
What We See When We Read - dnetesn
http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/08/14/what-we-see-when-we-read/
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mcjiggerlog
Am I the only one that doesn't even attempt to to put a face to characters?
When I read a book, it is a visually stimulating experience but it's all very
ethereal - I conjure up vague landscapes, actions, objects, poses, expressions
etc, but never an entire portrait of a character.

To be honest I think I read entire books without even considering what colour
a person's hair is, how tall they are, what shape their nose is.

~~~
wmil
Many people don't, check out Generalizing From One Example

[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/)

key passage:

"The debate was resolved by Francis Galton, a fascinating man who among other
achievements invented eugenics, the "wisdom of crowds", and standard
deviation. Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some
people did have mental imagery and others didn't. The ones who did had simply
assumed everyone did, and the ones who didn't had simply assumed everyone
didn't, to the point of coming up with absurd justifications for why they were
lying or misunderstanding the question. There was a wide spectrum of imaging
ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to
three percent of people completely unable to form mental images."

I don't have strong mental imagery, and it's actually a problem for me when
reading some fiction... Some authors love putting in long, detailed,
descriptions of characters.

That's incredibly boring to me, and I just skip those pages.

I've found that people with very strong visual imagery love anagrams, because
they can actually visualize and rotate the letters. And to me, that's
basically a super power.

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bjterry
It is difficult to describe faces because we don't have a familiar vocabulary
for them. It's not necessary for us day to day to describe exactly what faces
look like. Sure, we have chiseled jaws and high cheekbones, but there isn't a
word for the many different styles of noses and shapes of lips. And we don't
have a point of reference for the words that would be associated with the
faces of our friends.

I suspect that if verbal descriptions of faces were a constant part of
society, that our ability to imagine faces based on authors' descriptions
(using that shared vocabulary) would be much better. I also wonder what
experience police sketch artists, like the one who drew Anna Karenina, have
when reading books, as they probably think about this sort of thing much more
frequently.

As a sidenote, it may seem like I'm appealing to the now somewhat discredited
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but I'm only saying that our lack of vocabulary
constrains what we express, not that it constrains our cognition.

Personally, when I read I do visualize things, but I don't have strong
visualizations for people's faces, much like mcjiggerlog elsewhere commented.

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the_af
I never focus on a detailed physical description of book characters _unless_ a
body part is brought to my attention by the author. In fact, it annoys me when
some authors insist on irrelevant details such as clothing (I used to joke
with friends about some American writers, especially for courtroom dramas,
making extremely detailed inventories of the main character's suits. We called
it the "navy blue syndrome"; for some reason, the suit was always navy blue,
and it was important for the author to call our attention to this).

I do have a very general idea of what main characters looks like, in
particular about whether they are young, middle-aged or old, and about their
hair color. When I see a movie adaptation, this always clashes with my
preconceived idea. "No, no, the character was older and had black hair!"

~~~
3pt14159
I think visually, and so for me an initial description of how a character
looks is really helpful, because otherwise my brain is forced to borrow from a
different story, which leads to a disconnect when details are brought forward
that aren't congruent with what I've imagined.

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the_cat_kittles
maybe what we are thinking of when we "picture" a character is the resulting
feeling. so we know when someone looks like anna because when we look at that
person, it feels the same- but its much harder to go the other way, like a
hashing function. we know when the things match, but its hard to know how to
make things that match.

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collypops
There's a curse that comes with watching a movie adaptation of a book before
reading it, in that you can't not picture the faces of the actors that portray
the characters.

I'd attempted to read The Fellowship of the Ring a few times as a kid, but
never got into it. I watched the movie before I started it in earnest, and I
feel I was kind of cheated by all of the visuals I wasn't able to conjure up
myself. For that reason, some of my favourite parts of the book were those
that were cut from the movie, such as Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-downs.

Thankfully, I went on to read The Two Towers and The Return of the King well
before the movies were released, and enjoyed them much more because I got to
inject a lot more of my imagination into them.

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contingencies
There are probably neuroscientists researching the links between human visual
perception and memory. I would like to know whether someone has done a
comparative study of literary perception and visual perception with regards to
memory. I recall reading that because vision takes more sensory input and our
spatial reasoning is so well developed, our brains are able to reason and
recall more effectively in this realm... but I assume blind people and others
may have alternate configurations. Would the 'photographic memory' applied to
literature result in words? Or visual recollections? Feelings?

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Handwash
Whenever I try to imagine how a character looks like, I will eventually forget
about it and make a new one at the next reading. So, I try to map the
character to the person I know, which become a problem when the character
grows older.

From a writer's point of view, maybe it is fun to put a lot of details about
the world they are trying to describe in a very detailed way.

