I have never been able to consciously visualize (meaning: think in visual mental images). All of my conscious thought is in the auditory mode, though I know what it would be like to visualize as it happens occasionally in a dream. I have always wished more than anything to have such experiences while fully conscious (to see my mother's face and so on).
There has been a fairly longstanding debate in philosophy and psychology about whether visual mental images even exist, yet when I discuss the issue with friends none of them can believe or understand that I lack imagery.
I've read a fair amount without encountering real evidence that the capacity can be developed. I've certainly spent time trying, but possibly in the wrong way.
If you've dreamed of a video game, or you know where things are in your bedroom without looking, or you can draw something, you're probably using visual memory, even if it's not overly detailed. You can probably train yourself to recall more detail if you observe things more closely. Remember the brain is great at compressing - there's no shame in remembering the important parts instead of just a raw photograph.
I certainly don't remember things photographically, but if I memorize a piece of music from a printed version, for example, for a while I'll remember roughly where on the page I would be at any point. But after practicing from memory without the printed version, this spatial memory will fade away.
Wow. My experience is drastically different than yours.
I've almost always thought of things through mental imagery. It comes naturally to me (which really helped in calculus 3, haha). I can say that with confidence.
Thanks for the link. I wonder how many non-visualizers are out there, too.
Reminds me how there's apparently a decently-sized part of the population that doesn't intuitively know left and right. I wouldn't have believed it much if I didn't meet someone with the issue and someone else who claims their wife has it.
I've always had problems immediately referring to left or right. As a kid I had to recall which hand I used for the pledge of allegiance to remember which side was right vs left. To this day it takes me a couple of seconds of thought to pull it out when my mind is not already primed for it.
I have a well developed spatial sense, but am very weak visually. When I try to visualize, the best I get is impressions of abstract glow-y lines that fade away quickly. I also tried to develop mental visualization but to little effect (I did have a vivid dream once. Only once, though.)
This perfectly describes me. Interestingly enough I attribute my great mathematical ability to my ability to "visualize" problems, although I don't literally see objects in my mind's eye. Its almost like my logical circuitry is co-oping my visual processing circuitry to solve abstract logical problems. So while I'm thinking of a problem there is a visual aspect to thought, but its nothing concrete enough that I could, say, draw on paper.
So you can't see the matrix? Take the red pill (No, that's not Modafil painted red) Neo.
On a more serious note, when do you understand something? For me, it is when I can visualize how the parts of the function interact with each other, for example for Summation, how many little functions (those functions are visual images too) in a long finite line stack on top of each other and create a large something, that might get fed into something else.
Think how hard it is for visual thinkers to produce one-dimensional text of their two or multidimensional ideas. They see all the relations between things directly but it is hard to express in text. It's not always a blessing.
It has been intermittently amazing to me that I not only get by but am even considered intelligent without what seems (to me) an absolute gift and superpower that most people possess.
The rest of the time it's just obvious that there are tradeoffs, or that it's behaviorally insignificant unless one is off the chart positive on some modality. Would still give anything to picture though.
Just to say you are not alone. Though my internal voice has no accent and does not sound like me. We may well differ in other respects.
I remember the day I asked my English teacher what she was talking about when she described the impact of poetry on your mind...and the expression of pity she showed.
I remember the day I discovered my sister read a novel and imagined a film as she read...this was the first time I was ever jealous of my sister.
They were not good days. People might wonder what I remember. I remember my thoughts-emotions of the moment. So when I say I remember my teacher's expression I remember my thoughts-feelings about the fact that I could see her pity.
However, there are major advantages especially as life as gone on. It seems to have taken me longer to get the hang of life as I have had to develop alternative ways of doing things that are often not as efficient as the visual method. But that has given me a powerful originality of thought and approach that I can increasingly use to my advantage now I am no longer undermined by the basics of life.
Thank you for this. Even though I consider myself pretty average now you've made me feel like I have some secret power. It helps a lot when I visualize things. Also, writing ideas out in a narrative also helps. So, I guess I can do both. Genius Here!!! (Standing up, wide eyed, looking proud with an idiotic smile)
p.s. I don't actually believe that you cannot visualize images. Can you draw a stick human figure? Did it pop into your head when I mentioned stick human figure? There you go, you just visualized it.
p.s I guess inability to visualize something could be something similar to dyslexia?
It's frustrating when people suggest I can visualize and just don't know it. The way one thinks is the most first-personally obvious thing in the world, and I've been sore about the way I do it since I was in elementary school wanting to imagine strawberries to count with.
Despite the literature I never accuse visualizers of the reverse (ie that you only think you have mental images), but when I do challenge incredulous friends about their phenomenology some discover it's actually much less pictoral than they'd believed: eg, "imagine a tiger, how many stripes?" or "imagine an ant crawling across a checkered picnic table toward a jar of grape jelly, what color square is it on now? what about now?" or "imagine a 3x3 word matrix whose rows read 'too', 'aid', 'ole' -- read the column words straight off without sounding out or going letter by letter". Granted, others can do these with an ease that amazes me.
"Can you draw a stick human figure? Did it pop into your head when I mentioned stick human figure? There you go, you just visualized it."
Yes I can draw a stick figure. I'm not an idiot, and nothing pops into my head other than the sound of the word and some xkcd affect.
Meanwhile, it astounds me that a single picture can pop into your head: how do you know what position to put the stick figure in -- akimbo, Thinker? Imagine a flower -- ok, which, a rose or a marigold? Do you decide or does it just happen? How many different flowers can you visualize, and how quickly? Do they appear embedded in soil or just floating free? How many different varieties can you see at once? What prevents you from seeing more?
Re: dyslexia -- I drew this link too, as I have very mild dyslexia. My father is profoundly dyslexic but claims vivid imagery.
Well, for me imagining a tiger is basically recalling what it's like to look at a tiger (or picture of a tiger). I can have a photo of a tiger right in front of me, and know it's a tiger, yet not know how many stripes it has without counting. I might also not notice how the back paws look if I'm focusing on the front paws. Same thing when it's in my head (except less consistent, since it's just a memory).
> how do you know what position to put the stick figure in -- akimbo, Thinker?
This is no different from other senses. If I tell you to imagine the smell of soup, do you smell minestrone or pho? (Have you cooked those dishes? When you smell soup, can you tell what spices are in it?) If I tell you to imagine the sound of a violin, is it a six year old scratching away or Yehudi Menuhin playing a Beethoven concerto? (Depending on your musical training/listening habits, you may be able to imagine a concerto all the way through, or maybe just fragments of it?)
The interesting thing is, at one point I thought, like you, that I couldn't think visually. I tried practicing it, and either that worked or I adjusted my definition of visual thinking (or a bit of both), because I definitely consider myself at least partly a visual thinker now, and it's difficult to imagine it any other way. I've noticed that my visualization ability is sensitive to how much sleep I get though.
If you can think of chocolate, but not how it tastes, how it feels in your mouth, what a square looks like, what sound it makes when you bite into it ... maybe you just need to pay more attention the next time you eat chocolate :) And my ability to imagine other things - like music or food - depends strongly on how much time I spend on such things.
I appreciate the vividness of your minestrone, pho and chocolate examples, but I can't seem to do what you describe. I can't imagine smells or tastes -- both are as foreign as the visual modality (though much less missed). When I read the example I hear the words "imagine the smell of soup" I simply hear (in my head) my voice say the word 'soup', then, when asked to elaborate 'minestrone - pho' -- more words. I can sit with my eyes closed for the rest of the afternoon but the thoughts go no deeper, or I can silently direct my attention at the memory of the last auditory image, or repeat 'pho' in my head, or say something like 'curly noodles, light broth, deep green basil' and list off favorite attributes of pho, but it's low bandwidth audio and not cumulative in the way my dreamed pictorial representations are.
With respect to music, I can occasionally imagine a few concertos most of the way through in rich detail, but more often just in detailed fragments. I don't seem to have much control over how it sounds, what it is (usually Beethoven or BWV 1004), or when I can do it. I listen to a hundred contemporary songs for every one classical and I can't so much as summon the tunes or lyrics of any of them. Truth be told I don't listen to much music as I find it impossible to think while doing so, as if it's all on the same metaphorical channel.
edit: on the tiger, I'm not expecting the person to solve the speckled hen problem. People with stable mental images can count the stripes off the picture, none should simply "know" how many are there. Some believe (until confronted with such a challenge) they think in fuller, richer pictures than they actually do.
It sounds :-) like you may have more sensory representation than me - as you have some auditory representations.
I remember emotions but I don't remember my bodily sensations.
With regard visual images (in response to words) it is like part of my brain sees it but I have no conscious access.
However, I have had one intense conscious dream where in that dream at least I had full sensory representation in every dimension. It was wonderful! I remember playing with my dreamscape and transforming things visually before I woke up...and so I - at least - have some idea of what being able to visualise means to others
Are you saying you can't hallucinataste chocolate? The soft melting of a piece of milka, the soft stickiness of your tongue against your teeth, the feeling in your throat, and of course, the sweet cacao taste on your tongue? I don't know why, but if I think really hard about it, I can actually vividly imagine the experience of eating chocolate, but I can't have any other flavour in my mouth at that time. I can mix it with other imaginary flavours though, which is why i roughly know how a sauerkraut hot dog tastes despite not having eaten one ever. (Sauerkraut ufm wurstbrötl? Sapperlot no ma!)
One really curious thing that happens to me though is that when I smoke and smoke gets into my nose, the burn in my nose might trigger one of my taste memories, leading to me tasting some random thing in my mouth, from Apple Juice to seared steak. I do get some weird stares though when I suddenly say that taste out loud.
>>>Despite the literature I never accuse visualizers of the reverse (ie that you only think you have mental images), but when I do challenge incredulous friends about their phenomenology some discover it's actually much less pictoral than they'd believed: eg, "imagine a tiger, how many stripes?" or "imagine an ant crawling across a checkered picnic table toward a jar of grape jelly, what color square is it on now? what about now?" or "imagine a 3x3 word matrix whose rows read 'too', 'aid', 'ole' -- read the column words straight off without sounding out or going letter by letter". Granted, others can do these with an ease that amazes me.<<<
I'm not a freaking computer.
"imagine a 3x3 word matrix whose rows read 'too', 'aid', 'ole' -- read the column words straight off without sounding out or going letter by letter"
You might as well tell me to add 182748+37638373 in my head. The reason I cannot do this is that it requires short term memory and I don't have much of it. I can only remember four, five, maybe even six number in a row at a time in short term memory. You giving me a bunch of instructions to visualize exceeds my short term memory so I cannot do it. In other words, I'm not a computer, neither are you.
>>>Meanwhile, it astounds me that a single picture can pop into your head: how do you know what position to put the stick figure in.
Well if nothing pops into your head then I guess you really cannot visualize. The stick figure is usually standing up straight.
Based on the friends and family that likes to bounce engineering ideas off me, it seems that a lot of people's imaginations are too optimistic -- we end up going in circles with what inevitably becomes the trade-offs or limitations in the design because they envision a "perfect" solution and contradict themselves as they try to get around it. It's frustrating for them when I start committing things to paper in front of them, because then they have to deal with the problems/contradictions their optimistic brain was avoiding. Do you know if there's a way to hone realism in imagination?
That's where you need to implement your ideas and see what works and what doesn't. If you are the type of person that needs to know the truth and can't cover it up and hide from it then your imagination will eventually adjust to reality (as long as you are getting good feedback).
For me, I like the example of creating music, or even coming up with jokes. If you only imagine music or jokes you will never know if they are good or bad and you will just keep getting more imaginative but in an unrealistic way. As soon as you actually write that song, and tell that joke then you get actual feedback. It's the feedback that you need to calibrate your imagination.
I love ideas and I love being passionate about them. When it comes to actual implementation, I'm a pretty pessimistic fellow. Thus, I'll attempt to apply the same rigor here.
My goal is to actual develop a somewhat realistic imagination. That being said, I want to be able to turn it on and off. Dreaming unrealistic scenarios is half the fun, right?
Know your facts and patterns. When I imagine something, i try to add specs to it in my head. This resistance in this circuit, this geometrical design in this circuit. Some thing, I won't know off the top of my head, so I'll go online to check references, look at other designs and then I'll add it to my mental repository of design elements. A lot of my friends think it's crazy that I can quote specs, dimensions and prices off the top of my head, but frankly, it's neccesairy. Let me walk through a rough example.
I want to create a 8x8 RGB LED matrix which will display patterns.
First off, the LEDs. Proably 5050 SMD RGB LEDs 0.05$ @1k.
They go onto the top of the board, which leaves me the bottom for controlling circuitry.
Now I have several options in my mental library on how to adress them. Adressing them individually via microcontroller pins, which would require 8x8x3 I/O pins though, which is expensive. How about multiplexing them then? Charlieplexing migh yield a saving of a couple of pins versus regular multiplexing, but it'll add in board complexity. So a regular multiplex, either using 8 NPN transistors and 3 8 channel LED driver ICs (Similar to the GLiP setup) or using a CPLD/microcontroller combo to generate the signals. I decide on the CPLD/microcontroller combo. I get out a piece of milimeterlined paper to draw up a couple of sketches for the LED routing, because it's a hell of a lot of connections, and I'd like to draw them on paper. In my head, i route 3 lines between each row for current source, and 1 down each column for current sink. I realize that they'll have to cross, and will take up some of the back side. Since I'm allready using that, I decide to make it a 4 layer pcb, adding 2 layers more of mental routing space. I could have also routed around everything, but that would increase pcb size and would be unsightly. Now I put the row traces onto layer 2, and the connections from the row traces to the LEDs onto layer 1 and connect them with vias. Then I turn my mind to creating a rough routing for the loose ends to the CPLD. I don't know which CPLD to use yet, so I just abstract it to a square in a certain location and route the traces there. This square is connected to a microcontroller. I kinda fancy the ATtiny1634, so I roughly know the pinouts, but I still abstain from routing it properly to the indefinite CPLD. Then I hook it up to a SD card and try to fit in the power traces somewhere. Layer 3 happens to come in handy. Now I do still need to figure out which CPLD will have the requisite number of gates, but I'm very close to completition of the circuit. The rest is some rudimentary calculations (resistor values) which I know will work out, so I don't have to worry much about them.
When I engineer these things in my head, it's very similar to a rendering algorithm. First, rough shapes which are refined again and again till the image is as sharp as it could be. I utilize other designs as proof of credibility, and put them in later on, making some areas of the image redundant till completition. Somewhere along the line, I do need to switch to paper for some things (My mental wall is there), but most of the work I do in my head.
Makes me want to read the Tesla autobiography. Is there something specific you can do to improve your own mental creativity and ability to model things visually? I have always felt some type of barrier when thinking of ideas and I usually resort to paper to draw out wireframes.
Also might help if you can dig up some research on this, to back up your thesis that its done by simply visualizing older memories in vivid detail. How long do you do it? How many times per day? Do you do it every day? All things I'm uncertain of if I'm going to participate in the experiment (which I plan on doing).
Is one opening himself to diseases of the mind, when practicing improving their "imagination" and "visualization"? Does making your mind a superior receptacle come with an increased risk of absorbing and processing rubbish?
I am reminded here of a book I read long ago:
An emotionally idiotic child, unable to feel compassion nor human empathy, was one of a few to survive a memetic "plague". This was a virulent disease of the mind that swept away most of humanity -- particularly the imaginative people, destroying them using the very facility of imagination and "openness" of mind.
I once tried to read two pages at a time (one with each eye) because I heard that the rain man was able to do that. So a grabbed a small paperback and focused one eye on either page (as one would do with a magic-eye picture).
I was able to essentially line up two words at a time in my vision and alternate my focus between the two, but after about 20 minutes I started to get a headache, so I put the book down and went to the couch in the other room. I sat down and looked out my window which has vertical bars on it. My vision suddenly latched on to the vertical bars and began flickering between normal focus and the magic-eye focus. I started feeling dizzy, my heart rate sped up and I started sweating a little. I closed my eyes for some time and was able to relax but still had a strange headache for the rest of the evening.
I felt fine the next day, but then a couple days later I was in a hotel with black and white tiled floors (diner style) and I had a sudden recurrence of my focus uncontrollably reacting to the pattern of the floor. It wasn't as intense as the first time, and it hasn't happened since, but it freaked me out.
I like to watch movies and tv comedies and adventures and ignore any stuff I don't like.
I visit websites I like, VS anything else I just don't care about is vague and bland and ignorable.
Simplest most powerful solution to your seeming dillemma:
If a random thought feels bad, it's bad - stop it.
If a random thought feels good, it's good - do it more.
And I go out adventuring, with an open mind seeking out more feel good stuff.
For a long time I have a fascination for improving memory. It seems that visualization and memory are closely related, or even one and the same. Tony Buzan and Joshua Foer are authors that have written about this.
They write about techniques to learn a deck (or decks) of playing cards, names of people, long numbers, etc. The 'roman room' is one of these techniques, that is used for long speeches; and was also used by people like Seneca. See here a clip of how it works to learn a deck of cards: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-xl7_hdWZo
The essence of these techniques is that you must create the most vibrant or bizarre imagery in your head about the subject. Not only visually, but by using all the senses: smell, taste, etc.
Da Vinci is also known for training his visualization skills by looking at an object for a moment and then trying to draw it from memory. I believe that is from Michael J. Gelb's book 'How to think like Leonardo'. (Which might not be the best source.)
For how consciousness and how we see things works this video by Susan Blackmore might be interesting, because it discusses with how much (or less) detail we can see with our eyes open in the first place: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdMA8RVu1sk (from 40:00 or so)
Pretty cool--I've been interested in finding new ways to exercise my mind recently. I have pretty bad ADHD/laziness, so it's hard to commit to doing such things regularly, but I'm hoping that meditation as well as these sorts of exercises will help with that.
Another fascinating set of exercises (that I became aware of reading an article on Ithkuil, an invented language, that was on here a little while ago) is "deconcentration of attention". There's a simple website at http://deconcentration-of-attention.com/, which happens to talk about its applications to software engineering. It's somewhat similar to meditation, and focuses on harnessing the parallelism of the subconscious mind to think more non-linearly.
It seems pretty out-there, and I'm not sure if anybody has really had any success with it, but just reading the exercises is quite intriguing to me (e.g. try to hear "red" in your head, visualize "red" without the word, and then try to feel "red" without visualizing it). Another exercise I thought of after reading the page (and which is quite hard for me, it turns out), is to count in your head without subconsciously speaking/hearing the numbers.
Is great that you at least admit that your problem is part laziness. I'm sure ADHD must be true for some people but I wonder if too many use it as an excuse for their failures.
<half-joking>Even I've wondered if maybe I suffer from ADHD since is really hard to keep my attention on a project past the prototype stage. That is, once the last 10% starts. </half-joking> All joking aside, it feels almost like pulling teeth when working on that last 10%. Don't really know how to fix it other than to just force myself to keep at it.
Well, at least in my case, they're pretty closely related. It's complicated, and rather hard to explain, but I might say I'm addicted to distraction. It's very hard for me to do something I don't get any stimulation out of.
There's a long passage in the Patrick Suskind's novel _Perfume_ that is an extraordinarily evocative description of the main character building an imaginary palace of smells. He also imagines "constructing" new smells, similar to what's described here.
The books does an amazing job of evoking smells using only text. Highly recommended.
It is important to have a wild imagination to generate wild ideas. But this will lead to insanity unless you takes these wild ideas and refine them. You have to continually iterate, going over your imaginative ideas and asking why they will not work. You have to apply rigor and reason over and over again until the wild idea starts to take shape into something new and useful.
I completely agree and intend to do just that. The imagination Tesla describes in his autobiography is one that translates very well into the real world. Maintaining that quality and cohesion with the real world is on of the primary metrics I'll be measuring against.
Make sure that you goal is worthy of your time and energy. Seek to create something that will help you, other people, or will increase humanities knowledge of the world. Otherwise, you are wasting your life.
This is actually very interesting, I am glad this has been posted. As a kid, I would cover my eyes with my hands to create darkness, or sometimes put my face into a pillow or even do what Tesla did in putting a slight pressure onto my eyes with my fingers.
I would start to see shapes and just be thinking I could change the color and contort these shapes. Strangely, I never knew how I did it. If I tried too hard it would not work, I would have to let my mind run on its own, and give it a slight nudge every now and then consciously.
In college, when I was trying really hard to visualize a project I was working on I would do the same, I would put pressure on my eyes and try to make it as dark as possible so that I could see what I was trying to imagine, and it helped!
I had no idea others do this as well, this is very cool. Some forms of meditation will be very useful for this I think.
There is a process called image streaming that is similar to what you are doing. This involves closing your eyes and describing aloud to another person or recording device the images that you are experiencing.
The key is the combination of verbal description and visual thinking, as the two together are very powerful.
Wow -- didn't realize so many people tried the eye pressure thing. If I did it and you did it just because we thought it was cool, I bet there are a lot more people out there.
I'm curious, after looking at a computer screen for a little while and then closing your eyes do you ever see a rectangle that is the same proportions as the computer screen?
It doesn't have to be a screen even, it can be anything. I have noticed that I will have an almost exact replica "burned into" my vision when I close my eyes. I can then (somewhat) manipulate this image in my mind. I've kinda thought that these changes in light (from whatever we are looking at) creates the initial image and then this image can be manipulated in the mind. I think that the retina or the parts of the brain that are involved in visual imagery must somehow be involved in these visualizations we are seeing (not the after image). It would be inefficient to develop a new skill from scratch, a big part of our brain is already dedicated to sight and imagery, so I wonder if we can somehow make use of the visual cortex to enhance our ability to visualize things?
Need to find a way to hack into the subconscious..
FYI, the phenomenon you describe is an afterimage and happens to everybody (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afterimage). You are correct that the visual cortex is involved in both phenomena but they are quite different. An after-image is still an "upstream" image on your retina, whereas a mental image is not. Whether the former can be used to increase facility with the latter I do not know. I haven't seen scientific evidence that imagery can be trained at all.
Despite all that it doesn't sound like a terrible place to start.
Ah, that's what it's called, thanks! I read about that a while back but forgot whether it was a phenomenon of the retina or of the brain. What I am wondering is if you can use the after image as almost a skeleton for more advanced visualizations. For example, imagine the retinal after image laying down the basic shape, and then you can consciously add detail on top of that after image. Maybe using the after image as a kind of training wheels..if it's even possible..
Tesla may have been grandiose not only in this thinking - his underdog genius certainly has kept that alive.
Visualizing something you are thinking about (a problem you are trying to solve for instance) goes well beyond an obvious "image" of what is going on. As a coder you probably know what it feels to be in the zone when you are working on something that truly engages and challenges you - you have immediate access to all aspects of your project and your knowledge and experiences come effortlessly into play in figuring out the way forward.
I spent about two years dedicating my free time to experiments of this type. The most profoundly affecting exercise was training the left side of my body (I'm right-handed). I learned to write in left-handed mirrored script (Da Vinci style) and performed all sorts of everyday actions with my left hand. Amazingly, the more I trained my left hand the more my right-handed writing and drawing skills improved. Within a few months I found that I was able to switch back and forth between two very different modes of thought. My brain seemed wired differently. For a few months I could hardly put sentences together in speech, it was an odd sensation. Eventually though, I developed the ability to intentionally control which half of my brain was switched on. Science is all over the place when it comes to the left/right brain theory, but there is undoubtedly a level of truth to it. If you can learn to control it, it becomes a powerful problem-solving technique.
>I'm curious if anyone has tried anything like this before? I'd love some guidance or thoughts.
This is proving quite hard to articulate as I try to find a way to visualize it.
To me...
Thoughts are like threads to follow and your wall is faceted shell. Each of these facets carries a kind of gravity which pulls on your thread.
Facets you have accepted without understanding appear solid, a barrier. When you run into one you have hit the wall.
Facets where you have no concept are wide open and you're free to follow your thread, but you risk finding yourself adrift with no reference asking for your thread to become tangled.
Facets where you have greater understanding are revealed to be a lattice, full of gaps to thread through and continue exploring.
You don't "leave" the shell, there's always another layer that might be completely new or something you've passed through many times before.
Imagination/discovery is the act of continually finding the gaps.
---
Personally, I've always done a lot of visualizing. As an adult I've come to recognize close similarities to what I do in the visualization techniques of Stoicism and general thought experiments.
One exercise I find quite useful is to avoid resorting to references for things I don't understand, to turn first toward visualizing how to create whatever it is that's puzzling me - to "search for the gaps" and see where I end up.
I've had the same experience as Tesla, though not so extreme as to cause problems. For as long as I can remember I have enjoyed extremely detailed "daydreams" where I explore worlds and meet people inspired by the books I read. I suspect this is fairly common in children, but I did it right through high school, university, and several years in the workplace.
The real question is: how much benefit does having a strong and well exercised imagination have for a technical career? (I assume it's very useful for artists).
I've found that software development gets a large boost. The more of the design you can hold in your head on once, the better the coder is able to anticipate the consequences of their decisions. When debugging, the programmer is able to see the entire state of the application that must have predicated it, experiment with a range of fixes, all before writing any code.
I love this quote from The Tao of Programming[1]: "Sometimes there are difficult problems. I see them coming, I slow down, I watch silently. Then I change a single line of code and the difficulties vanish like puffs of idle smoke."
I'd imagine a strong imagination is great for the concept and design parts of engineering, but not entirely necessary if you're just building to a spec.
Try starting with some random nonsense phrase you repeat in you mind for a period with your eyes closed. This clears your immediate references. After a period, you'll drift into an alpha brain wave state where you can willfully enter into a state of lucid dreaming. I got into this via an interest in trancendal meditation (sp?) and continued into other meditation styles. These days, I find that I can use this to visualize scenarios in my software projects at a depth that is difficult to explain with words.
Tesla mentions that he would apply a small pressure to his eyes, which would then cause geometric shapes to appear and strange patterns to develop. The patterns put him in a different mindset whenever he saw them.
Reading that truly hit me hard, since I did that while I was a kid. I didn't use it for any purpose though... I just thought it looked badass.
Hey, I really want to keep reading your blog, you seem just like the kind of person I'm aspiring to become. But there's one thing stopping me, your design seems really messed up. Sometimes lines of text only show top-half or bottom-half, and links can only be clicked on in the top-half. And yes, I'm using the latest chrome.
This is pretty much precisely how I think. If I'm considering a complex issue, be it engineering or otherwise, I effectively stop seeing through my eyes and instead maintain a visual image, either literal or abstract, of that which I'm considering. It's very "intuitive", and can be applied to anything from relativity to simple mechanics to mathematics. Anything which can be boiled down to logical symbology, which is to say, practically anything.
I can happily spend hours on end staring into the middle distance entirely engrossed in a labyrinth of thought - although this can get me odd looks on trains, as a frequent side effect is wild gesticulation, as though manipulating invisible objects.
I've always thought in this fashion - it's not something "learned", rather more a byproduct of a hyperactive imagination, and probably has something to do with the fact that television, magazines, and anything visual were outright verboten in my childhood, the only entertainment available being books. You learn to visualise stories or described situations, and when reading, I don't see words on a page, rather an immersive cinematic view of the text at hand.
All of that said, it landed me in hot water throughout my studies, as when you look at a physics or maths problem and write down the answer without any intermediate computation, one tends to be accused of cheating.
On the note of memory - I have a poor episodic memory (struggle to recall what I did three days ago) but can recall abstract facts with facility, as its just a question of looking at the right mental image.
That sounds exactly like my process of thought. Except for wild gesticulation, I rather trace the outlines of the object, which is less weird, but still gets me weird looks.
There has been a fairly longstanding debate in philosophy and psychology about whether visual mental images even exist, yet when I discuss the issue with friends none of them can believe or understand that I lack imagery.
I've read a fair amount without encountering real evidence that the capacity can be developed. I've certainly spent time trying, but possibly in the wrong way.
A good place to start on the "mental imagery as simulation" literature is Kosslyn, e.g. http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic561942.files/2009...
For an accessible window on the debate: http://www.edge.org/video/what-shape-are-a-german-shepherds-... and http://www.edge.org/discourse/shepardears.html
Curious to lean whether HN harbors any non-visualizers.