Complex Numbers

Mind Your Own Mind

Today, we're looking within.

    Imagination is a spectrum – and 1% of people can’t mentally visualise things at all  

I'm sure this comes as no surprise to at least 1% of your readers.

I saved this one because, fairly recently, it came to my attention that while I see spoken words as text in my head, not everyone does that. It may be a reason I'm pretty good at spelling: lots of practice.

When you hear someone talk, do you see the words in your mind’s eye? Or do you see what they’re saying as a movie? It’s easy to assume that the way you perceive the world is the same for everyone.

I know I've said this before, but when I was a kid, I had a deep, philosophical conversation with another kid, one which amounted to "how do I know that the color I see as 'red' is the same color as what you see as 'red?'" Much later, on the internet, such a question popped up as a profound revelation. Me, I'd spent the intervening years occasionally wondering how one would go about investigating such a thing.

The reason I bring this up is to note that I've been open to the idea that we each perceive things differently for a long time, and yet, it still sometimes surprises me.

We range from those who are “mind blind” and cannot visualise things mentally to those who have brilliant images in their mind. Some people see shapes in their mind when they hear music, or imagine colours when they see a number (a phenomenon called synaesthesia).

Yes, the article uses British spellings. Those don't usually appear in my mind when I hear words, but I can see them when someone speaks with a British accent.

There’s even a type of synaesthesia in which people’s minds run a written text on a mental ticker tape. Even though ticker tape (or subtitle) synaesthesia (TTS) was first studied in 1883 by Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, little was known about it until lately.

Yeah, I don't think it's quite like that for me. I do remember some instances of synesthesia (American spelling), like when I was a kid, each day name (Monday, Tuesday, etc.) had a different color associated with it. What those colors were, I can't describe. But ticker tape was already obsolete by the time I started reading. I saw it in action, once, when I was very young, and never since. I'd expect that a person's inner experience would be based on stuff they're familiar with; today, one might see words in their mind as text on a small screen.

Any reason to mention Darwin here other than name-dropping? Your science should stand on its own, regardless of the accomplishments of your more famous cousin. (Darwin, incidentally, had a lot of cousins. Hell. He married one.)

A study published recently, one of the first to explore this condition in more depth, found that of the 26 participants with TTS, most had additional types of synaesthesia, most commonly space-time or number-space, where they experience time or numbers as a location.

26 is hardly a compelling sample size, but considering the apparent rarity of TTS, it's understandable. I just wouldn't make any far-reaching leaps based on the study.

While many adults can imagine written words when listening to speech if asked to do so, people with TTS are different because of the ease with which it happens. In fact, some cannot stop, even when it makes it difficult to follow conversations when lots of people are talking at once. But the ability to process information from different senses at the same time is often helpful. There is an evolutionary explanation for this.

Of course there is, but it's speculative and possibly wrong.

FFS, I have to explain this again: Yes, evolution is fact. But asserting that such-and-such is the case in our minds "because our ancestors needed it on the savanna" or whatever is, at best, an interesting thought experiment, and, at worst, utter nonsense. Unless they can back it up with actual evidence.

In this case, a moment's thought might suffice to convince you that our savanna-dwelling ancestors didn't see written words when someone spoke, because writing hadn't been invented yet.

The more general informational-processing argument, okay, sure. But that would also apply to all the other animals that share, to one degree or another, our sensory array: sight, hearing, etc. And thus be a holdover from way before apes.

Okay, enough of my perennial ragging on evo-psych. Skipping that part of the article.

Except for this gem:

So if we also saw, or even smelled an animal in the scrub behind us, we could more easily determine if it was a dangerous predator we needed to escape from, or a fluffy little rabbit. As they evolved, our brains became experts in tying information from different senses together.

Which of course made my mind conjure an image of the Killer Rabbit from Holy Grail.

Researchers recently suggested fewer people are born towards the end of the low-visual-imagery spectrum. Extreme forms of aphantasia, people who do not have visual imagery at all, are rare. Less than 1% of people have this form.

While I've known about synesthesia for years, this is probably the first time I've encountered aphantasia, and I love the word, even though it describes a condition I hope I never experience.

Some research suggests we are not born with the ability to imagine. Instead, visual images emerge and develop during early childhood. This is followed by a decline in visual imagination in adulthood.

Okay, this strikes me as being like saying "we are not born with the ability to speak." Obviously, in reality, no child has ever popped out and immediately said, "Hello, Mother. Nice tits." No, we learn that later, but our capacity for speech (or imagination) is inborn. For most people.

Despite my issues with some of the claims here, I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with the basic idea: that we each have a different interior world. And, as the article notes at the end, there's a lot more to discover. We just have to begin by imagining...