By 1, do you mean you can picture all the details of an image in your mind, or do you mean you can turn visual hallucinations on and off at will? Many people who say they can't visualize anything are unwittingly just saying they can't hallucinate, because they think you can.

[+] wantonviolins@hexbear.net 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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[–] SerLava@hexbear.net 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Maybe people aren't saying "I can personally hallucinate at will", but many people saying "I can't visualize images" think that other people can hallucinate at will. The twitter poster even says "the way your eyes see?" which is pretty clearly asking if people can hallucinate.

Depending on how someone comes into this discussion, their prior experience, and the particular language they come across, it's easy to interpret these images as representing... well... images. People who say "I'm a 1, I'm a 2, 3, 4" are probably just saying they can think about and recall the shape, texture, color, etc of things, and can't actually see shit. Having a scale of "good image, bad image, outline" was probably meant to be very abstractly tied to this ability to think about those details.

I think if you took a group of completely neurotypical people, whatever that means, who all have EXACTLY the same sensory experience, they would start labeling themselves on every part of this chart and completely misunderstand what everyone else is saying about their perception. You'd have 1's and 5's despite no actual difference.

[–] AssortedBiscuits@hexbear.net 2 points 1 year ago

By 1, do you mean you can picture all the details of an image in your mind, or do you mean you can turn visual hallucinations on and off at will?

I suppose that's strictly true for me even though real visual input completely overrides the hallucination. It's like comparing the Sun with some random star. However, there was that one time I smoked way too much weed, which had an effect of greatly augmenting my mind's eye so it became comparing the Sun with Venus. Visual input was still at the forefront, but you now had the mind's eye image of the object being superimposed on the actual object.

If you're talking about just being amused by the floating images when the eyes are closed, yes I've done this countless times. I don't see this as any different from replaying movie dialogue or imagining eating something delicious.