See this article, which includes a quick test for aphantasia, or lack of ability to form mental images.

It's interesting that this is finally being studied. I've always felt my visual imagery was poorer than average (I score 16/40 on the test above, which is pretty subjective.) I do a little better with faces, but I'm still below average there, which can occasionally cause some embarrassment. It's probably unrelated, but I don't have visual fusion or stereo vision, either. In fact, I always see double, which makes for amusing moments at the optometrist when he asks if the image is clear and I ask: "which one?"

In chess there there are many people who think visualization matters and there are even commercial software programs to "train" it. On L19, there are occasional posts about visualization as part of go training. So far I haven't seen any hard evidence that such training works.

My go visualization exists, and I don't think it's terrible, but it's definitely unsteady and unreliable. Sometimes the stones will flip colors in my mind and this varies from day to day or moment to moment.

This may or may not be relevant for go players. After all, de Groot studied chess players and found that many of them have almost no vivid imagery of the board (though they may imagine other, more abstract things) so I assume there must be other ways to cope.

31/40


It seemed as much a test of confidence as visualization.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

Mr. wineandgolover, given that you have a double rainbow in your profile pic, how did you rate yourself on visualizing rainbows?

I tried the test and scored 21/40, which, as I suspected places me in the bottom half. The results said that I was in a 25% "band" which is ambiguous. Does it mean the 25th percentile?

I have improved my (conscious) visualization through exercises and self-hypnosis. Once I read out a correspondence game on the 3x5 board from move 5 by lying in bed and visualizing the board and stones on the ceiling. Recently I "saw" a moderately deep go sequence, but I did not form a clear image at all. OTOH, I could easily rattle it off on the board.

Even without conscious visualization, I have a good "feel" for spatial relationships. As I have mentioned before, I once took a test in which I used white and red colored blocks to recreate certain patterns. The last one was the most difficult one. The tester told me that the average time people took to solve it was two minutes. I solved it in 12 seconds.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Our visual cortex is layered: our eyes react to photons, to individual points of light, sort of like pixels. This is translated into a wavefront of neuronal activation that travels, layer by layer, into our brain. As the wavefront gets deeper into the brain it starts encoding higher level visual objects: from pixels to regions of color, discontinuities, curves. Further in it encodes shapes and objects, and we use these much more abstract, higher level objects in our prefrontal cortex to reason about the world we experience.

When I visualize something, it very much feels like I'm coming at it backwards. I can set a scene of friends and familiar objects, and I can imagine them very abstractly but specifically. I can move them around the room, closer and farther away, put hats on them. But largely it's the abstract objects: Caroline is sitting on the couch, Steve is looking out the window. It's not images, it's not words, it's that weird abstract full level view of a window where I'm not noticing the pane and the glass and the latch, my brain just filled in an abstract "window" placeholder.

This seems to be enough to trigger the intermediate representations of images, especially if I focus in on something. It's hard to have the curves and shapes and regions of color for the whole scene, but my attention can move around: zoom in on Steve's glasses, react to the color of the couch. It's specific, I know that color, I imagine an object of a similiar shade on it and tell they're different, but it's not the same as actually seeing the color. Because I can't quite seem to get all the way to the original pixels. I've got the processed "region of textured green" neurons activated, but I can't seem to get at the raw "dot of this color green just to the left of the center of your vision" to actually see the couch. It's all the substance of an image, but it lacks the crucial realness of actually seeing something.

For go, the issue doesn't seem to be the quality of my visualization, it's just memory. I can't keep that many imaginary stones on the board. By the same token I can hold three friends in place in my imagination, but if I keep adding additional friends I lose track of the order or who's already there.

Sadly, I lacked confidence in my answer, and only did the second highest category, as I did for all except the posture/pose question.

I thought I saw the Bozulich article posted here, but maybe it was on reddit? Anyway, I find it very interesting, and will try to work on my visualization skills.

_________________
- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

This link - http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mkozhevnlab/?tag=visualization-abilities - seems relevant here. It suggests that object visualization (colors, textures, details) and spatial visualization (location, movement, relations) are processed by different parts of the brain.

If correct, it the test provided may not be a good predictor of Go visualization. (I scored 28/40)

The study of mental imagery is fraught with deep methodological questions: viewtopic.php?p=49464#p49464.

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Occupy Babel!

True, the questions probably have the psychometric design level of a Cosmopolitan quiz. I scored myself low on the characteristic pose question because I had no idea what they were talking about. Maybe if you are a dancer you pay attention to that sort of thing.

There are times of day, such as right before I fall a asleep, when my mental images are much, much sharper. But they are also less controllable.

Maybe this e-Journal article? I saw that, too. What is interesting is that he says that this is part of pro training. In the West, we hear precious little about what goes on there, so anything is appreciated.

For example, recently I saw this old post on Clossius's Facebook page. Nice tsumego book, I wonder who makes them?