[teekert]

Hmm I can imagine what something will look like in a position in a scene but I wouldn’t call it AR like. This is a really interesting thread. I always thought people were much the same. But recently I also learned that my wife just sees words when reading a book whereas I see a “movie”.

Also I will project words in my mind to inspect them visually to see how to spell them, and if they look ok. And when studying I recall pages of books with the info in the place where it is printed, much like zeehio describes. This is super helpful when memorizing entire books ie when I studied biology.

But from this thread I still get the idea there are people that really really see things, whereas for me it stops at “visualizing”. Which does help when composing a picture but perhaps there is more? I think I’ll try this exercise.

One weird thing I often did (or try to do, doesn’t always work) as a kid is stare into the blackness of my closed eyes until I sort of got convinced there was a massive boulder looming over me. It would feel quite real and I’d really feel the massiveness and it would make me feel very small and even make me feel adrift. Strange, this thread actually made me remember, didn’t really do that for a long time now.

[colordrops]

I have a feeling that, unless you are blind due to illness of the brain, that everyone has the capability to visualize internally. This would include your wife when she is reading. I think they difference is that some people have access to this visualization consciously, with their frontal cortex, and for others it's subconscious. If you didn't have this visualization, I believe it would be really hard to commit what you read to memory and have any sense of a story.

When I meditate, one of the practices is to label thoughts as they arise. When you do this, you realize that a huge amount of thoughts pass by subconsciously. You notice them more and more as you label them, but it feels like a deep rabbit hole of thought that I haven't gotten to the bottom of yet.

edit: just looked at the article and realized that the technique is essentially thought labeling. This is one of the most common practices in Buddhist meditation.

[JshWright]

I am quite certain that I cannot visualize, consciously or subconsciously. I don't see how that would be related to remembering what you read? Reading is just learning a series of facts (potentially fictional "facts", depending on the genre).

[colordrops]

How would you know that you can't visualize subconsciously?

[JshWright]

How would you know I could?

[OhHiMarkos]

Omg, the boulder thing is something that happened to me a lot when I was a kid. Then it stopped for many years and then at some point I could do it again. I don't know you can make it happen. It scares me a little bit to tell you the truth. If it happens now days I try to shake it off.

But yes, wth is that thing?