[ SECRET POST #3607 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3607 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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04. [SPOILERS for Doctor Strange]



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05. [SPOILERS for Doctor Strange]



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06. [SPOILERS for Life is Strange]



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07. [SPOILERS for Danganronpa 2]



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08.[SPOILERS for Great British Bake Off, series 1]














Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 00 secrets from Secret Submission Post #515.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

04. [SPOILERS for Doctor Strange]
http://i.imgur.com/5TN8FS0.png

[herpymcderp]

That's quite unusual and interesting, OP. What do you do when you try to recall faces? Or do you also have prosopagnosia?

[(Anonymous)]

Not OP, and not familiar with the territory, but is pattern recognition necessarily connected to the ability to form mental images?

[herpymcderp]

Yes and no. Facial recognition tends to be largely the domain of certain cells in the temporal lobe, and "creating" a picture out of nothing tends to primarily be a function of the occipital lobe. However, there is a fair amount of cross-talk.

I was asking this specifically because it sort points in the direction of a visual recall problem as opposed to a singularly optic problem.

[(Anonymous)]

OP - Stuff gets kind of divided into a yes/no thing of "Does that look familiar?" when I look at it, so if you asked me to describe Sailor Moon visually I'd draw a total blank, but I look at a picture of her and go "That's Sailor Moon!" But it can easily become confused and little things in appearance are enough to throw me off and keep me from recognizing even people I know very well.

Ending scene of Iron Man 3 I had to lean over and ask who Tony Stark was talking to because I had no context for recognizing that it was Bruce Banner.

[herpymcderp]

Fascinating!

Tell me if I'm prying too much, but if I asked you to draw...say... an apple from memory would you be able to do it?

[(Anonymous)]

You're not prying, I don't mind talking about it at all. An apple is the sort of thing I have a vague idea so probably it would look very much like a child's drawing of an apple, a blobby circular shape with a stick poking out the top and maybe an oval-ish circle for a leaf. That's... probably also the same drawing I would give for a peach or a pear. Roundish fruit with a twig, as opposed to roundish with no twig like an orange.

[herpymcderp]

That's fair. In that context you're not really that much different from the average person. ...Provided you could also then pick out the correct colors for apples and oranges.

If I asked you to, say, draw something like the "four" or "five" face of a six sided die, would that prove difficult?

[sarillia]

I can form pictures in my mind but I'm not good at it and it doesn't come naturally to me. I'm not really a visual thinker. It always bugs me in school when teachers assume everyone will be helped more by pictures and skimp on the written explanations (I had a biology professor in particular who did this a lot).

[(Anonymous)]

This has made me realize something kind of interesting, which is that I'm pretty terrible at imagining a real person's face or a description in a book, but on the flip side, I'm actually more of a visual learner.

I think somehow my mind responds differently to things I've already seen represented visually. So like teaching diagrams are great for me. I can also visualize celebrities better than I can visualize most of the people in my life, even the ones I see every day. It's like my brain categorizes celebs as inherently visual quantities or something. Whereas my brain categorizes real people as personalities and interactive experiences, and basically forgets to document what they actually look like. *shrugs*

Brains are weird.

[(Anonymous)]

related to this - why the heck Stephen is able to "clearly imagine" a closet in the Hospital of all things? Not his office, not an operating room but a broom closet..?

[(Anonymous)]

It's the closet that he fucks in

[(Anonymous)]

+1 Good answer.

[(Anonymous)]

While I agree with the other Anon's answer (lol) it may also fuction in a close enough/fuzzy search kind of way, where the magic can only bring you to real locations, so you are presented with the closest option to what you seem to be aiming at, like if you type an address into Google but misspell the name if the street, you may still be presented with the correct location (or not, since Google doesn't always know).

[soldatsasha]

Aww, I bet you could still learn magic! People "visualize" things in all sorts of ways. Mental images are common, but they're by no means the only way people contextualize internal thoughts. There's sound, words, abstract concepts like math, emotions, feelings like touch or taste or smell....

I didn't realize until I was a teenager taking a psych class that most people have an easier time "seeing" things mentally if their eyes are closed. For me I can picture things if my eyes are open, but if I close them then my brain just goes "yep, it sure is black now" and any sort of imaginative thought totally stops.

[(Anonymous)]

I'd never heard of this before, it's quite fascinating. I love the idea that our experiences of consciousness are all slightly different but we lack the tools to describe it to each other.

I mean as far as regrets go "I can never be a wizard" isn't so bad, right?

[(Anonymous)]

I listened to a podcast on this a while ago (I think it was Stuff to Blow Your Mind) and there were a lot of people who described similar experiences. I think a few of them were artists/writers who took a different approach to their creative expression (I say different only because I personally have really vivid mental images) and I'm sure there could be a magic system that is aphantasia-friendly as well. Also, I think this is something that tends to happen when writers constantly borrow from the things they read--sometimes things become cliche.

[(Anonymous)]

ugh, cumberbizzle's face is so gross. i thought a beard might improve it somewhat but nope! guess that level of fug is unconcealable.

[(Anonymous)]

Huh, I'd never heard of aphantasia before. That's really interesting!

I fairly sure I wouldn't qualify as aphantasic, but I've always had a pretty weak ability to visualize things. I never let myself skip the descriptive passages in books, but my ability to form a mental image of what is being described is always really minimal, and the more detail there is the more I struggle. This applies to every kind of description, from the foyer of a house to a character's physical appearance to a battle scene. Translating the words from information into image is really difficult.

It's the same with describing most people. If I know them well I'll be able to give a basic description of them, but I could never tell you what someone I only met in passing actually looked like. And I can rarely visualize what someone is wearing when they're out of my sight. I sometimes imagine witnessing a crime and having to tell the police that I honestly can't describe any of the people involved at all. :/

Plus, my dreams are super hazy - more comprised of ideas than images.

I do often feel frustrated by this, but at the same time I'm positive I don't actually lack imagination. My imagination just has different strong suits, I think.

[tree_and_leaf]

Yeah, I'm a bit like this - though I can enjoy descriptive passages in books if I enjoy the writing style - I love the descriptions in Lord of the Rings, but almost more like music.

I can sort of get a brief fuzzy flash of things I have actually seen, but making up images? Nope. I don't often recall dreams, but if I do, it's only dialogue.

The article in question

[feotakahari]

http://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-2026-a-weird-brain-anomaly-took-my-imagination-away.html Despite the title, it's actually very informative.

I have issues with visual memory--nothing as serious as aphantasia, but things I've seen are blurry at best and vanished at worst. I can't read lips, because I can't remember what it looks like when a lip movement corresponds to a particular sound. But I'm very good at memorizing long strings of numbers, letters, or symbols. I think that's how magic would work for me, incantations turned to patterns, and maybe there's a way magic would work for you, too.

Re: The article in question

[(Anonymous)]

That's the one that me and most other people with it find horribly inaccurate. Visual memory is 80% of memory so people with it have to have really awful memory! Except if that was the case wouldn't completely blind people also be unable to remember anything? Also we're entirely capable about worrying about the future. I worry a whole lot!

[(Anonymous)]

Considering magic is bending the rules of physics, I'm sure bending the rule of having to visually picture something to preform it can be done too.

[(Anonymous)]

When I began studying Tibetan Buddhism, I discovered there was a lot of emphasis on detailed visualizations, which was something I found difficult. (I spent a lot of time gazing at traffic lights because for some reason green was harder for me to "remember" than other colors!) Discussed it with my teacher, who said not to worry - some people are stronger at "envisioning" visually, some people are stronger at "envisioning" sound, others at 'envisioning' touch, and so forth {fill in the sense}. She explained that forming a clear mental "picture" didn't have to rely on sound, it was more about getting the feeling-tone of the object of meditation, through whichever sense door you happen to be strongest at.

So, for what it's worth, this is how I'd interpret the Doctor Strange situation: he's good at visualization (maybe because his profession demands it), but that doesn't mean that people who are stronger in the other senses couldn't also master magic in their own way.

P.S. The cultures of western industrialized countries tend to put vision front and center, but it's really not the "main" sense, it's just the one that most people favor.

[(Anonymous)]

OP - This honestly, as silly as it sounds, makes me feel a lot better. So much fictional magic tends to borrow from Eastern religion but focuses on the 'picture it in your mind's eye' stuff. So knowing that at least in the RL inspiration it's not the only way is really nice.