Comments on: Missing the mind’s eye view

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 24 May 2013 00:56:19 +0000

I have absolutely no mind’s eye. I have never been able to visualize a single image in my mind. When I was in school, teachers would say that it was more fun to read novels than to read books with pictures, or to watch movies, because the pictures we saw in our heads were better. I was simply confused and didn’t know what they were talking about. I love reading, but picture nothing while reading, and only read novels at about 10 pages an hour, because anything described visually takes me a long time to process. And when I was in groups where we were told to relax, close our eyes, and imagine being at a beach or something, I was again confused, because I can’t do that at all.

I also can’t imagine taste, or smell, or touch. I have a limited ability to imagine sounds. I don’t actually hear them in my head, but am able to remember a little of what they sound like.

I majored in math and art in college. In art, I did mostly computer animation, where you can see the final image, and manipulate it while you are looking at it. In other classes, my art teachers were always warning us to draw/paint, etc. what we were seeing, and not what we thought we were seing, and were astonished that I was always able to draw anything I was actually looking at photographically and exactly, with color and shadow perfect.

Math was very interesting. I graduated from a college that generally produces over 100 math majors a year. Almost all the rest of them thought visually. I think completely in terms of relationship, pattern, abstract structure, etc. and rely very strongly on intuition. I could solve problems that no one else could, including my professors, because I thought so differently. I solved several problems that my professors had been unable to do in years of trying. They would always ask me what I was visualizing, and I told them I wasn’t. I was especially good at probability and abstract algebra, because there is nothing to visualize. But then there were problems that I couldn’t solve even with great effort, that every else could solve in an instant through visualizing. I learned my way of thinking wasn’t better or worse, just different. My skills were a fabulous complement to visual thinkers, and I became very popular in group projects, because I added so much to the rest of the group. When paired with a visual thinker, we could do a week of work in under an hour, that would take either of us alone the whole week. I was awarded one of two departmental distinctions in math because my alternative problem solving skills awed the math faculty.

I really wish I did have a mind’s eye, but I wonder if I would lose more than I would gain. I am sure my standard way of looking at the world and thinking is extremely different from most people. People always tell me I am so weird for thinking things through, and solving things the way I do.

By: kkeefner

kkeefner — Tue, 21 May 2013 09:14:57 +0000

I have very limited visual imagery. For example, I cannot imagine my wife’s face, although I can get a fleeting impression of a photo I took of her.

A lot of my thinking occurs in shapes that I use metaphorically, especially architectural features such as windows and partitions. I don’t see these exactly. It’s as if I have another sense, halfway between touch and sight, colorless and more abstract than normal perception.

On the other hand, I have a great aural imagination, and can hear music quite well in my head. And I can recognize faces normally, although I have always had some trouble with names

By: Teri

Teri — Sat, 09 Mar 2013 23:20:28 +0000

Wow. I am an artist too and I can draw from memory and visualise as I go in painting – I had no idea some of us don’t think this way. I get frustrated, in fact, when my ‘mind’s eye’ isn’t working at optimum. It fluctuates. So I also get how the surveyor felt.

By: heath

heath — Fri, 04 Jan 2013 02:51:15 +0000

Yeah tell me about it, I am a 38 year old – and totally lacking in this department – zero ability to create or call up any sort of image internally.

By: Jim

Jim — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 20:04:54 +0000

This is also very much the same as me. I have never been able to see with my ‘mind’s eye’. I have not been able to find out how common it is to not have a “mind’s eye”. There does not seem to be any articles about the absence of a “mind’s eye”. All articles appear to assume that everyone has this ability. If anyone knows of any info about this inability, please communicate.

By: Terri Halford

Terri Halford — Sun, 08 May 2011 10:49:00 +0000

This is very much the same as me. I have never been able to see with my ‘mind’s eye’ but I didn’t even really realise that I was different in that way until university. A lecturer decided to show the group she was teaching ‘the power of the mind’.
She told us to picture a kitchen, and walk over to the refridgerator, take out a lemon and slice it. We then had to eat a slice.
I could not picture a kitchen but I could imagine how it smelled, and my saliva glands reacted almost painfully at thinking of tasting it.
When I told the lecturer, she just told me that I obviously have no imagination. I was rather offended considering I am a budding writer.
I can remember and describe what I see, but I cannot ‘see’ it in my mind. I remember peoples faces when I see them, but I often have problems putting names to the faces.
It’s nice to know I am not a weirdo to be honest.

By: amy

amy — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:07:07 +0000

Until about 2 years ago, I thought that when people said “mind’s eye” or “mental image” that they were just using a figure of speech. I was a little shocked to discover that they meant it *literally* — it seemed, to me, hallucinatory and bizarre. As peculiar to me was the realisation that most people have no idea what shape (in a tactile rather than visual sense) ideas are (although it does explain why their thinking is so muddled).
I’m 33 and a visual artist. I recognise faces just fine (I just don’t really remember them), but I’m terrible at pre-visualisation (I have to actually see something in order to know what I think about how it looks). I’m unusually good, though, at seeing deep structural connections between superficially unrelated pieces of information.
I only figured out that other people actual do have “mental images”, and that my sense of ideas having shapes is unusual, because my Art School training required us all to think and talk a lot about our “process”. If I hadn’t been required to do that kind of self-conscious thinking-about-thinking, I probably never would have noticed. I suspect that that’s not all that uncommon: our language contains a lot of sense-based metaphors that aren’t literal, so absent some specific reason for asking other people a lot of questions about how they think they think, if one doesn’t literally see things in one’s head, one has no reason for assuming that others might do something so alien.
Both of these things (my shapes and the “mind’s eye”) are just forms of synaesthesia, after all. To be visually dominant isn’t necessarily “normal”, it’s just hegemonic. Those of us who don’t process information in that way — and who assume it’s just a figure of speech — may be a lot more common that is assumed.

By: carol

carol — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 02:56:56 +0000

This is a very intriguing article. I’ve had experiences that have convinced me that the mind’s eye is something I use to confirm what I already know – and that it actually slows me down. I start out mysteriously knowing the answer, and then I have to confirm it to myself so I picture it, often enough second-guessing myself into giving a different answer that turns out to be wrong. It’s really quite frustrating sometimes.

By: Michael Moncur

Michael Moncur — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 13:23:50 +0000

Fascinating – I have a mild-to-moderate case of prosopagnosia. (If I meet you today and again next week, I won’t know you’re the same person unless you have a distinctive haircut or hat or voice or walk or clothing style, but I don’t have trouble with people I see regularly.)
And I have almost no visual imagery. Various threads on Ask Metafilter and elsewhere have convinced me that this isn’t that unusual – people vary in their capacity for mental imagery, with a small percentage being like me.
I never made the connection with the facial recognition issues. Maybe it’s the fact that I can’t mentally “see” a face that makes it hard to recognize.