Comment by cocacola1
16 hours ago
That apple test was wild. I’ve legit never pictured an apple so clearly. First time I could see the mental image of one after closing my eyes.
16 hours ago
That apple test was wild. I’ve legit never pictured an apple so clearly. First time I could see the mental image of one after closing my eyes.
That wasn't a mental image, that was oversaturated photoreceptors in your eyes still sending an updating status of what they are detecting to your brain and your brain still processing it.
It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is.
But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.
That's so bizarre to me. I can "picture" an apple, but I'm not literally seeing something resembling an apple in my mind. It's closer to the classic object-oriented example of "Apple isa Fruit", except not in text but in vague geometric shapes that to me say "appleness".
I can mentally see and feel the little fuzzies around the top where the stem is. I can mentally fidget with the bottom where the flower was.
I can make it a granny smith, a pink lady, a Gala, a Cosmic Crisp and the shape and color striations change. I can see the tiny little pore circles when it's a green or yellow apple. I can conjure and catch my fingernail on a worm hole in the apple.
If I think about a wild green apple from apple trees I know about in Seattle, I can see myself standing there, seeing them both on the tree, and sitting on the ground rotting in several different states of decay and I can squish them and feel it crunching and squishing underfoot, with some parts just sinking into the soft spring soil at a tree on one side of town, or grinding into the gravel and asphalt on the other side of town. I could pinpoint these trees for you on a map.
I can put myself in the scene from Oppenheimer in the lab at Cambridge where he poisoned the apple in the movie, and I can pick up the apple and see the injection site. If I really try I can detect the faintest smell of almonds as I hold it up to my nose. I can do it as Bohr. I can grab the apple out of Bohr's hand as Oppenheimer and feel his adrenaline and the resistance of his confused hand as I do it. I can throw it against the wall instead, maybe shattering a glass window and hearing and seeing all of that, then cutting myself while cleaning it up and smelling and tasting the blood because I instinctively sucked on it.
Mind's eye is so much more than just visual, that the article and discussion of mental imagery in this thread is a bit flat.
Even the survey assumed that every aspect of someone's mind's eye is entirely visual, and it's just not the case.
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