Re:Aphantasia: A life without mental images
by rndn on Tuesday September 01, 2015 @08:25AM
(#10151858)
Interesting. I think about recursion both in terms of linguistic/symbolic rules that are associated with it, but I also associate it visually with call tree diagrams, nested structures and loops. I can't think about dogs, flowers and sunsets just in terms of language though, there are always images, smells, sounds, movements etc. associated with it.
Perhaps take an empty piece of paper and imagine drawing a big letter on it. I've read before that non-visual thinkers can experience visual thinking that way.
The only analogy I can draw is this:
Imagine these "concepts" in your head:
They don't particularly have an "image" associated with them. I can think of "recursion" as an idea and have a mental understanding of the concept, yet I don't see it as a picture (I assume that most people don't actually see it as a picture, but perhaps they do).Now, when I think of things like:
I still think of them as abstract concepts. Like the activations in my mind when thinking of "recursion" are of the same kind as when I think of "flower". If I really focus strongly on thinking of a dog, I get a really fuzzy "flash" of a visualization of a dog, but it's in no way "image-like". When I do this I can feel my brain really really working hard and it's mentally tiring.Understandably, it's hard to express the internal mental life in words :)