Hm. But if people really see things in their mind like that, how come so many apparently struggle to draw a bicycle, even though they've both seen and used one? If I ask one of those people to picture a bicycle in their mind, what exactly do they see? Do they see their own distorted version of a bike?
When I "picture" something in my mind, I can't really see anything, it's more feelings and words and abstract ideas. But I have no problems drawing an imaginary bike.
> Do they see their own distorted version of a bike?
Yes. For most people it's more like a "schema" or a lossy compression. It can be placed in space, left or right or above or below other image-fragments, there can be colouring, shading, motion, sound. But it's not a faithful bike-image, although it's hard to notice that unless you try to draw it.
There are also other reasons why mental visualization doesn't necessarily mean one can draw it faithfully. For me, mental imagery has a kind of unstable three-dimensional quality, where I see the image from multiple overlapping, shifting perspectives, kinda like a Cubist painting. Different parts of the image have more or less detail over time; I can't hold fine detail about the whole thing simultaneously. If I wanted to draw it, I'd have to pin it to one perspective for long enough, and I can't make my mind do that.
This shouldn't be so surprising -- perspective and realistic representational art took a long time to develop in human history. It's a skill that has to be learned, and I haven't learned it.
Some people really can imagine a photorealistic picture of the bike though. They're usually either savants or trained artists.
Well I can say what happens with me, although as should be clear from this whole thread, other's experiences might be very different!
Visualising an image (of a memory, or an ideal) is a bit like tricking yourself into seeing something. There is no actual bike in your brain, just memories of what parts of a bike look like.
The trick is your brain putting those parts together and presenting that composite as 'a bike'. So i can understand how - some people - can 'see' what they think a bike looks like but then draw a mechanical mess.
Of course there are people with perfect recall, and others who design bikes for a living and so on. I'm really just describing how it could happen for some group of people.
That makes sense. So perhaps you could simplistically think of it like this then: the brain remembers things somehow, and when recalling, it runs that internal representation of that memory through some kind of a machinery that visually presents it to you? Only in some people that machinery actually doesn't produce visuals, but something else? (And I would seem to be one of those people).
"Drawing from imagination" should not be taken literally. It's a blueprint, a thumbnail. By the time you're done, what you have on paper is significantly different, if not totally different from what you were imagining.
When I "picture" something in my mind, I can't really see anything, it's more feelings and words and abstract ideas. But I have no problems drawing an imaginary bike.
https://road.cc/content/blog/90885-science-cycology-can-you-...