Imaginings

Notes from about an hour’s quality waking up time. Recumbent, in the dark, eyes mostly shut. The topic of this time being the extent to which it was possible to conjure up subjective – particularly visual – experience of the outside world without the benefit of real-time input from that outside world. With what follows having been mostly written right after the event: contemporaneous, as the policeman might say in court when referring to his notes.

I started with imagining the letters of the alphabet, with the idea being to imagine their appearance rather than their sound.

For some reason, I started with capitals, possibly because that is where one starts at school. After a while, it seemed that I was writing the letters which appeared in my mind, using something like a pencil rather than brush, pen or biro. A clear sense of the successive strokes needed to make up a letter.

I then thought to try small letters. Here, after a while, it also seemed that I was writing the letters in my mind. The sort of letters that one was taught to use in joined up writing, rather than the sort of small letters one gets by typing or printing.

Perhaps with a bit more care, I would be able to sense activity in the pencil holding right hand, in the way that one can sometimes detect activity in the mouth and jaws when silently saying words to oneself, without overtly moving either mouth or jaws.

I then thought to try colours. This was much harder, I thought at the time because while one can write words, one can build words with the strokes of a pencil, one cannot build colours in that way. The imagined strokes have extent in one dimension but they do not have colour in two. From where I associated to a watercolour brush full of coloured paint, and visualising the brush full of, for example, blue paint, moving across the white paper, seemed much more vivid than just trying to imagine blue, tout court.

I then moved to trying to visualise animals or things which were strongly associated with a colour. So a red letter box, a pink rose or a brown cow. This worked fairly well, but there was still a tendency to build the outlines of the animal or thing in question with the imaginary pencil strokes and then let something in the unconscious fill in the appropriate colours. Or not, as the case may be.

While sometimes, a quite complicated visual image popped into mind without there being any overt construction at all.

Trying to imagine cycling along the road, I did not get much further than an impression from the mainly thigh powered, alternate down strokes of left foot then right foot. Weaker, background impressions from the hands on the handlebars.

Much more successful was the business of imagining the cleaning up of the base of a tenon, the very distinctive feel of the small bits of wood being split away from the base of the tenon, illustrated in the snap above, where the cuts down the face of the tenon and across the shoulders of the tenon have not quite gone the full distance, by appropriate taps of the wooden mallet on the bevelled chisel. A very distinctive combination of proprioceptive (motor) sensations, somatosensory (feel) sensations, sights and sounds.

While the business of building imaginary networks of triangles or squares was rather odd. I could visually imagine drawing in the edges of the new triangle or square, but the ones which had done before seemed to fall away as fast as I could draw new ones. On the other hand, I could get glimpses of completed networks without overtly building them at all.

Speech and music were easy. One just silently spoke, sung or hummed. Again, without overtly moving either mouth or jaws.

Conclusions

A definite sense that intentional visual imagination worked better when it had relevant motor activity to build on. The photographic sort of imagination was there, but it was not very susceptible to command. It did its own thing, rather capriciously, although drawing something in the mind, using one’s knowledge about the thing in question, did help. The subconscious could sometimes manage the colouring in bit.

But I worry that my imagination works better in construction rather than recall mode because I believe that that is how it should be. The belief is interfering with the performance.

Time to turn up reference 3 again, the title of which, at least, appears to bear on the matter.

Closing, I wondered how the business of imagining letters would play with a younger person brought up to computers, with less emphasis on the hand written word. Would their connection between the business of writing a letter and seeing the letter be weaker of different to mine?

Afterword

Artists who are interested in painting stuff from the real world generally use models. And sometimes they boil their models down to see how their skeletons are organised, with a knowledge of the inner workings helping along the presentation of the outward appearance. A compromise between working as an engineer by building the image up from first principles and working as a camera by just dumb copying of the pixels. Dumb in the sense that the pixels are faithfully copied, but using no knowledge apart, perhaps, from that of colour and texture in general.

The artist uncle illustrated another sort of compromise. He would make pen and wash sketches when he was out and about, sketches which he would work up into engravings when he got back home, to his workroom. I doubt if he dignified it with the name of studio. While Michelangelo did cartoons for his paintings, cartoons which these days are valuable objects in their own right.

It is often said that some people have a photographic memory, in the sense that they can reproduce on paper or describe an image or can recite a text which they have seen, possibly quite fleetingly, some time before. But claims which appear to be disputed. See references 1 and 2.

Whatever the case may be, people clearly do have visual memory. Most people can recognise pictures of lots of different individuals, lots of different places and lots of different sorts of things, especially flowers, animals, birds and bees. Which is not to say that they are storing raw images but they are clearly storing something. Probably a bit more than the text ‘four footed carnivorous animal with brown and yellow stripes living in the jungle’ for tiger. But while they have those visual memories, they cannot necessarily deploy them with pencil and paper, in the way of an artist with his model in front of him.

References

Reference 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eidetic_memory. The doubts.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wiltshire. One of the few well documented cases of photographic memory.

Reference 3: Homing in on Consciousness in the Nervous System: An Action-Based Synthesis - Morsella and others.