this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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I have a visual imagination but it usually works on a higher level of abstraction than simply imagining a picture of something. Let's say that you see a mouse run by. You feel that you have seen a mouse - it was small and gray. My imagination seems to work on that level - it goes straight to the feeling of seeing something rather than generating pictures and then processing them to create that feeling.
This might not seem visual but I can rotate 3D objects in my mind to solve geometry problems, so I think that it is.
(A related question: can other people imagine smells and tastes? I cannot.)
When I read "you see a mouse run by" I saw it like a movie. The background was rather generic, a wooden floor, chair leg in the foreground, warm lighting, but that's it. But I clearly saw the little gray mouse, pausing for a second, whiskers twitching about before continuing on.
I am utterly broken as to rotating objects in my head. Took me until I was into my 40s to figure out that my brain simply doesn't work.
Standardized tests in 70s-80s elementary, rocked out on every subject until spatial reasoning. Didn't give up because I found it hard, really tried my little ass off, couldn't do it, mostly guessed.
Say I get an antique shotgun and tear it down. I'm mostly mystified as to reassembly, very little online to explain old stuff like that. Have to have my young friend across the street come over and figure it out. He's a born mechanic, hates the work. ๐คท๐ปโโ๏ธ
Interesting... I can't do what you describe with regard to the mouse. If I focus on actually picturing the mouse, the most I can do seems like a child's crude sketch, and only the parts of the scene that I am particularly focused on are pictured at all. The rest is abstract. And yet I can entertain myself by daydreaming in visual impressions. For example, just now I thought about a cool car chase, and I was thinking visually rather than verbally, but then I noticed that I hadn't bothered to imagine what color the cars were - I can assign them colors now, but before there was just no impression of seeing any color.
Edit: And now that I think about it some more, the same is actually true with sounds. I can, for example, imagine the feeling of hearing a woman's voice, but I can't hear the voice. And the same goes for sounds that aren't speech. I can imagine the feeling of hearing one piece of metal hitting another, but if I try to hear it the best I can do is the sound of myself saying "Clang!"
Spatial skills seem to be separate from visualization. Elsewhere in the thread a commenter said they can't visualize, but do very well with rotating objects in the mind and fitting shapes together.
As to your question, people indeed can imagine smells, tastes, and sounds. Smells are supposedly one of the strongest factors in evoking memories โ although my own olfaction was always questionable and got worse with age, but some strong smells still elicit recall from ages ago, e.g. the mechanical smell of subway around here when I haven't been in it for fifteen years.
Another commenter said they can imagine the taste of a dish from its ingredients, which I can do only approximately.
However, I'm pretty good with imagining sound, particularly music โ while knowing jackshit about music theory. This actually brings some annoyance, as I'm trying lately to finally do some music production, and it never sounds quite like I want it to.