roadkill

If I were to ask you to picture a street with shops and cars moving along upon the street. What would you visualize? And why?

Now after that has been asked and stated, if we though about it the chances of us having the same street, the same shops, the same cars (with the same color) is incrediably small.

However, we all came up with an answer to that question. Why is it different. Why are the cars those cars and their color. Or why does that shop on the corner to you seem to be a starbucks, why not a pawn shop?

I've been thinking about this for a while and it's been blowing my mind.

Johnny Rotten

The fewer parameters you set, the more variables you have to deal with. If I told you to visualize a quarter and I asked you what year it was made, I would get maybe a dozen different answers from a sample of fifty people, even though they're just visualizing a quarter. But if I tell them what year the quarter was made, they'll all see it pretty much the same way: the older the quarter, the more worn it looks.

"A street with shops and cars" by comparison, will not produce a significant match from one respondent to another. Or you will get a response as vague as your input.

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FallenAvatar

Correct, it's all based ,as Johnny said, on parameters. The more options you give the smaller the chance of exact matches from person to person.

roadkill

What I'm trying to point out is really when there is no primiters other than a street. Why is there such difference? It's not about how vague this can be it's how persice you make this when this is posed to you, and why most of the time we all make it increadably vague.

WhiteKoopa

It depends a lot on the streets that person has seen before. If someone had lived in the same street all his life, without ever walking outside that street, then he would probably imagine that street.

Ample

I bet the majority of the people came up with three ideas. The road that they currently live on or around. Probably the the first thing that popped into their head. Of course its going to be different depending on what area of the country that you live in. Second, "that road" from their childhood. This person might have dug a little deeper, and thought of that road that brought back memories. Last, I bet some people thought of what the person asking the question would want to hear. A large majority probably thought of something Norman Rockwellesk.

I could be full of shit, but that makes sence to me.

Zeraph

Because we all have different experiences and therefore different memories to draw upon when creating an imaginary street. Communication is really about the hopes that the other person has similar enough memories to your own that you'll understand each other.

Cynthetiq

People have their own internal parameters.

Say this to a person living in Madrid, New York City, Bangkok, Manila, Tokyo, and you'll all have different descriptions of the same question.

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d*d

it'll be down to association, I have a number of images that I associate with the word car - depending on my experiences. When asked to think of a street my mind associates the word with remembered images, we all have different memories so the images conjured up are different

Sho Nuff

Excellent observation. My mind went to Rockwell immediately because when I am asked to picture something my first reflex is to turn to imagination and fantasy because I am a dreamer. I was born in DC and have lived almost exclusively in big cities, but my imagination went to a Mayberry scene because right now I am feeling the need to get away from here to a more peaceful life.

I would guess that whether someone picked a scene from their life or a scene from their imagination would depend on if the person used their minds eye more for pragmatism or fantasy.

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rsl12

It would be like saying, "Picture a single M&M (plain)." It's impossible to picture an M&M without assigning unconsciously a very particular color for the M&M--you can't just visualize a generic M&M having no specific color! That's because visualizing means pretending to see, basically, and by imagining seeing, you're forced to choose a particular image, rather than a generic street of indeterminate business, filled with generic shops of no particular design, and houses of no particular architecture.

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biznatch

I imagined a street that I had never seen before. However, it felt familiar...it was a product of my imagination based on my past experiences and the streets I had seen before and grown attached to.
Even if you had asked us to visualize an object that most people were familiar to, say, the statue of liberty, the angle of view, the lighting, the amount of green Oxidized Copper on it depending on how long ago it had been cleaned when you saw it would different for each person.
If you picked the Mona Lisa, the images would be similar, but still different because each person's mind interprets and distorts an image in their own way.
So I'd say these images are different for each of us because our brains and memories and eyes are not standardized units, like computers and video cameras. They grow, and evolve, and get worse, or better.

Rodney

Experience, expectations, familiarity. Everyone's got different levels of those, and it'll affect how they visualize 'a street.'

A more interesting question would be to individually ask several different people to visualize the same, _real_ street, one that they were all familiar with, and compare what they did or didn't recollect, what they did or didn't leave in or out, what parts they recollected correctly or incorretly, etc.

frogza

You can not create something out of nothing, even mental pictures. Even the most creative person pulls from their experience, perceptions and knowledge to come up with their ideas. So when you give a person the chance to create a mental picture, they will pull from their unique tool box to do it. Since we all will have different knowledge and experience to use as tools, we will end up with very different pictures.

CrypticDreamer

The real question is, "who are the people driving those cars that you made up?"

roadkill

Indeed, but itsn't is just amazing how different this can be from the same question.

Ch'i

Mental pictures of things we have never seen are usually contrived by coupling past images and experiences with the description of the person asking if you.

Mark23

If you ask someone to think of something as vague as a street, then of course you are going to get many different images forming in people's minds. To say a street is to be really vague. If you ask someone to picture a small country road with a blue Ford Mondeo parked beside a large oak tree, then most people will imagine the same thing. By leaving the question at only a street you allow peoples' individual minds to fill in all the gaps - vehicles, buildings, landmarks etc. and it is impossible to expect everyone to converge on the exact same image.

As was pointed out before, the more specific your question becomes, the more people's minds are restricted from picturing different things and the more similar the mental image is.

Sugarmouse

with me i picture me drawing a street and what i would draw..but i agree it somehow depends onthe kind of streets you see daily and thus what a street is to you...
it is interestng,i had never thought about it before! also,is it a pleasant thng or not?as in...do you thnk something nice, from a street..or soemthing not so nice...ok im waffling

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Mark23

I think a street is quite a neutral thing. If I were to ask you to picture a demonic beast it would be different.

roadkill

The street woulden't be the point it's the immigantion that's in question.

xim

What are words?

Words are symbols. Symbols which identify and classify a specific phenomenon of experience either perceptual or conceptual. Not only classification, but catagorization, a hierarchy of catagories of catagories of catagories ad infinitum, catagorizing each other into a big circular web of invented concepts which we use as a linguistic pencil, feebly trying to trace an ass tight outline around our experiences which are in reality fluid and edgeless. Language is a collection of these symbols, interwoven like a web in their definitions and relationships, creating our map and model of the universe which we use to understand the world and operate in it. Dictionarys make definitions look official with their bound covers and copyright information, the fact is that everyone has their own vocabulary-model of the universe made of these symbols whos relationships are subject to change depending on the individuals experience. Here's an experiment, pick someone at random and break open their skull. Inside you will find their personal Dictionary, defining all the relationships in their known universe represented by words. Therefore words are not only symbols, they are opinions. Language is magick, severe conciousness change. Each word evokes an image from the unconcious, not only visual, but seemingly holisticly connected to the actual fluid reality much more closely than the word-symbol it started with. If I pointed out that you are helpless but to evoke the image of any word I expose you to, would you have a feel for the word or the image of Power?

The human mind can be broken down into two systems. There are given many titles, right brain and left brain, concious mind and subconcious (or unconcious) mind, yin and yang, the occipital and temporal lobes, etc. They are running in simultaneous interreliant unity.
The dominant (left) hemsiphere maintains the symbol systems. This is language, math, musical notation, models of understanding things, archetypes of the tarot, pantheons, etc. It works through these symbol systems, trying to formulate the best possible understanding of the world. Language being each individuals greatest model for understanding their experience to date. The dominant hemisphere also controls what the guys trying to simulate conciousness in the Webmind AI project called 'Active Focus' -- that ONE place at any moment where the conciousness is focused. It could be on a symbolic concept like a thought, something you are seeing with your eyes, a sound are listening to your ears, a sensation from any of your senses, or the imagination of any of these sensations of the senses. This focus is represented by the first tarot card, the Magician: directed focus. This is the concious mind. It is active. Containment of creativity to a logical form. It reduces wholes into component pieces for analysis. An example of this is dividing up the organs to understand the body (even tho spleens don't ever grow on their own, they are part of a greater One), or dividing the brain into two systems to understand it better.

The non-dominant (right) hemisphere is more passive. It is thought of as the subconcious mind. It acts as a supplier of creativity and has deep applications most people never come close to realizing. Creativity could be seen as randomness, the random number generator of the mind, which is practicly static until reduced to logical form by the concious mind. In a way it is like an explosion of creativeness, or at least a provider of necessary creativity. Rather than trying to understand things by breaking them down into smaller components, it sees things as Wholes, or gestalts. This is where intuition comes from. When the conscious mind is distracted; by a hypnotist, driving, when doing an idle task, when hearing music, by exhaustion, while sleeping, and especially when meditating (after practice); the fragmented image-slideshows of the subconcious non-dominant hemisphere can be experienced more purely isolated from the ordinary conscious experience. This is the sensation of being in a trance. It feels like being spaced out. You are feeling it to a degree right now from complex verbal/symbolic/linguistic overload trying to soak in so much information. (read carefully Your eyes are fascined to the text, and you have a slight resistance to looking away, because you intuitively know that it will alert you more to the environment around you, breaking your relaxing reading trance. This mind works, not with symbols like language, but with imagined re-experiencing of the the subjective sensations it has previously encountered, minds eye experiences being refered to as images (whether from any of the three representation systems: visual, auidory, kinesthetic). Cognitively speaking, having an experience, and imagining you are having an experience, are the same, with the exception that the imagining the experience will be of less intensity or amplitude, depending on the depth of the trance that you are in and in applicable cases your skill at meditation. The subconcious is very subject to suggestion and conditioning. The mysterious, passive, receptive, creative, subconcious mind is symbolized by the second card of the Tarot, the High Preistess.

Ordinarily the conscious (linguistic) mind drives the unconscious (image) mind. What this means is that the [active] focus of the concious mind formulates a thought with its symbol systems (ie langage):
In order to experience the idea of that sentance, the linguistics have to be decoded and trasformed into the symbols and their relationships (for more information on this process study transformational grammar and the transformations from surface structure to deep structure). Then the symbols invoke the images of those experiences (we hear the traffic, see the cars, the road, and the sky). By invoke I mean just that, the passive-receptive subconcious mind receives the suggestion of that symbol (the road) from the consciousmind, and it provides an image of experience. Experiencing the images of the idea in sequence along with the images of their relationships, allows us to actually 'feel' what the sentance means. The actual image that is formed in the minds eye will be a creativly thrown together collage of previously experienced examples of the phenomena symbolized by those words. It will have a level of elaboration correlated to the depth of the trance, effort, and your ability to visualize from practice.

I say that the concious mind drives the subconscious mind only 'ordinarily' because at those times where the conscious mind is distracted the subconcious is given a chance to roam free. The hypnotist has a bag of linguistic tricks to destract the concious mind (not the least of which is simply talking for a long time, the others mostly being exploitations of transformational grammar). This puts the hypnotee in a deep trance and which makes them feel spaced out and able to visualize things intensely -- so intensely that they can be lead to hallucinate helpful experiences.

This is why imagary is such a powerful tool in poetry, because the subconcious state brought about by the visualization and experience of the words has a magical feeling to it. This is what happens whenever we talk to anyone, or tell a story, say about a prince who lived in a castle on a big green hill, crashes his sliver spaceship shaped like a horse statue into the ocean, creating a giant splash of foaming water, mysteriously causing the water to start changing to a white color, swirling the way cream mixes into coffee until the entire ocean becomes a giant fluid terrain of milky turbulance as far as the eye can see. Imagery sucks you in.

The images come from our stereotypes of previous experiences slapped together by our 'random number generator'. No other person has a the same of either of those as you. Therefore they will be different.

yeah that is if the're even free enough with their visualizations to pick a number. the people who really suck at visualizing might just say I have no idea.
Yes, there's an infinite amount of information that could be used to describe any square inch of reality. As with a quarter, whatever data we dont have explicitly from the words in the sentance, gets filled in by the your stereotype-template of 'quarter' to create an image that can exemplify whatever data you do have (the age, the condition). Can you imagine a beat up quarter without the quarter? Just pure 'beatup'? I cant. The round silverness comes from the your stereotype of how a quarter looks and then the modifiers are added onto it. But your stereotype is the actual basis of the image. By the way stereotypes arent bad, they are default impressions necessary for cognitive thinking. Destructive predjudice comes from when people are blind to the fact that what they are observing doesn't fit the stereotype, and they maintain the perception that the person of X race in front of them is a stupid criminal, despite obvious evidence that this is an innacurate description. Heres a philospohical question: is there a such thing as an innacurate description, or is it just what you notice and tune into your perception?

If there is so little data, why would they be the same? Just saying 'street' is not precise at all. It is ultimatly vauge, a huge catagory of reality ranging from dirt to brick with an infinite number of possible modifiers. Any definition is incomplete. The Tao which is spoken is not the Eternal Tao. If you said 'hot black asphault street with cracks and tar filling them' that is more precise, and the images you will invoke in peoples minds will be more similar. But the comparitively little data you have (compared to the literally infinite data that exists) is filled in with your own assumptions, stereotypes, and creativity. If you specified a specific street even which we had all seen:

I personally imagined a newyork street, which I have never seen in person, only in pictures and on tv, but it wasn't a particular scene from somewhere, it was mostly creativly manifested from peices and themes I have seen in the media. How many people think of cowboys and rusty windmills in the desert when you think of texas? Most of it is really not like that. But thats all you see in the media, and if youve never been there its all you have to go on. And my street is three dimensional. I can fly around in it

I'm a computer engineer not a neurologist, cognative psychologist, trasformational grammarian, or anything else like that, so gimme a break if I said something wrong

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dd3953

there are a few reasons for this. visualization is the ability to form a mental image ((while waking)) but that image can come in one of ten forms. three of these types of imagery would work towards making my image of the street filled with shops. one is memory imagery, which is images that come from things i have seen or experienced before. & since all of us have seen & experienced different things, that would influence our streets & shops to be different. imagination imagery, which comes with no refernce, comes straight from the mind & does most of it's work in the area of creativity. & since there is no way we would be thinking the same thing, there is no way our streets, cars, or shops could be the same. lastly is daydeams & fantasy, which works with memory & imagination imagery, which doesn't help our situation at all.

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Ch'i

The brain can only think through two methods: Equaling & association. What you project in your mind is variations of the two.

malo

When we visualize we tend to stimulate our brain cells (neurons) to connect in a certain pattern/. Different people have different pattern arragements depending on their experience. There is no way that two people can visualize the same thing ( even if they are given specific paramiters) because they are wired different.