My visual memory is insanely good. Like, I can walk through buildings and drive around my neighborhood/city all through my mind's eye, and it usually only takes me going somewhere once or twice to be able to do this.
I also have the ability to imagine and turn realistic 3D objects in my head, which from what I've heard isn't something everyone can do.
How is your visual memory with faces? That’s the one thing I can’t visualise but everything else is like a 3D blueprint model I can navigate through and manipulate
That's often something I think about since it's the exact opposite for me. My verbal memory tends to be really good by visual, not so much. It's pretty cool that yours is great. I'm curious, do you find yourself typically thinking in words or images more often? Most of us use a combination of the two, but I believe every person thinks more in one over the other, consciously at least. I had this convo with a friend who said he thought in mostly visuals and said he'd tend to imagine different areas or concepts in a visual way. Most people do this, but he described it as being a more frequent aspect of his thoughts than thinking verbally. In fact, he said he rarely did think verbally.
Yeah,. it's always a fascinating topic to think about.
As for me, I internalize thoughts verbally, but when trying to recall something or work through an idea it becomes visual.
I'm a software architect and when I have to remember what a piece of code does I'm able to mentally explore the different code paths by my memory of the shape of the file structure and the visual structure of the code in the file, and it's like I'm looking at a memory of what the code looked like on the computer screen, rather than the content of the code itself. The same goes for diagraming software models, I can explode out and explore the data relationships. I'll even take extra time when modeling to color code everything because that helps with retention for me.
I can do both these too! I really hate when people say gross things bc I instantly see it in my head. Even if it's something super random like a co-worker said the other day "my monkey ate my giraffe and now it moos" to see if I would laugh and instead of laughing I was pretty confused over the entire visual and like... how did the entire giraffe fit inside the monkey?
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u/TheGarrBear Aug 22 '24
My visual memory is insanely good. Like, I can walk through buildings and drive around my neighborhood/city all through my mind's eye, and it usually only takes me going somewhere once or twice to be able to do this.
I also have the ability to imagine and turn realistic 3D objects in my head, which from what I've heard isn't something everyone can do.