I have difficultly visualizing faces as well. When I read a novel, I find that I visualize/imagine the setting and action, but not what the characters look like up close. I've never thought of it as "weird" because that's what I'm used to, but I guess it is weird, isn't it?
I think it is, since there are various descriptions of facial expressions in novels that I only perceive abstractly. I suppose this is how those that do lack a mind's eye read books. I understand the description, what it means, and would be able to pinpoint it if I saw someone with the same expression but do not consciously experience it visually until I see one face to face. If I was good at drawing I could probably draw faces too but wouldn't model them visually in front of my mind's eye while doing so but rather just move a pen over paper and work with the live feedback I get from drawing.
I figured the best way to get a better handle on this was to pull out a book and start reading. So, here's a passage from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose:
His reaction was most strange. He widened his eyes, if it were possible to open them wider than they were, and he blessed himself repeatedly, murmured some broken phrases in a language that this time I really did not understand.
I can visualize this, but until the author forced me to do so I didn't really put much thought into the facial expressions of that character (Salvatore), and after the scene ended I lost the vivid mental picture I had of his face. So I can experience it briefly, but it isn't a strong mental image because it fades very quickly. On the other hand, I can remember and visualize a picture of a facial expression very easily...weird.
Me too, I'm able to visualize it, if only very roughly/sketchy. But not until I deliberately concentrate on doing so. Otherwise it's just words that have a known meaning. I'm not sure how to describe it, it's rather abstract. There is no conscious visualisation of those words when reading them, merely a feeling of comprehension and my own voice reading those words.
This reminds me of the question if other people hear their own voice in their mind while reading. If I try to supress my mind's voice I can hardly comprehend the meaning of the words. Although if I concentrate on single words without reading them out in my mind the meaning is surfacing. Interestingly another involuntary voice is half starting to read them with the addition of some almost synasthetic experience of shape.
If landscapes are described, or actions as you mentioned before, I don't need to try hard, a movie of the described is playing along in my head. But now that I think about it, sound is rarely part of the experience, except some babble resembling speech.
AFAIK some people subvocalize while reading, some don't. Is this preventing you from reading quickly?
(I've heard claims that eliminating subvocalization it is the first step to faster reading, although Wikipedia doesn't agree. I, as far as I can tell, don't subvocalize while reading (especially when reading English text, in which I don't link strongly words to pronunciation), and although I have some problems with concentration, I still read at about 300 WPM. One of my friends claims ve's unable to read faster than speech due to subvocalization).
I know that I subvocalize when reading at least sometimes, and usually when I am beginning to read a text. I believe that what I think of as the point where I "get really into" a book means the point where I stop subvocalizing. (I can read 2-3000 WPM--huge variance depending on what kind of text it is, and it's usually more pleasant not to push so hard and read slower.) I don't know how to consciously stop subvocalizing, though; it just happens.
In general I don't hear my own voice since I'm focusing on imagining the scene. I also don't visualize certain things unless I focus on them, and it seems like faces belongs in that category. I see what you mean about seeing the words and knowing the meaning without visualizing--here's the example that comes to my mind:
I spent all night writing that essay, it was awful.
Upon hearing this, I generally just acknowledge the meaning of the sentence and move on. I have to stop myself and make a conscious effort if I want to visualize it actually happening to the speaker. What I find odd now that I've thought about this more is that this doesn't apply to landscapes, actions, etc. in a novel even though it applies to most things in daily conversation.
I suspect such visualisation is not a binary ability but a spectrum of "realness", a skill you can be better or worse at. I don't identify with your description fully, I wouldn't call what my imagination does "entering the Matrix", but in some ways it's like actual sensory input, just much less intense.
I also observed this spectrum in my dreams - some are more vivid and detailed, some more like the waking level of imagination, and some remain mostly on the conceptual level.
I would very be interested to know if it's possible to improve your imagination's vividness by training.
What just came to my mind is what if those people who allegedly have a reduced ability to imagine realness actually have a heightened ability to experience reality? That is, what if what I describe as the ability to simulate what I experience consciously through sensory input while awake and engaging with my environment would be deemed as dull and abstract, not in any way corresponding to the reality you experience? The people who claim to be able to use their mind's eye to resurrect the experienced and fantasize might simply have a very primitive ability to experience real-time sensory input and therefore put their rather abstract imagination on the same level.
I don't know how we could overcome the boundary of subjective first-person experience with natural language here. If it is the case that human differ fundamentally in their perception of outside reality and inside imagination, then we might simply misunderstand each others definition and descriptions of certain concepts and eventually come up with the wrong conclusions.
Reminds me of the most fascinating post, The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You.
A somewhat relevant quote: "In psychology one may or may not be a behaviorist, but in linguistics one has no choice." --W.V. Quine
I have tried to come up with a personal technical language that precisely describes my nonlinguistic thoughts and the result is a mess. I also have a constructed language (WIP) that's on hold while I learn Lojban. [Any Lojbanists around here?]
PS: Sorry about my low-quality posts. I'll try to meet LW standards in due time. Until then I'll read the blog and update my lingo.
I don't know how we could overcome the boundary of subjective first-person experience with natural language here. If it is the case that human differ fundamentally in their perception of outside reality and inside imagination, then we might simply misunderstand each others definition and descriptions of certain concepts and eventually come up with the wrong conclusions.
While it does sound dangerously close to the "is my red like your red" problem, I think there is much that can be done before you leave the issue as hopelessly subjective. Your own example of being/not being able to visualise faces suggests that there are some points on which you can compare the experiences, so such heterophenomenological approach might give some results (or, more probably, someone already researched this and the results are available somewhere :) ).
I would order my intensity of imagination tacticle, visual, auditory, olfactory. Much like you, I am unable to picture faces, but this extends beyond merely described faces. Although I have few problems recognising people (bar ones I have not seen in a long time -- I often end up in the embarassing situation of not remembering someone who has come up to me out of the blue to talk to me), I have extreme difficulty brining even the most familiar faces to mind if they're not right in front of me.
I remember when I was younger that my auitory processing seemed stronger. I would often imagine people calling my name, and was unable to tell whether it was a real noise, or just in my head. The last time I remember this is about the age of 5 ot 6 though, and I've never had it happen since then.
As far as tactile impressions go, I sometimes find that my imagination can make a tactile sense more interesting / strong than the axtual experience of it. For instance, I remember being disappointed with how much less snowy snow was than how I'd always pictured ("felt"?) it, when I finally came into contact with it.
I can "play back songs in my head" pretty well, especially something simple like this; on occasion, I've had trouble telling the difference between a sound I was imagining and a sound with an external source. Visually, I have more difficulty; I can pretty much only picture a small piece of an object at a time, and everything tends to be in front of a black background. Visualizing a whole scene is hard for me; I either have to spend some time filling in all the visual details or end up turning things into abstractions instead of simulated sensory data. (Maybe this has something to do with limitations of peripheral vision.)
Hmm, I have a few more thoughts to add.
The word "face"on its own can't be expected to convey anything more than eyes + mouth. An equal sign followed by a parenthesis is a face. That region of the body above the neck is not a "face." That is, when one human sees that region on another human, its brain doesn't just process "face", it processes all sorts of subtle details that authors fail to recreate in their writings, although it is difficult I'm sure.
And about my other imaginative capabilities--well, for one I can't hold a scene in my waking mind's eye (with no sensory input) much longer than a long GIF animation. I have to pause before I can continue and the clarity is gradually lost no matter what I do. The scenes are clear enough for me to describe where various items like furniture or people were situated and even sketch or map on paper, but it's all very noticeably hazier than seeing with my eyes and the field of view is reduced. With math I can roughly translate the notation into 2D graphs and some simple 3D shapes. I can't do anything like rotate a dodecahedron with distinctly colored sides in my mind and keep track of which colored sides are adjacent to which.
XiXiDu, are you well above average in mathematical ability? Your trait is correlated with it, strongly IIRC. At any rate, you should get yourself under an fMRI for science.
I used to have a lot of trouble seeing faces in both books and dreams, and I can only guess why I got better. To better visualize the faces of characters in books I consciously "cast" friends, actors, and mostly generic ethnic looks. And I also mentally design faces--I can choose brachycephaly or dolichocephaly, a concave or convex nose and anything in between, recessed eyes or bug eyes, jaw curvature and slope, etc. I can also classify anyone from Iran to Ireland with relative accuracy, and East Asians/Sub-Saharan Africans by broad geography. My guess is that my former interest in anthropology (e.g. looking at portraits with the nationality of the person captioned underneath)and real-life practice have trained my brain to make these distinctions, as well as the crowd I keep, but there's surely some heritable component to this ability.
I am extremely poor at visualization, can't even picture a line or a circle (I just tried it) and I don't remember images from my dreams. Strangely, when I was a child, I was sometimes able to visualize, but only with extreme effort. More recently, I have experienced what I would call "brain movies", involuntary realistic visualizations, under the influence of opiates.
It seems I am fundamentally capable of visual thinking, but my brain is just not in the habit, though I wouldn't mind being able to summon the ability. It sounds kinda cool.
I've found that I've gotten better at visualising in the last couple of years. No idea how or why though, it's not like I've been practising.
I'm very good at entering the auditory matrix--I can "listen to" music without needing to have an external source, though sometimes the record player in my mind gets stuck on certain parts. Most of my thoughts are auditory/verbal, as if I am constantly talking to myself. (And when I collaborate with someone or have an intense conversation I prefer to type it, because I feel like I can't think when I can't listen to my internal monologue--I feel like I am slow in conversation because the time I'm listening to someone else I'm not doing any thinking myself. It may just be in comparison with my SO, who speaks quickly and has no problem thinking and listening at once.)
There's no other sense where my mental recreation of it is at all comparable to really experiencing that input. I can visualize things I already remember well, or with non-spatial alterations. There are not many visual things I remember well, and anything that requires spatial skills beyond the most basic ("picture this rotated 120 degrees and turned inside-out") is quite difficult. I don't try to imagine physical sensations much, so it doesn't surprise me that trying to do so now is quite difficult. Smells are so-so; it doesn't really feel like it's real, the way I really hear the music in my head.
In order of my ability to call up the relevant experiences: audio, tactile, scent, visual, faces. I am ok at calling up visual memories but terrible at constucting new ones, and using visual modality is quite costly for me. When I read books I very rarely visualise anything, and when I read comics I usually read the text first and look at the pictures more as an afterthought.
I would say this is quite reflective of how I experience reality too, which makes sense - when you use your imagination you're just extrapolating from memory, after all.
Related to: Generalizing From One Example
I am able to simulate sensory input, i.e. dream deliberately, enter my personal Matrix (Holodeck). I can see, hear, feel and smell without the presence of light, sound, tactile or olfactory sensory input. That is, I do not need to undergo certain conditions to consciously experience them. They do not have to happen live, I can imagine them, simulate them. I can replay previous and create new sensory experiences in my mind, i.e. perceive them with my minds eye. I can live, pursue and experience activities inside my head without any environmental circumstances, i.e. all I need is my body. I can walk through a park, see and hear children playing, feel and smell the air, while being weightlessness in a totally dark and quiet zero gravity environment.
After reading the article by Yvain some time ago the idea(?) that some people are unable to deliberately experience the world with their mind's eye hasn't ceased to fascinate me. So yesterday I came back to search the comments on that article if there are people who actually confirm this claim. The comments by Garth and Blueberry seem to suggest this. After that I started to ask other people and was amazed that after some misunderstanding the first two people I asked were both either completely or almost unable to experience anything if it wasn't happening live. This is shocking. The second person was actually my dad. I asked, "if you were to close your eyes and I told you that I changed the lighting in the kitchen from normal to red, could you imagine how it would look like"? "Well, yes" he said. Only after about 10 minutes I figured what he meant is that he would be able to describe it, paint it or pinpoint other characteristics of his kitchen equipped with all red lighting, but he couldn't actually dream it! He couldn't see it if he closed his eyes! He always thought that when people say they imagine a beautiful sunset they actually mean that they could describe it or picture it literally, not experience it! I was struck. This insight only came after we started talking about dreaming. He seems to be able to dream, but once I compared dreaming with imagination he said that's really completely different. Dreaming is closer to the real thing he said, you actually experience it. But if he's awake and closes his eyes there seems to be nothing but darkness and some unconscious processing or data queries that allow him to describe and picture something without actually experiencing it in front of his mind's eye. It's the same with all other sensor perceptions.
Now don't believe that I can actually simulate the real thing, it's not as vivid. Here is how close I perceive to be able to match live experiences by imagining it solely in my mind: Tactile (90%); Olfactory (60%); Auditory (30%); Visual (40-15%); Pain (2%). If you are one of those who do lack a world of thought, think about Tinnitus or phantom pain, it originates from within and is not caused by environmental influence. Such fake sensory perceptions can be perceived to be as real (100%) as experiencing actual sound, or in the case of pain, for example burning. I can cause this deliberately without having to expose myself to actual sensory input. But the degree of realness varies as stated above.
Interestingly there is one striking exception, faces. I'm either unable or have to concentrate really hard to perceive faces without looking at actual faces in real-time. When I read stories, faces always stay blank. More than that though, they are not blank, it's like they are simply not computed. It's not like they are black or blurry, but rather in another dimension that I cannot, do not access. I'm pretty sure that I see faces when dreaming though and sometimes, when I know faces very well, I can even make them appear in front of my mind's eye. But I've to concentrate solely on the face, it doesn't happen easily.
All this is really crazy I think. How is it possible that humans are this different in such profound ways? Is it a mutation that only appeared very recently in our evolutionary history and is only expressed within a subset of people? Or is it maybe in spite of all assertions a conceptual misunderstanding?
What about you, can you enter the Matrix?