How do I improve my ability to form mental images?
It’s pretty common for people to think that their mental images are full-fledged “pictures in the head”, but there’s a lot of good psychological data that suggests that isn’t the case. Response-time experiments suggest that people tend to encode information explicitly represented in the novel, and then confabulate responses when asked about it. If someone says they have good mental imagery, either they are: 1) very good at (implicitly) asking themselves questions about a scenario (“what color is the woman’s hair?”) and confabulating and representing a response (“it’s blonde!). Artists and movie directors would be very good at this, I’d think: they’d always be internally asking themselves how to best paint the scene or set up the shot. 2) good at confabulating responses when asked questions about a scenario, but then tend not to ask themselves those questions. If we don’t ask ourselves something about a scene and receive the answer “I don’t know”, then we don’t notice that anything is m
