Can you picture a full object or do you just imagine part?

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When I think of 'a chair' I think of every chair that I have ever seen, all at the same time but all in 'low detail'.

When I try to focus on 'a particular chair' I tend to over zoom and focus in on a detail or flaw. There is a visual element to my thinking but otherwise it is more like the way Fnord described it, as a functioning system.

^ Same for me. Maybe not every chair ever, more like 20 or 30 of them. I see them the way I would w/o my glasses, as geometric shapes and colors and textures.

If I think of a song or sound though, I can hear it perfectly in it's entirety. All the instruments at once. Can't hear the words though, just the melody and tone for the singer's voice.

Being an artist, I find this discussion quite interesting. Right now I can close my eyes and imagine all of a chair easily, though I can't just imagine a generic symbol for a chair. I'm not really good at symbols. No matter how hard I try, I keep imagining a rocking chair with woven wicker seats, or a kitchen chair with round dowels that come together at the bottom for a back, or even a sway-back lounge chair. The same is true of letters. In my mind I always choose whether it is print, cursive, serif, sanserif, etc.

The total opposite is true when I am painting/drawing though. My mind goes completely blank. No matter how hard I try, I can't see anything at all except for whatever subject matter sits in front of me and my paper. The whole idea of closing your eyes and imagining what you want to paint before starting is impossible for me. When I try to do that I usually ruin my painting. When I am successful at painting, I typically feel like the paper is my mind, and that both the subject matter and the unpredictable blips of my brush or pen are other people in a conversation in which I am participating. My mind responds to the demands of both the subject and the medium (my paint) flexibly, and in a way that attempts to take them both into consideration. I do not believe that this can be achieved were I to cling to an idealistic symbol, or even a static photo in my head.

Perhaps that's why my mind just goes blank.


...sorry, perhaps this is too deep :p

Does it make a difference thinking about something with your eyes open and with your eyes closed?
Actually I just tried both, for the purpose of this thread, and keeping in mind that I'm half awake and only had one coffee, There's a slight difference.
First off, I don't "see". But I do see. Seeing in my mind is just a very different feeling than "seeing with my eyes".
And no 2 images appear in the same way. Letters and numbers I can actually see , they can even rotate and do what I want them to. I have control over those. Same with cubes, triangles, lines and all purely geometric shapes. but a boat, for example, is different.
With my eyes open, thinking of a boat feels like my eyes get out of focus and start looking inside the very back part of my brain. I can feel it happen. I then pick the "children's book version" of all the boats lying there in my mind, because I don't need the sailboat, my stepdad's boat, or any of the others, as I'm not in any "real" conversation about boats. I suspect I'd see a different one "on top" if I was.
With my eyes closed I see everything around the boat. The sea, the sky , the birds, there is sound and smells and motion feelings associated with the "boat". So with my eyes closed, I can say that I see more what the "idea of boat" feels like to ME, based on my experience, whereas with my eyes open, I see the "quickest basic concept of boat available", it feels like nothing except an image on a children's book.

I can pictue full objects. I'm actually more able to picture full objects than I am to picture parts of objects. We're all different and that's good.

I'm also an extreme visual thinker. My mind is constantly exploring all kinds of geometric forms.
When I imagine an object such as a chair, it's not just an image, it's a full 3D volumetric form that I can rotate all around and examine details while keeping the rest of the object in mind. I can alter and change aspects of the object however I want.

Even something such as the letter 'A' is imagined as a 3D, extruded shape, and in any font I desire.

I excelled greatly in all drafting and mechanical drawing classes in high school, I even went to a trade school for drafting. But I was unable to ever get a job doing that. You can give me any set of blueprints and I could assemble them into a 3D object in my head, along with the interaction of moving parts.

As a mental exercise I even try to push 3D geometry into 4D hypergeometry. It gets a lot tougher at that point, every extra dimension exponentially increases the amount of info dealt with. At that point it gets very tough to describe what they look like in words.

Verbal things do not come so easy for me. I am a very slow reader, and large blocks of text are torture for me to get through. Everything I speak is very carefully planned out first, and if ever "put on the spot", I freeze up and go completely blank. I can however speak a lot easier with people I know very well, like my immediate family. Even my forum posts take work for me to write. I have to proofread and go back and edit several times.

Spoken instructions are tough for me to remember. I am very rarely able to quote anything that someone else says to me. I have extreme difficulty taking notes, and classroom lectures are pretty much a complete waste of time for me. I dropped out of college 3 times in the first semester because of that. It seems to me that most of college is for verbal people.

I'm very visual. I can imagine something, as a whole, that already exists, as well as something that doesn't exists yet, or I haven't seen it. I remember my life and work related things as images rather than numbers: I have a photographic memory but I can't remember dates, phone numbers, formulas, etc.

However, when creating something: a website, building a bike or a putting together a computer or even something simple around the apartment, like couple of shelves. , I have sometimes hard time focusing on the whole project. I tend to spend lots of time and effort on details and I change my plans as I go. I can't seem to be able to adhere to a concrete plan and the outcome is usually different than what I visualized. If I have have do follow a rigid, structured plan, like at work, I'm miserable and lose interest in the work. I much prefer to have a loose goal and adjust and improvise as I go.

Nothing, or a very fast impression of simple outlines. Unless I'm relaxed and sleepy, when I can sometimes start to picture things.

Hurrah! Not just me then.

I can picture anything in my mind that is possible to visualize. My thoughts are almost all visual (all visual, but not all verbal) and I can even picture full-length movie-type images in my mind with many tiny details.