Do you have a "mind's eye"?

[CurlewKate]

I was just listening to a podcast where someone said they have no mind's eye- they can't visualise things in their heads. Apparently, some people can visualise something in colour and 3d, some in colour and 2d, some in black and white 2d, some just as a hazy image and some not at all-no image at all, just words. I realise that now I can't think about which I might be....I THINK I'm 3d colour, but I don't know! You?

Full 3d with sound and voices.

blue ! I ‘m not a blue person at all, eyes, clothes, paint colours, anything in the home - so even when I dream in technicolour, there is always an absence of blue unless its the sky which is pale pale blue and seems far away

I'm autistic and mine falls between hazy and nothing just words.

My head is busy. I have 3D colour and an inner monologue. My brain doesn't shut up!

I'm so jealous of people like this - it must be amazing!

No head TV/movie screen at all here unfortunately but I have always been great at spelling and have a good sense of direction
I love reading anything but rarely have time due to the DC. I take two or three novels or factual books- generally history on holiday each year as my big treat to actually read them.

This is so interesting. I can't picture any faces really at all, just a brief impression maybe. Not even my family.
But I am really good at names and can often immediately get someone's name on seeing them a second time even if the first time was really brief... so my mind has held onto the image somewhere?
Fascinating

Yes, and I can visualise most things..I can go shopping,pick an item, for instance a vase, and it will be an exact colour match, for what I want,same with sewing thread.

I don't have a minds eye so can't picture places I have been or people i know, even family members that i live with. I can picture a photograph if i have seen it many times, but only very fleetingly, if I try to 'look' at it it disappears. I too have a very busy mind, back and forth conversations etc, and I dream visually, I actually have very vivid dreams. Aphantasia is weird.

It’s got everything to do with hearing sounds because by definition an internal monologue is something you can hear in your own head.

Again, as I’ve explained, it’s more semantics. Some people say they don’t have an internal monologue, because they don’t speak to themselves in their own head etc or hear words in their head on a day to day situations.

I totally get why they would say they don’t have it, but some people say they don’t understand what it would feel like, but my point is, is simply being able to hear the words in your head, that’s it.

I'm a 3D colour kinda gal as well. It blew my mind when I realised other people didn't visualise in the same way as I did, as I'd naively assumed we all visualised in the same way.

When I was at school, one activity we had to do in a maths class was looking at around 20 potential nets of cubes and we had to visualise which ones would make a cube and which wouldn't. I, and a few others, whizzed through it, but so many others just couldn't picture it in their heads at all and were getting very frustrated that they couldn't complete what they had assumed would be an easy task. It's a fascinating really.

3D colour. I had no idea not everyone did this until I was quite old.

" Also can see letters and numbers in colour."

Is that the same thing as synaesthesia? I have a friend with that and it sounds fascinating.

I agree with PPs that aphantasia is fascinating, and that the terminology can sometimes be misinterpreted.

For me, if I sit in front of my laptop, close my eyes and try and visualise a red apple or a red star (popular tests) I 'see' nothing. But I KNOW what a red star/apple is. So, my questions are:

1. What's the 'mind's eye'? Is it only operating when your eyes are closed? Is it more metaphorical? Does it 'have' to be visual? For example "See yourself in your mind's eye becoming a guitar virtuoso". I can DO that but it isn't visual.
2. Do peeps who reckon they have aphantasia notice any difference between sitting up alertly compared to lying in bed in a pre/post sleep doze, or dreaming. (I have visual dreams and do have visual images showing up in my dopy fantasy world.)

I have no minds eye, but am really good recalling names to faces ( they just come to me ) and used to have very strongly hypnagogic dreams, definitely visual, audio, sense of touch etc.

So I assume it's a processing / command failure. My mind can obviously do it but not at will, I can't control it.

I also see letters, words and numbers in colour. I see words, so spelling was pretty easy, they look wrong if misspelled. I have an inner monologue and am good with names and faces, though I hear not see the names. In the old days, I was good with telephone numbers, but I would hear the numbers in combination, in that instance, not see them.

However, I am rubbish at dates, whereas as dp is excellent at them - I have to think, how old was I and when would that be? I also showed him the spatial synaesthesia picture and he laughed that it was like being on drugs (no that's just my brain). It's fascinating how different people's minds work.

This is very frustrating because you keep explaining that it is semantics and not listening when i tell you that i do not hear anything in my head, and i am not unusual in this.

I have a bit of synaesthesia. I associate scent and sound very strongly with colours. Not always, but more often than not. The stronger the scent or sound the more likely it is to have a colour associated with it. Some noises are so overwhelming that I feel like I'm almost blinded by the colour that comes with it. Anything screechy is white and is increasingly blinding depending on how loud the screeching is.

I do have a mind’s eye, but I don’t need it for directions. I have internal maps instead.

Not landmarks and visual stuff, just directions and roads and how they will all join up. Knowing what is west of which bit, that sort of thing.

I’m not properly synesthesic, but North, South etc definitely have a look and a flavour to them. As do Left and Right.

I don't know that term, but it's interesting.
Basically a bigger number gets the colour of the first one, same with words and names.
You don't get to choose that colour, but it's always the same for particular number or letter.

That's interesting about names to faces. I'm really poor at that, especially when I see an unfamiliar face 'out of context'.

Thanks also for introducing me to a new word: hypnagogic (and indirectly to hypnopompic.) I never knew there were names for these transitional pre/post sleeping states. (Although for me, mostly these aren't hallucinations, IMO, but visual representations of my full, rich fantasty world and thus pretty much consciously controlled.)

I do. My "imagination" is like a film playing in my head the whole time. Like the tellytubbies have screens in their chests. Mine is imaginary and inside my head, behind my forehead. If someone is taking to me about say, bananas, there's a bunch of bananas on my imaginary screen.

Fascinating. Aren't the differences between people's internal, currently unknowable worlds amazing?

Just had to look up hypnopompic so thanks back to you!!!

Oh yes. 😁
Churchill sound.
What I'm surprised about is that this stuff didn't fade away with youth!