VISUALIZATION
So there’s this thing: this nagging confusion I have that has been with me for as long as I can recall.
The first time this confusion formally came to light was in primary school during a visualization activity. I recall feeling like I didn’t understand and was not really participating. The teacher asked the class to sit comfortably and quietly, and to close our eyes and imagine the scene she was about to describe. I was with her up to that point, but she then used language that made little sense to me. With my eyes closed in anticipation, she talked about “seeing” with our “mind’s eye” and about “forming an image in our heads.” I thought, how do you see with your eyes closed? And, how do you ‘form an image’ in your head? As a child, accustomed to being perplexed, I did not seek clarification about what I was supposed to be doing, how or why. But, like all the other kids, I sat with my eyes shut and listened diligently to my teacher. She continued to use words like “see”, “observe”, and “imagery”. She used phrases like “notice how the grass moves in the wind.” I had no idea what she was talking about. I could think about the scene she verbally painted for us, but saw nothing whatsoever. Why did she talk like that? Why did she use those words? I wondered. I just assumed she was talking metaphorically or something. I remember thinking about how forming a mental image in one’s head seemed so silly. I assumed I didn’t actually know what I was supposed to be doing and that it really didn’t seem to matter either.
It wasn’t for almost a decade or so before I again questioned what all this meant. I was walking home from school with my friend Ryan one day and tried to make sense of this phrasing. I don’t recall what precipitated the conversation, but I was agitated about the phenomena of “seeing” something in your head.
I asked him, “What the hell do people mean when they say to imagine it in your mind’s eye or see it in your head?” I added, “It sometimes seems like they expect you to literally see something.”
“Uh, what do you mean? That’s just what they mean. They mean 'see'. Why? What do you think they mean?” He replied.
“What?” I complained, “So if I ask you to close your eyes and visualize a pink elephant, you actually see a pink elephant?”
He looked at me, more confused than I felt, closed his eyes for a moment and then said “Uh, ya.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I blasted back at him. “So if I say to think of a pink elephant, when you close your eyes you see something? Like, there’s a picture floating there?”
“Well, ya”, he came back. “It’s more or less detailed, more or less blurry depending on the situation, but ya. Why? What happens for you?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all. How could it? I always thought we were just trying to quiet our minds and concentrate or something.”
I think he thought I was just messing with him. I wasn’t. What he was saying seemed ludicrous to me, like he had to be messing with me or was just confused. I felt like we weren’t being specific enough, clear enough about what each of us meant by “seeing.” I didn’t know what else to say.
In the twenty or so years since then I’ve tried to figure this out, to understand other people’s experience and compare that to my own. I have searched libraries and websites and journal articles and always wound up frustrated or more confused. Never hearing anyone else describe my experience, it has always seemed like I am either alone in this or somehow mistaken, either about what others or I myself experience. And yet these scenarios seem to be both unlikely and the only available options. But, as all one can really do is trust their perceptions, I continue to talk about it. I talk to friends and to strangers on the bus and professors of mine in different ways. And almost all of them either think I am crazy or just joking around for some inexplicable reason. I’ve talked to people who felt like we were having some kind of juvenile philosophical debate about the nature of consciousness; others who seemed to think I was just parsing out the semantic difference between various notions of seeing; others thought we were talking about the mechanics of and what it means to physically see something versus imagining it. I’ve had a dozen or more of these conversations but it hasn’t really evolved much since my initial talk with Ryan. (This is partly due to the fact that I engage with it only casually, as I find it hard to think about without feeling as though I am either fundamentally disabled or engaged in a life-long project to undermining my own sanity.) The most recent mental imagery conversation iteration went something like this:
“No. I mean I don’t imagine with imagery in the way others seem to suggest. There is nothing that I would call visual or I would describe as seeing when I think about something.”
“Well, I don’t see anything either. It just arises in consciousness. Kind of like a dream or hallucination, your visual system is engaged but not through stimulation by photons from your environment, of course.” “I get that, but when I ask you to imagine a pink elephant, say, something you would describe as visual transpires: the image of a pink elephant, however accurate and detailed, materializes somewhere in your mind. Right?”
“Right. That doesn’t happen for you?”
“No.”
“What? But if I ask you to imagine a sailing ship you can see that in your mind’s eye, right? It wasn’t in your head, in your consciousness, and then I mention it and now it is in your head. Right? And if I start to describe it and add details, like the width and height of the masts or the colour and texture of its sails, that all comes to mind, right?“
“It comes to mind, but not visually; not at all, in any sense. You use terms like mind’s eye and visualize and imagine. These all connote sight and seeing, they suggest to me that you form a mental image. I do not, cannot, and have never formed a mental image of anything. If you say ‘I see it in my mind’s eye’ I want to insist that we experience something very different when we think and, therefore, that there may be a different process unfolding. The phrase ‘seeing with your mind’s eye’ is total nonsense to me. Yet, it seems everyone else on Earth relates to this notion.”
“But you dream, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And your dreams, you’d describe them as visual?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. But, back to the sailing ship: if I tell you there are twelve cannons, six on either side of the ship, you can kind of place them there in your head, right? And they come kind of pre-formed out of your prior knowledge of cannons. And you can kind of rotate those cannons or the whole ship itself and see it in your head from different angles, and even imagine it in different settings, right?”
“Yes, but not visually. I do exactly that. I know it. I can conceptualize it. I can imagine it. I can remember and manipulate, and I can construct and deconstruct it; but I cannot, in any sense, see it. I mean, in school math the unit I always did best in was geometry. I can rotate and transform geometries in my head with no trouble. I understand that it seems crazy, but I’ve never seen anything in my head. And it seems truly bizarre to me that you do.”
“So how do you contend that you see or imagine non-visually then? Isn’t that like hearing non-aurally or smelling non-olfactorily?”
This questioning was followed by a burst of laughter and a very humane subject change. (But sometimes conversations of this sort result in an eruption of consternation and just an end to the conversation altogether.)
Once, after a freak health scare, I ended up in a doctor’s office. (I just passed out for no apparent reason while hanging out with a friend. The ambulance was called, and – after determining that I wasn’t drunk or high or vegan or suffering from low blood pressure – they insisted I get some tests done. I ended up in hospital and subsequently in the examination room of a GP.) The ol’ saw-bones and I talked about biochemistry and about diet, about hearts and brains, about consciousness and, of course, about losing consciousness. I mentioned to him that I didn’t “see” anything in my head, like others seemed to. He asked me what I meant. I elaborated. He asked me about my memory and about my ability to recall and organize objects and ideas in my head. I described my experience as fully as I could and he assured me that I was fine and that I was normal and had nothing to worry about. I was then, and am now, pretty sure that what I experience is atypical.
I’m pretty sure you and I are having a very different experience and I don’t know how to convince you of that. I feel as certain as I can be without actually getting inside your head. But when talking about this it can often feel like I am arguing that I don’t have legs and cannot walk, all while walking down the street with the person I’m speaking to. It’s a bit like I’m colourblind or even like I can see a colour you cannot, or something; and sometimes I can convince you that the colour is there, but more often than not we determine that seeing a colour no one else can is kind of irrelevant. That, being so wholly intangible and inconsequential, so non-disconfirmable, it may be interesting philosophically or maybe poetically, or maybe it would be of some interest to a neurology student somehow; but, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter.
Though this is often the conclusion, and I want to agree, it doesn’t feel irrelevant to me. I mean, it seems to me like others have a strange superpower – one I can’t really imagine actually exists, nevermind having myself. And, conversely, this ability seems so fundamental, like the formation of ideas or an elementary number sense, that no one else can imagine I could possibly be without it. That doesn’t feel irrelevant. Yet, as all I can do is use words, make associations, and form metaphors that seem to fail to get us closer to understanding one another, it seems mad to continually pursue this – like trying to hear silence or something.
I don’t know.
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