible to communicate clearly what a mental picture is. Just as there is no easy way to verify that we see the same colors the same way...

anyhoo, whaddya think.........do you have mental pictures. I feel like I need more feed back to accurately be able to determine whether or not I can create mental pictures.

Thats a shame, I used to not have them.

Lee Ranaldo, I've seen posed the idea that we do not have imaginations.
I simply think thats an awful assumption, perception of life.

However, we're each entitled to those perceptions and personally I haven't until more recently when I changed my thought process completely- I imagine vivid things all of the time now, both out of past existences and things I know myself to build in my brain.

Otherwise some people are just visual / aural , what have you .... in that you probably just limit yourself somehow. That's all I can offer, truly.

I have different kinds of mental pictures; I have synesthesia.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia

I definitely have mental pictures. Or at least my mind has tricked me into thinking I do. They aren't very detailed, though. I can see generalizations of images, like "a black cat walking in the street" or something, but it's kind of dim and I can't make out anything my mind isn't specifically focused on.

Like I can picture the page of a book I was reading, and see the shape of paragraphs and placement of pictures, but I can't actually see words; however, if I can picture a word if I think about it specifically.

I apparently have synesthesia, too, but that sounds kind of like simple association/nostalgia mixed with OCD.

Same here, whenever I read a book all perception of reality is lost, and the story becomes reality. Everything becomes vivid.

clinically diagnosed or do you just think you might have it? synaesthesia doesnt have anything to do with OCD.

does it negatively affect you or do you use it in some creative way? What kind do you have? I find the crossed connections really interesting especially how consistant the experiences are. I suffer from aural overload sometimes and it disrupts my mental process.. but in a completely different way. It seems wonderful to be able to at least experience it with some kind of pattern. There are a couple of really great docos where people with sound to colour syneasthesia describe their expeirences, really interesting to watch./

I tend to think visually. At least I think i do. If someone say's "spaceship" I immediately visualise one. To be honest I thought everyone did this. If it's a mood or an emotion or something equally abstract it may not happen, although if someone talks about 'freedom', for example, I'll usually think of an image that reminds me of that concept. Something iconic.

I definately have mental pictures/imagery.. not sure whether its something that I've always had, or something that has developed? In my head I see colours, textures, shape, size... and then along with it, sound. Its strong enough to distract me from reality sometimes.. day-dreaming and being completely in my own world. For the most part I love it. Though in my artistic or creative process, it can be really disheartening. If there is imagery that I'm trying to put down from memory or imagination, I cannot draw with my hands anywhere near as fast as I can with my mind.

I've actually been blessed in my life with a really good mental imagery ability. It's something I've always had, going back to my childhood, and it definitely serves me well in my writing.

I'm still funny about remembering certain things though. I often forget people's names, for one thing.

i have synesthesia too, the kind where i see music in colors: songs or instrumets have a color to me. my mind works in an extremely visual way, which is kind of logical since my biggest passions involve visual elements. i can see images very clearly, and when i make associations, i'll immediately see them rather than just think of it.

sometimes i remember a picture exactly how it was, but mirrored. it's weird.

I guess maybe I don't have mental pictures...weird. sad. whatevs

Also (not accusing anyone of anything) I feel like people lie about having synesthesia in the same way people used to always lie about being klepto and pyromaniacs in middle school.

hell yes, all the time. which is why i hate to hear about other people's sex lives. and when i read a book, it's like a little movie playing in my head. i thought everyone else was that way!




the rimbaud twins!

Voyelles



WHOA!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9G1YIdDHh8k

I most certainly do. Maybe years of consuming delicious psylocibin helped.

Oh my God. Alchemy of the Word is my favorite poem of all time. The first poem I ever had published was actually a ridiculous obsessive experiment of assigning colors to letters as my brain saw them, and trying to stick to certain colors in the letters and imagery. I don't know if that's why it worked, but it's still one of my better poems.No, I just have what I've heard is synesthesia, and what I've heard is OCD, and they seem like pretty much the same mental processes. There may be some clinical level beyond what I experience, though. I dunno.

indeed, seeing a color or image when hearing a song isn't necessarily synesthesia, it is when you connect the same color with the same sound every time.

they tested me by writing down thrity songs, i had to write down the color or visual that i had, and do this again a month later. 29 of them were exactly the same.

rimbaud is awesome.

rimbaud says he invented these colors, not saw them as such, but nabokov did claim somewhere to have synesthesia.

where did you publish yours?

I have a very hard time conjuring mental images. that is weird for an artist to say and my teachers thought it very odd, but it is true

That one was just in my college "literary journal" or whatever. It wasn't a real publication, but at the time it was exciting.

ah yes. i used to edit one of those. i still keep them to embarrass myself, but no, they were quite decent things.

Haha, yeah it's not exactly a poor-quality output--I've been rightly denied a couple times--but it does publish some shit.

In 3rd grade, my teacher constantly wrote me up for daydreaming too much in class. I was supposed to be doing my work, but I couldn't help it.

I still occasionally daze out and get lost in my own mental imagery; thinking about ideas for films or short stories. It can really piss friends off sometimes, because it can be hard snapping back to reality.

I think that's why I can't draw very well. I can't
"picture" things in my head.

oh really
i've got photoshop cs3.

It's super super easy to remember chords, names, phone numbers, words, etc. and it's really easy to spell things. The only time it's really distracting is at night when I'm tired... it basically overloads and my entire line of vision is covered in some silvery blob.
Also, thanks to my synesthesia, it's easy to put chords and harmonies together.

i use it to remember things too, like names... it also influences my drawing, since the music inspires me in a way (giving me images and colors to work with)

Haha. Yeah. That's lame. I can remember from when I was VERY young and I didn't even know what the hell synesthesia was... I remembered names from colors, and I always got Stephanie and Rachel mixed up because Stephanie is a reddish-purple and Rachel is a blue-purple.
I remembered songs from the overall color I got from them.
And I hate the way certain words look. Meal being my least favorite word ever because of this, followed by panties.
I didn't even know it was a condition until I was 14.

What a strange condition! So when you think of the name Stephanie, you get a mental image of the reddish-purple colour or do you just think of the colour everytime you hear that name? Does shortening the name to Steph give you the same colour?

I knew a guy who said he had a condition where he would read a sign back to front or smtimes when he was listening to people speak he would involuntarily get the words of the sentence mixed up, either confusing him or amusing him.

The only sort of synesthesia I experience is number form. I see numbers sort of like this..


It actually helps a lot with remembering dates and ordering them chronologically. From a history student's perspective it's great.