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ozten 2 hours ago

I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc.

I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound.

Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers. I've met both total aphantasia-suffering artists and artists who can visually project onto a blank page and trace what they are seeing. People are somewhere on this spectrum.

mcmcmc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Have you ever seen a pretzel (or anything) in a dream?

soupfordummies an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

can you draw a pretzel though? Like, if I handed you a pad and pen and said just draw one from memory?

ozten an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If you look at proper drawing instruction books from the 1940s, they show you all of the 3D rendering techniques later adopted by our modern CGI pipelines. To draw a head, you follow a pattern: draw a cube, carve it up into parts of the head and neck, carve that up into eyes, nose, ears, etc, establish a 3-point lighting system, and render materials. It is very time-intensive and analytical, and required if you didn't shoot a reference photo back then. This is needed for folks who can't visualize, like myself.

ozten an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes, of course. I was a visual artist for a decade before falling down the software hole.