Thinking without a mind's eye, ear, nose, etc.

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Thinking in pictures/words/etc. has been done to death on this forum, but I'd like to highlight something that (I believe) even the experts get wrong.

As I have stated on other occasions, I have no "inner life" of mental imagery whatsoever. I cannot visualize, I have no "mind's ear" (I cannot "think in words"), nor can I produce sensations of taste, smell, or anything else in my mind.

I normally describe my thinking as purely conceptual or intellectual. For instance, if someone were to say "think of what you had for dinner last night", I do not see, smell, or taste that meal in my head. I don't have a "memory" of it so to speak--but I do have an intellectual understanding of what I ate last night. My mind contains the fact of what I ate.

The day I realized that when people say "picture this" they actually expect you to produce and image in your mind (and that I lacked this ability) I happened upon this website, where "dfan" explains his experience with the disability: http://dfan.org/visual.html

dfan's description (with a few minor exceptions, such as his having a "mind's ear") matches my experience precisely.

dfan later added this blog entry to accommodate some of the feedback he got from the page: http://dfan.org/blog/2010/01/23/i-still ... e-my-eyes/

The blog makes reference to Dr. Stephen Kosslyn, who's basically the world's foremost authority on the topic of mental imagery. One of the commenters took it upon themselves to email Dr. Kosslyn on their inability to visualize. They posted Dr. Kosslyn's respone:

I know the answer to all of these questions, but once again, the mental process I engage to them is purely fact- or intellect-based. I do not visualize a spinach leaf and a lettuce leaf and then compare them (indeed, to me this seems like a bizarre and crude way to approach the question) in order to derive an answer. I simply know intellectually that spinach is darker than iceberg lettuce.

I think Dr. Kosslyn and others make a huge mistake by assuming the ability to answer such questions indicates some visualization ability. I wonder how much of his work would have to be completely re-evaluated if we accepted a way of thinking which allows someone to know the fact of which shape Mickey's ears are without producing a mental image of them.

So you decode the information before you memorize it. That sounds very interesting.

It sounds like you really make sense of the world in an abstract way.

How do you feel though when you remember something? Do you think in words?

I find this fascinating. I see everything in pictures and find it really interesting how others can think in words, but you appear to be enigma in between.

If someone asked you to describe a painting you had seen could you do this? Is so how would you describe it?

Please let us know more, this a really interesting link.

Last edited by ByattBrown on 23 Mar 2012, 7:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think in words.

You might compare my "memories" to someone who remembers the fact of the Titanic sinking. It's not that I have a memory of what I ate last night, I simply remember the fact of it. Now, I know a lot more about what I ate last night than someone who simply knows that I had a burrito, as I remember the fact that it contained chicken, the fact that it tasted good, the fact that my lips tingled from the hot sauce when I was done. I suppose that if I were able to convey a sufficiently large number of facts about the meal to someone who wasn't there when I ate it that their "memory" of the meal would be no less substantial than my own. I don't really have memories, I guess. I just know that stuff has happened.

Yes, I can describe paintings, photographs, etc. that I've seen. For example, I know intellectually that the Mona Lisa is a portrait of a woman with a sort of smirk on her face. I also know the "fact" that the color palette is sort of flat and earthy and that she doesn't have much by way of eyebrows. But I can't conjure up an image of the painting in my head, I can only tell you what I know about it factually.

Interesting. I'm the complete opposite. I have video with sounds, smells and touch, which are all very clear to me. As I'm typing this, I have an internal voice telling me what to type (it's definitely my voice BTW ) and there's Mona Lisa and the Titanic.

Tell us more, as this is intriguing. If I was to ask you what someone said to you an hour ago, how would you go about remembering the actual words (and not just the concept of the conversation)? And do you have memories of voices? I mean, how do you know A is speaking and not B? Do you do a lot of decyphering or is it all automatic and non-cumbersome?

I probably wouldn't be able to remember exactly what was said unless the precise wording was significant--like a funny comment where the humor depended on the wording. But once again, I would only be remembering the words, not hearing them over again in my head. My ability to remember something that someone said to me earlier is no different than my ability to remember the pledge of allegiance, except that I have heard the pledge of allegiance many times and I'm more likely to get the exact wording right.

Generally speaking, I'm more apt to remember the concepts in question than the actual words. If you told me a story about your dog that pretty much amounted to, "my dog poops in the living room all of the time", I'd remember that fact but probably not the specific words you used to convey it.



I remember facts about voices. I can tell you that my father's voice is deep and guttural, but I can't hear it in my head.



Probably for the same reason I can recognize people without being able to commit mental images of them to memory. In other words, these processes must not be wholly interdependent.



Going by what others have said, I believe that my mental processes are generally more automatic than normal. Go back to the spinach/lettuce question...it seems absurd to me, when asked which is darker, to visualize one, then the other, then compare the two images in order to find an answer. I don't have to think about that question, it's just obvious to me.

I would ask a person who does such mental comparisons: if someone asks you what shape a basketball is, how do you find an answer? Do you visualize a basketball? If so, how do you know it's a sphere? Do you have a set of neutral, generic-looking shapes that you compare things to in order to determine what shape they are? I'm guessing not. I'm guessing that you have an intellectual understanding of what a sphere is, that you don't have to rifle through a catalog of labeled shapes to try and find a match. Maybe I'm wrong, though.

Super interesting. But intuitively, I'd argue that you have to have some kind of "mind's eye" even if it is weak and not readily available to your mind/concious thinking - because at some point, you had to be able to compare spinach with lettuce to store away the fact about their colours.

Of course, you might have been lucky and have just seen them placed right next to each other (I guess they can go together in some dishes) in which case you would have been able to perceive the difference with your eyes and store that fact in your memory.

Being able to store mental imagery is not the same as being able to purposefully recall that imagery.

Most people would be able to visually imagine how to brush their teeth or would be able to verbalise the process but they can carry out the process without having to occupy their thoughts with such trivial matters. The processing is carried out in their unconscious mind/subconsciousness like a sort of energy-saving mode to help to not clutter the concious mind in order to not force it to decode halfway-processed visual/audio/other information and make sense of it before they can get to carrying them out (give an answer, move a certain way, form an opinion). For energy-saving mode to work as efficiently and smoothly as possible, the concious mind gets "send" the finalised concept instead.

A few things here. First, the concept of a mind's eye that's not available to your consciousness...this almost seems like a contradiction, as the whole point of a mind's eye is that it's a part of your conscious mental experience (if you can't see with your mind's eye, do you really have one?)--BUT I do think that there are systems and processes at work unconsciously that don't really warrant the label "mental imagery" but perform functions that are normally thought to require mental imagery. This is my point in questioning Dr. Kosslyn's questionnaire...as it seems very natural to me that answering such questions need not involve mental imagery of any kind.

In other words, those who are able to visualize might have memory processes that are so enhanced or otherwise tied up in that ability that, to that person, the thought of remembering things without the ability seem impossible. But should those people lose their visualization ability at some point, I think they'd be surprised that their ability to "remember" things and answer the spinach/lettuce question has not been completely extinguished.



It's not quite this mechanical. It's not that my mind is simply a collection of discrete, uploaded facts--such that I might not be able to answer the spinach/lettuce question unless I had compared them at some point and "uploaded" that fact--there's definitely a holistic element to what I'm trying to describe. I know what color spinach is. I can't picture it, but I have an intellectual idea of what color it is. If you showed me a color palette of greens, I could pick out one that was roughly spinach-colored. But at no point do I get a picture of spinach in my head.



This is not a bad description of what my entire inner life is like--or, rather, my lack of an inner life. My thought process, whatever it is, is completely hidden from me.

Hard drive ( long term memory ) . Memory of a computer. The hard drive is aware of the information is stored in it, but in order to retrieve that information you need a "reference / address".

It might be stored, but in order to see it you need to bring it out of storage into your Ram ( short term memory ).

Edit:- Working memory ( would be the needle passing over the HDD, writing the data & Reading data? )

What ever you use for the process is the one you use.

Just like they is many different learning styles.

Serious how you think we invented a HDD & ram in the first place. Reverse engineering.

Last edited by TechnoDog on 23 Mar 2012, 2:46 pm, edited 3 times in total.

http://www.learning-styles-online.com/overview/

I have the same type of thinking that isn't in any sensory form. I can, however, visualise (or audiolise, or olfactise, or whatever) quite easily, but it is a translation.

Goodness.

I know an NT who has always said she has no "inner monologue". If she's serious I find it pretty fascinating, she's very visual/artistic FWIW.

But is that really what you mean?

Forgive me, I didn't look at the links.

I have very weak visualization skills but I can still picture things if I need to. I think almost entirely in words and sound though.

So do you have awful trouble at the grocery store, for example?

For me if I need to go find something I have a picture of it in my mind, maybe you have a way around this?

My conclusion.

I read the salvo earlier today, and now scrolling down the posts, this is how I broke it down.
Nice job.

I use a mix of it all. There are many things that are unable to be conjured up as a direct mental image experience.

For example: To sense or have a feel of a word/concept, say like whole. What is whole? I think of it as complete or not lacking in any parts. Somewhere I learned that concept. But I think of "whole" as an (invisible) intuitive feel /understanding, without any mental picture of "whole."


If someone says to me, "my house is the only green one on the corner," I don't have to see green to know to what to look for.,,,,, in fact if given directions, I wouldnt 'minds eye' a green house, but I could.

I do eidetic, and recall actual voice, scent, sound. I can replay my late mother of 24 years, with photographic imagery, realtime voice expressions, with all mannerisms.

Interesting.

My basic thoughts are conceptual. I don't visualize things when I think because it takes too long, and by the time I generate the image my thoughts have moved on.

If I want to visualize something, I need to stop and generate the image specifically. I don't see it--not like a hallucination--but have a good mental concept of it. I think this is what you would call the usual experience of visualizing something.

I also translate my basic conceptual/associational thinking into words, sounds, music, and other things as necessary. Once again, generating those images takes longer than is feasible to use them directly in thought.

I always thought it was pretty odd that the psychology profession is so focused on words as the basis for thought. They don't seem to be aware of the wordless thinking that must underlie all the words. For example, you can be aware that you know something without actually retrieving that information: That's conceptual thinking. You can be familiar with a person without actually being able to place who they are. You can follow a pattern before you're aware it exists.

I don't know to what degree most people are aware of their own basic thought processes, but I've always been aware that my basic thoughts are not in words, pictures, or any other medium, but in pure abstract concepts that connect to each other, with each one triggering neighboring concepts. I think by following a mental thread along these yet-wordless associations.

I can translate those associations into words fairly easily. I may have such a pedantic style of speech because those associations and concepts are often more precise than a narrow vocabulary could express. The wider the range of words I can choose from, the closer I can get to expressing what I'm actually thinking. I also use words and images to "pin down" what I am thinking, to narrow down the web of associations into a single solid thread; so not only do I use words to talk to others, but also to talk to myself. The difference between words and concepts is like the difference between a lot of liquid water--fluid, flowing, not easy to measure--and that same water frozen into ice cubes, now with a definite shape, but not so much potential.

I wonder sometimes whether we might not all basically be conceptual thinkers, but experience various levels of awareness of it. Some people are aware that they don't think in words; other people only become aware of their thoughts once they put them into words--that kind of thing. Or maybe it has more to do with how well you can remember wordless concepts--whether you need to put them into words and images before you can remember them, or whether you can just store them as association links.

You remember more about the Mona Lisa than I ever did. Then again I think visually and get distracted by a lot of imagery or just focus on one part, and the ADHD...

Everything mentioned on this page i.e Mona Lisa, Mickey's ears, the Statue of Liberty have conjured images up in my mind.

Even when Callista talks about conceptual thinking I can only relate it to images; blue prints and graphs in this case.

So what does a conceptual thinker do when they are bored? What are day dreams like? And how common is synaesthesia? Sorry, probably asking a lot of questions. This form of thinking is just foreign to me and I don't think I'd ever be able to get my head around it.