I don't even think there are complimentary modes of imagination as you put it. To circle back to your original question, I don't think the absence of one of the modes of imagination necessarily enhances another. I've often wondered what it would be like to try to imagine a new recipe and get an imaginary sampling before the attempt. I do neither of those, but it sounds really quite intriguing to me. What I do have a hard time understanding is that people can conjure up smells and taste in their imagination. Nor do I think that it's neccessary someone with a very vivid pictorial imagination. I understand how it would work with an image of a chair, and it does seem like it might have some advantages at times, but I don't think it is necessary for me to "see" the chair to know how it functions and its basic spacial properties. Conjuring up a picture of a chair isn't really neccessary when you have an understanding of the chair object and its properties. Just for a little insight into my internal thoughts, most of my thought processes are highly object oriented. I can also fairly acutely imagine a touch/feeling. I also have very strong auditory memory and can, as other have said, "play songs in my head." Though translating those imagined songs to the real world is less then steller in my case. The paper is Sir Francis Galton’s Statistics of Mental Imagery (incidentally interesting: it was so long ago that the paper notes “There are many who deny to statistics the title of a science”, which is a bemusing thing to read today.)Īs a dataset of one, I can tell you that I am aphantasic and have a lot of internal monologue from multiple voices (No I'm not schizophrenic). This new paper fits neatly into that paradigm they chose a high threshold and (inevitably) discovered that most of the bell curve falls below that high threshold. The paradigm proposed in that paper is more or less that there’s a bell curve of varying vividness of mental imagery, all the way from a few percent who almost completely lack it, up to a few percent with hyper-real “more detailed than reality” mental visualization, with most clustered in between. It demonstrated the existence of aphantasic individuals as well as high fidelity and low fidelity individuals! From the very beginning, back in 1880! But one of the very first major published papers on mental imagery, arguably the paper that opened this topic up to scientific inquiry, was a statistical study of peoples’ varying experiences of mental imagery. It seems like there is a perennial surprise at conditions like aphantasia, or of discoveries that some people have high fidelity mental imagery while others have low fidelity mental imagery. Research and discussion of mental imagery has always confused me.
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