It was recently brought to my attention that most people don’t. I find that…literally impossible to believe.
So, do you have an inner monologue? Do you talk to yourself? Do you get lost for hours in your imagination? Just spend time thinking? When you read, is there a voice that reads the things or do you just…see the words or something.
…what
Like, can some people not rotate 3D objects? Lol. I have trouble with 4D objects but 3D is basic.
i used to be much better at it but over time my ability to hold images of any kind in my head has broken down as my working memory has degraded. faces of friends are amorphous and nondescript - more placeholders for the idea of a face than an actual detailed image whereas i used to be able to visualize in extreme detail.
i've had pretty bad cognitive decline over the years via depressive pseudodementia/lack of stimulation and my memory got particularly fucked up after i had electroconvulsive therapy so i'd imagine that's why
that being said i have a very strong inner monologue that i know i at least partially consciously developed as a way to cope with isolation and loneliness - i would talk to myself and narrate what i was doing or thinking because i rarely if ever talked to anyone else. as a child i thought more directly in concepts and images instead of words.
:meow-hug: im sorry your going through that.
Some people have trouble doing it. Not sure why
I have periodic dissociative states that will happen maybe once a year for 5-10 minutes and during that period I can't visualize objects with proper proportions, like if I imagine a person their hands or legs will be comically oversized. It's apparently a known phenomenon that a teacher brought up once but it's happened to me since I was small.
I've had one of those! I'd see my partner as if they were really far away, then blink and feel like they were right at my face, plus other crazy stuff - time was choppy, couldn't get oriented spacially, etc . Felt like I was stuck in a shitty short film from a kid that didn't know how to edit, light or operate the camera. It lasted a whole morning
Who knows, maybe some people have 2003 era intel extreme graphics crammed into their brains.
I can't render visuals at all. I do see things when I'm dreaming and when I'm drifting off to sleep, but otherwise when I close my eyes it's just black. It's more like my brain stores a bunch of interconnected information about an object - thoughts, feelings and memories associated with it - that could be generated into an image if run through the right interpreter. I still sort of know what an object looks like, though, and I work as a graphic designer for a living.