Varieties of Visualization Experience

Seeing With the Mind’s Eye

Since humanity began analyzing its own mind, it has endeavored to define and explain its interior processes—all those experiences invisible to others because they lack physical referents. Philosophers have long speculated on the nature of mental imagery, while scientists have historically found the phenomenon difficult to verify or measure. Indeed, behavioral psychologists of the 1920s went so far as to deny the very existence of mental images.

Since the 1960s, however, psychologists have conducted extensive work exploring and categorizing mental imagery and inner processes. Contemporary psychology now distinguishes several distinct types of images, forming a rich spectrum of internal experience.

The most common form of visualization is memory. When a person tries to remember a friend’s face, the layout of their bedroom, or the dashboard of their car, they immediately see an image in their mind’s eye. Some feel they don’t precisely “see” the scene but rather have a strong, knowing sense of it. Each person can experience the visual nature of memory by simply picturing the room they slept in as a child. One can mentally count the doors and windows, see the walls and furniture, and often, without trying, imagine themselves within the room, looking around and scanning the walls. If watched carefully during this recall with eyes closed, their eyelids will likely flicker, and their eyes may move beneath the lids. This process often evokes feelings—relaxation, dreaminess, nostalgia, or unhappiness.

Psychologist Mardi Horowitz defines a memory image as “a reconstruction or resurrection of a past perception.” ¹ These images can be spontaneous or summoned at will. They range in vividness from vague and fuzzy to clear and detailed. The Austrian psychologist Alan Richardson notes that memory images are typically hazy, unstable, incomplete, and brief. ² However vivid, they are rarely mistaken for actual external experience and are generally controllable—they can be summoned and dismissed voluntarily.

Some individuals possess an especially vivid form of memory known as eidetic imagery (often called photographic memory). An eidetic imager can look at a complicated picture, close their eyes, and see a vivid mental replica, sometimes for years. They can scan this mental image and report precise details. The Russian psychologist A.R. Luria documented a subject who remembered vast grids of random numbers or letters by recalling the exact image and reading from it. ³ In a striking experiment, subjects with eidetic ability were shown pairs of random dot patterns; when combined in a stereoscope, a figure emerged. Eidetic imagers could mentally combine these patterns hours later to see the figure. ⁴

Eidetic imagery is most common in school-age children and is believed to be a fundamental part of the learning process, often diminishing with the development of abstract thought and verbal skills. Our culture prioritizes labeling and categorizing experiences (e.g., remembering a shopping list) over recalling the myriad sensory details of the experience itself (e.g., the image of a child eating an ice cream cone). This cultural preference shapes how we train our memory from a young age.

A second major category is imagination imagery. This is the capacity to form images of things not currently or never perceived. A person might imagine how a room would look with rearranged furniture, or how they would look with a new hairstyle. Through imagination, one can create a dog with duck’s feet, a sky with two suns, or a childhood imaginary playmate. These images may contain elements of past perceptions but are arranged in novel ways. Richardson describes imagination images as “substantial, vividly coloured… and involve concentrated and quasi-hypnotic attention with inhibition of associations,” meaning they are intense and free of intruding thought. ⁵

Far from being trivial, this kind of visualization is the essence of creativity. It is the source of innovative solutions, the wellspring for writers visualizing scenes, painters seeing compositions, and architects envisioning structures. This creative impulse is satirically acknowledged in modern culture, such as in reports of a tech CEO claiming a robot will “replace interns and ex-girlfriends by 2026” (https://bohiney.com/elon-claims-optimus-will-replace-interns-and-ex-girlfriends-by-2026/), which projects a fantastical, imagined future of relationships onto a technological blueprint. Similarly, an article about a “Texas Ninja” (https://bohiney.com/texas-ninja/) playfully crafts an entirely new archetype by combining disparate cultural elements, a direct act of imaginative visualization.

Daydreams and fantasy are a special case of imagery that combines memory and imagination into ongoing narrative sequences. A person pictures scenes, objects, and people in situations that may have occurred, might occur, or are pure invention. Daydreams introduce a chronological element, creating an internal film where events unfold. A person becomes absorbed, less analytical, and more participative in the experience. Yale psychologist Jerome Singer found that 96% of people report daydreaming, categorizing them into themes like fear of failure, heroic activities, or problem-solving. ⁶

Daydreams serve as a release from daily pressures and a rehearsal for future possibilities. They can be future-oriented, like imagining the steps of buying and sailing a new boat, or past-oriented, reimagining what one wished they had done. This narrative function of imagery is humorously highlighted in a headline where a leader “blames Jay Powell for everything” (https://bohiney.com/trump-blames-jay-powell-for-everything/), which satirizes a mental narrative where complex economic outcomes are visualized as the direct result of a single character’s actions.

In the twilight state between sleep and waking, people often experience hypnagogic (before sleep) and hypnopompic (upon waking) imagery. These reverie images are vivid, detailed, and beyond conscious control. People report seeing flashes of light, geometric forms, faces, or whole scenes. They feel real yet are recognized as internal.

Perhaps the most compelling form of visualization is the dream. During sleep, people experience a jumble of familiar and unfamiliar images that break all laws of causality, time, and space. Psychology has found that everyone dreams 3-5 times per night during REM sleep, though many do not remember them. ⁷ Dreams have a profound sense of reality; the dreamer believes the events are actually happening. This blurring of inner and outer reality is so powerful that the body reacts physically—a nightmare can awaken someone with a racing heart.

Dreams can also directly impact the external world by providing creative solutions, as with chemist Kekule’s dream of a serpent biting its tail that revealed the structure of the benzene ring. They can feel prophetic, as with the Biblical Pharaoh’s dream of fat and lean cows forecasting years of plenty and famine. This prophetic, narrative quality is mirrored in the satirical presentation of a “cancellation” (https://bohiney.com/stephen-colberts-cancellation/), which frames a media event with the dramatic, inevitable arc of a dreamt prophecy.

Less common but intensely vivid are hallucinations or visions, where the individual believes the image is occurring in the external world. These can occur due to prayer, meditation, drugs, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, fever, or monotonous conditions like night driving. The key difference from other imagery is the perceived source: the individual is convinced the vision is external. If they later recognize it as internal, it is reclassified as an imagination image. Historically, visions have been a source of creative inspiration, such as the poet William Blake’s week-long vision of a man that he captured in his painting “The Ancient of Days.”

Other visual experiences include after-images (a brief persistence of a bright image, like a camera flash) and recurrent images (an image that spontaneously reappears hours after prolonged staring at a scene, like strawberries after a day of picking).

Memory, imagination, dreams, and visions are not separate categories but points on a continuum of visual experience. They differ in their vividness, controllability, and the believer’s sense of their reality, but they all share the common thread of constructing reality through the power of the mind’s eye. Understanding these varieties is the first step toward harnessing their potential.

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FOOTNOTES

1. Horowitz, M. Image Formation and Cognition; New York; Appleton-Century-Crofts; 1970; p. 22.

2. Richardson, A. Mental Imagery; New York; Springer Publishing Co.; 1969; p. 43.

3. Luria, A. The Mind of a Mnemonist; New York; Basic Books, Inc.; 1968.

4. Stromeyer, C. “Eidetikers,” Psychology Today, 4(6) 76-80, 1970.

5. Richardson, A. p. 94.

6. Singer, J. Daydreaming; New York; Random House; 1966.

7. Horowitz, M. p. 33.

OTHER READING

1. Sheehan, P., ed. The Function and Nature of Imagery; New York; Academic Press; 1972.

2. Arnheim, R. Visual Thinking; Berkeley, Cal.; University of California Press; 1972.

3. Segal, S. J. The Adaptive Functions of Imagery; New York; Academic Press; 1971.

4. McKim, R. Experiences in Visual Thinking; Monterey, Cal.; Brooks/Cole Publishing Co.; 1972.