And I would buy one just to watch him do it too… except none of my cats have ever showed a single interest in toilet paper. He’s more likely to play with a towel on the floor.
Or a toddlers’ !
I had an awesome Star Trek dream too! It would have made for a good pitch for a series following DS9 (but ignoring Voyager).
The other forum members were not so receptive.
Pangolins are weird!
D’aww look at that weird little alien motherfucker.
True, it does look like it ought to be clawing it’s way out of someone’s rib cage.
I’ve got my eye on you…
I read a little about aphantasia last night: the lack of a functioning mind’s eye. It’s fascinating to me, because I hear some people describing a kind of mind’s eye I don’t seem to have.
Because language is maddeningly imprecise, I’m going to use two words in particular ways to try and nail it down: envision to indicate a mental image which replicates the experience of seeing something with your actual, physical eyes, and imagine to indicate a mental image which does not.
When I dream (at least the dreams that I remember), I envision—I see a world in a way that feels to me like I’m perceiving it by eyesight.
When I _day_dream, I don’t do that (and I can’t, if I try). If, say, you tell me to close my eyes and picture an apple, I don’t envision it. I can’t call to mind an image of an apple that feels like a real visual stimulus—I can only see the inside of my eyelids.
Which isn’t to say that I can’t picture an apple—it just doesn’t feel at all like eyesight. (It’s also easier for me to imagine a thing if my eyes are open, for whatever reason.) I can imagine an image of, say, a DCS Harrier in flight, or of my family, in plenty of detail to draw them accurately (notwithstanding that I’m not a good enough artist to pull off either), with shape, color, and volume as you’d expect, but it’s a distinct perceptual experience.
So what about you? What’s your mind’s eye like?
This is my main problem with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies. They’re perfectly fine, very well made and acted, all that. But they look nothing like the Middle Earth or its characters as I’ve imagined them since I was a young boy. There’s this constant visual dissonance for me watching those movies. And that’s a me problem, no doubt about it, but it’s still a problem.
Wow. Really? I had literally the exact opposite reaction. When watching Fellowship in the theater the first time, I was in awe throughout most of the movie because the settings like The Shire, Rivendell and Moria looked nearly exactly like I had pictured them in my mind while reading the books many, many times in my youth.
Later I discovered this was no accident, that Jackson had given explicit instructions to the crews building the settings that they should follow Tolkien’s descriptions to the letter when possible to create the most authentic transition from page to screen that they could manage.
I don’t think anything about the movies looked bad, it’s not my intention to criticize them. Obviously a lot of care went into creating those movies. It’s mostly that nothing looks quite right to me. Everything’s more earthy, rather than majestic and mysterious. It’s hard to explain.
So how do you BFM? Just position the bandit on your canopy and pull? To me, having a sort of tacview-like picture of the dance I’m dancing with the bogey is indispensable. It’s what I call SA. How does that work for you?
On the other hand I don’t think everyone else sees a picture of an apple in their “minds eye” when they imagine one. For me at least it’s more abstract. Which works for knowing who is where and what they’re doing and where they’re going. Don’t ask me what they’re feeling tho! 8-]
Look at that thing! dopey as fuck lol and alien. If God indeed did create earth and all creatures in it, he is one humorous fucker lol.
My situational awareness is bad, but that’s a distinct issue—what I’m talking about only applies to being able to visualize-as-with-eyesight an object or scene.
Yeah, I also read a bit about this after it popped up on the forum. My experience is similar to yours, and the same for a surprising amount of my friends. I had no idea that most people actually go around actually seeing moving images when they close their eyes and imagine things.
OK, so let me loop that back around to my LOTR post - if you don’t see moving images in your mind’s eye, what do you see when you read a book such as LOTR? Are there images or do you just absorb the words on the page without visual context?
This is pretty consistent with how it works for me. It’s not exactly the same “seeing” as in normal vision. On dreams, for me, it is as visual as any memory is visual. But it’s not like I can replay yesterday in my mind with the same visual nature as seeing something, right now. Same with remembering the dream—it has the same fidelity, in my memory, as yesterday. Note: my mind’s eye can have as much detail as seeing something with my eyes, it just isn’t the same way—it’s more abstract, in general, until I focus on some aspect of what I’m seeing in my mind (e.g., now, focus in on the leaves on the stem of the apple).
It’s fascinating to me, because as I read my mind absolutely constructs a physical presence in my mind.
Reading Sherlock Holmes and I have a distinct image of 221b Baker Street. Dark oak paneling on the walls, a red carpet strip that goes up the stairs, the smoking room just at the top of the landing, and to the right side as you walk up. A fireplace directly in the left hand wall as you enter, a globe sitting in front of it, with a filing cabinet in the corner beside it. A chair with red upholstery next to the globe, and next to a circular table that holds the ash tray, pencil and paper, and an odd assortment of baubles. A big bay window opposite the fireplace. This is the scene my mind constructs. Sure there’s probably some amalgamation of various Victorian era rooms from tv and movies, but it’s a specific room my mind constructs.
Or reading a book set in early 18th century London, such as System of the World, and when they go past the various churches, bridges, and markets, I get a distinct vision. The docks build themselves, I see the stone quays and sea walls. It all takes a physical presence, despite having never been to London itself.
Which is why the topic is fascinating to me. Because it is hard to envision reading without that ‘theater of the mind’ aspect.