Yes, and there are no real limits to this. I can picture a Rubik's cube dominating the Manhattan skyline. I can also picture abstract images with no connection to the real world, that have emotions associated with them.

I believe my wife cannot make images, and the differences between us that result are pretty wild. I'm dramatically better with directions and maps because she can't make a mental model of the map and how it relates to the real world. However she's very aware of her emotions in a given moment where it's very difficult for me to express how I'm feeling.

It's crazy how varied everyone's experiences are. I can't visualize anything at all, but have a very strong spatial sense, and navigate much better than my wife does (who can visualize things very vividly).

Can you draw what you visualize? Can you recall a face exactly and draw it? As an amateur artist, I don't think there is as much "mechanical skill" in art, as there is clearly imagining what you are trying to draw. Any time anyone claims to be able to visualize, I ask them this question.

To be clear, I am not "challenging" you in any sense, but it's a good reality check.

Anyway - I am the same with maps, I can easily see the route in my head, but that has to do with being aware of where north is and a vague notion of where I am.

No OP, but I fall into the camp that can draw/sculpt/paint/etc what my mind's eye produces. I'm not as good a sculptor as a painter, but I can generally paint a face/landscape/car/etc that my brain is seeing, at least to a degree that I am satisfied with. Paintings take a long time to get 'good'.

Getting better at drawing and creating takes time and practice. I'd go on youtube to take a look at how to get better quickly, there's a lot of good people on YT that are happy to share and teach.

One good 'cheat' is to use a camera lumisia or a reference mirror to see how light interacts with your media directly: https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2013/11/vermeer-secret-to...

I'm likely an outlier though, as I'm a synesthete and my senses get a bit mixed up from time to time. So take that into account.

Actually my mechanical skill is way too inferior to capture things that I can imagine. Like I could spend a long time trying to bring to life a specific image, but why? I wouldn't bother unless it was somehow very important to communicate to someone else. Simple things I'm easily able to picture and draw.

Oh, the map thing is interesting. I can visualise pretty well but I can’t move around smoothly in my visualisations. I can only warp around like in VR games. Most of what I visualise is more like a 2d film/photo than a full 3D scene. Like your wife, I can’t figure out maps or 3D spaces (I spend a lot of time in 3d games wandering around lost) - despite me being able to form images. Maybe some of us only have 1d/2d imaginary worlds in our heads!

I also don't see smooth movement without extraordinary effort and simple objects, and it seems I'm just increasing the framerate. Although funnily I can imagine body and hand movements (which are smooth) in detail, and I don't feel the framerate limitation at all; I can get a 'intuitive feeling' for each kind of movement that way. So it seems like my kinetic-proprioception has a lot more temporal capability.

In terms of 3D imagery, I can visualized complex 3D objects and rotate them around, or navigate 3D cave spaces. But it requires significant focus, and the "framerate" is very low, like warping you mentioned. And for years I've spent time before sleeping visualizing things (often in 3D), so I think it's something I developed too (it's fun and I knew it was going to be useful -- when solving problems I very often resort to visualizations).

Characters, structures, vehicles, robots, pretty much anything I would like to draw or design. With color (or at least enough awareness to know a certain shape or area is in a specific color). I can also "listen" to music, unfortunately I'm really bad at creating new music so this skill is utterly useless for anything but remembering songs with just one listen or so.

At night before falling asleep it's pretty much like visualizing a movie, including motion and sound, the effect is somewhat stronger when eyes closed and not moving, I assume because "input" is mostly clear and thus doesn't conflict with whatever image you are conjuring mentally.

Seeing from other post, they say their dreams are pretty dull. My case is the opposite, my dreams are ridiculously vivid (including color, sound and touch) and there are very detailed environments and a lot of people moving around. I wonder if those things are related somehow?

EDIT: I have narcolepsy, perhaps that's a factor.

In general my dreams have duller images than reality, but I had a dream many decades ago, after a half-dramatic winter day in the mountains - when sleeping in the tent that night I was dreaming about a summer day where I walked over the top of a hill, and in front of me was a valley with an old road, and fields of yellow flowers as far as I could see. What was special was that it was extremely sharp and vivid, much more so than reality. I could see every individual flower, from an apparent distance of a hundred meters or more. And at the same time I could see it all.

I still remember that dream vividly. Which is also unusual for me.

That's interesting. Dreams always were a very interesting topic to me, so I like to hear stuff like this.

For me that's usually kinda how it goes. My dreams are usually rather mundane, borderline formulaic, although at times I can recognize places from my past that are altered (a little or a lot), or it's cleaner/with different materials or stuff like that. A thing that amuses me and seems to be uncommon, at least from what I hear from other people, is the amount of life. If I dream of a street, it's always going to have a lot of persons moving about. Entirely normal people, not people without faces or anything weird like that. They even remain consistent, like if I look somewhere in the dream, if I look back again, people retains their path and clothing. If I'm a bar or something there will be random patrons who I don't really interact with, but can be seen and heard like if it was a totally normal place.

Another amusing thing is that people claims they cannot read in dreams, but while there are times I have difficulty reading a thing, stuff like billboards or random "decorative" text are clear to me. Exceptions happen, for example a few days ago I dreamed I was doing a school test online on a tiny old-school flipphone and I was struggling to read the questions (didn't help the text was in garish colors, probably remembering something a teacher used to do in real life).

I can also get the feelings of taste, smell and touch, but for some reason the temperature is always "neutral". Like, if I'm dreaming in a hot or cold day, it'll be "neutral" in the dream, even if I later wake up because I'm too hot or cold. At times I dream I'm walking but my legs hurt (like when standing up for a long time) but then I wake up and my legs are in a totally neutral state, not in a bad position or anything.

The biggest drawback is that at times I dream I'm just doing my job (maybe with some minor differences in the room or so) and it feels like doing 3-4 hours of just real life, absolutely realistic work stuff. That is terrible. Once in a while I get a cool nightmare monster or setting (which I parasitize for my creative endeavors. Is it plagiarism when your subconscious came up with it?), but overall it's really mundane stuff.

Also, my dreams tend to be pleasant and chillaxing (like 99%), for some reason when sharing dreams people speaks of dreadful or depressing things or psychedelic nightmares and such. I'm glad it's not the case here. I have had weird psychedelic dreams during times of being extremely sick with fever but otherwise it's like some sort of virtual reality.

Makes me wonder if people who claimed to do stuff like astral walking just had the same "ability" and just had really vivid and realistic dreams instead. I also wonder how much of this is related to narcolepsy (I might be dreaming in a higher state of awareness than most people, but I'm not very wise on these topics).

I guess you are well aware of the concept of lucid dreaming?

Yes, it seems pretty close to what I get by default, although I don't particularly pursue it (I hear it makes for lower quality sleep, and being narcoleptic I can't afford any lower quality, heh).

I do have a certain degree of autonomy while in the dreams. I usually do what I want to do and go where I want to go, even if the results aren't exactly logical at times. I particularly like to admire certain architectural elements that are slightly off or non-euclidean. Most of the weirdness comes from stuff that is slightly off, houses with too many rooms, places with too many floors or unusual layouts or lighting, or stuff like a 1:1 recreation of a real street but it leads to different or entirely new places. My brain seems to put a lot of emphasis in stuff like structure and lighting. I wonder what that says about me as a person.

Not gonna lie, I enjoy the stuff a lot. Only problem is that it's too random and can range from incredible to ridiculously mundane and normal, so I don't quite take dream exploring as a thing. If the opportunity presents itself I'll milk it for all it's worth though, both from enjoying the dream and from whatever creative material I can take for myself.

As complete as it needs to be. I can see and hear my imaginings quite clearly, and often use mechanical analogues to test non-directly visualisable abstract ideas and logical flows.

In more general terms, I can see and explore real and imagined environments, and listen to music with perfect fidelity - although doing the hearing bit only works well with considerable focus, and peace and quiet - visual I find easy enough to just ignore what my eyes are seeing, leave walking or whatever on autopilot. To be clear, it’s not like just imagining a thing, it’s more like overriding a sense. When I visualise, I am literally looking at something that isn’t there, when I listen, I hear as though it’s real - although any real noise immediately breaks it.

I have a very hard time believing claims like this. Not to single you out, but you should be able to draw perfectly then and imagine whole systems in your mind.

The latter is especially unlikely given that most people are limited to 5-7 "items" in their working memory. To design even a simple system, e.g. a brake caliper, that's way more than 7 items, and they aren't "atomic" items either.

Again, this isn't a stab at you, this is a stab at the concept, because it's kind of like people saying they can put on 5lb of muscle a month without roiding. Sets false expectations.

It’s about levels of scale and abstraction. When you’re designing a car you don’t care about the innards of the calliper. Reducible complexity, and modelled inputs and outputs. If something seems wonky it gets looked at more closely - either the model or the concept is wrong.

I can’t draw for shit, but I can and do make complex devices and systems with no written plan, just a picture in my head.

Oh, and I’ve put on well over 5lb of muscle this month, by doing brutal hours of manual labour and eating like a horse. Being out of shape but historically stacked makes it a world easier.

"Group 3 (exercise, natural) was able to build about 4 pounds of muscle."

https://www.aworkoutroutine.com/steroids-vs-natural/

Maybe you did for one month, after a time of de-training, with all the ideal conditions.

I can hold whole systems in my mind, but I can't draw, as I've never learned. That doesn't mean that what I see in my mind is not real or inaccurate.

To expound a bit on what others are saying, I definitely have this visualization ability, and it isn't limited to sight, I have the same thing for all my senses. The way I've described it to other people is that I can emulate any sensation internally, it's just that it's a muted or foggy version of it. If it was 100% accurate, I think that would start to cause issues with your brain's ability to distinguish with what's real and what's "in your head".

The example I always give people is that when deciding what to eat and looking at things in the cabinet, or the fridge, or deciding where to pickup food, I just mentally "taste" each thing, and it really does feel like I have the sensation of eating that thing, and I decide based on which one tastes the best in that moment.

Temple Grandin claimed her visualization worked like the Star Trek holodeck, which is amazing. But then many people can easily manipulate verbal language in their minds. Some can do that with music.

I can pretty much visualize things as if they were in a 3D modeling system (there may be a reason why I work in mechanical product design). I can take some object and imagine it flipped around to another orientation or imagine how a complex mechanism will operate. I'm so adept at doing this that I very rarely actually draw things out before I start doing CAD work.

I would say my ideation process starts with a vague view of what I am trying to accomplish, and then gradually becomes clear. I'll have a general concept and can picture the end result, but without understanding how it is accomplished at first, which gradually becomes clearer as I think about it. I generally know I've got something when it "feels right".

My main artistic hobby is photography. One of the things I most enjoy doing is going out without a specific shot in mind and trying to "find" a photo by deliberately experiencing my surroundings. It is almost have an aversion to have a shot in mind before I go out to take it because it invariably doesn't live up to the visual I have in my head.

Like a 3D CAD or in Blender. Add or remove details. A circle could be a bouncy wire that has a shiny surface, or made of wood or plastic. They could rotate in the air, or running on a floor making a circle after being dropped. It could bend and get twisted it into a figure 8. I am writing this while imagining it, and I have no real ring-shaped object at hand.

Nikola Tesla always thought that this was a side effect of a very serious disease he had as a child. That was probably due to him never meeting other people like him, though as some comments here show they certainly exist (I count myself among them).

Some people with this ability can draw what they imagine very well, while others are not good at all. I don't see an issue - even if you project some image on a blank piece of paper so people just have to trace it everybody won't have the same results.

I can visualize to a limited extent, i.e. I can see anything I want but images are always very "unstable". I'm much better with music: I can listen to music in my head very clearly, even though there is a strong focus on the lead melody (e.g. voice, guitar). But I can also create music from scratch and let it unfold seamlessly, with any kind of instruments or vocals I want.

I can, but colours never seem as vivid in my mind as when I look at them directly, like I can imagine a red apple but it's like a faded red. I've always found this mildly frustrating.

I can only see a very limited amount of stuff in my head. My best visualizations are routes in 2D from above. Anything beyond that is really hard to do.

Funny thing is, when I dream I can see anything.