I was watching a video where a guy was interviewing a girl who can’t visualize what she’s reading but she sees the words if that makes sense. I’ve always been one that forms an entire world in my head when reading something. I’m not able to see it in perfect 4k but it’s more like a mental picture that I’m familiar with. This topic is very interesting to me so I’m curious to see what you guys see when you read.
Edit: To add more to what I’m trying to say, it feels as if there’s this empty movie theater in my mind and whenever I read something, it plays on the screen. My mind automatically fills in the blanks for things that aren’t explicitly said. For example, if I’m reading about a son of a king on the run, my mind immediately fills in the hair color, eye color, clothes, etc. If the book then goes on to say he has a different hair or eye color, it immediately changes.
Edit 2: I’m really enjoying going through all of the comments and seeing what you visualize when you read. Thanks for indulging my annoyingly curious brain lol.
by SlyEmoji
29 Comments
For me… I can sort of visualise it. But not very well. It’s like I can see an image of something, but it’s really dark, and I can’t see it very well. But I get a vague “this is what’s going on” type of vibe. So I can sort of understand the scenes.
I can sort of understand what that girl means, too. Not in the same way, but something similar. Like my brain sees a sentence “a girl walked across a bridge” and then my brain will think… “Okay so there’s a girl… And a bridge… And the girl walks across it…” But it doesn’t really “visualise” it. Such things happen more with non-fiction stuff.
Yes, I clearly visualize the activities I’m reading about. It could be because I’m one of those people with a continual internal monologue, so my mind is always spinning with things going on in it.
I would describe it like a dream. I don’t perfectly visualize it like a movie but I see the characters, the locations, and certain scenes seem to stick out more than others.
Most people with partial to full r/aphantasia have little to no visualization when reading, listening, recalling, etc.
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Nope, I have aphantasia. For that reason really beautiful/clever writing is such a priority for me since invoking imagery doesn’t do much for my brain.
Books have always played out like movies in my head.
I don’t have aphantasia but I don’t visualize things in my head as I read. I just didn’t develop the habit when I was young and it’s too much work now. I read like 100 books a year.
I love books.
I love films.
I don’t like graphic novels.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate the artwork, it’s because I find it distracting to read AND view the action at the same time. For me it’s one or the other, because with a book I visualize everything in my head.
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I’m the same as you. I’ve always been a HUGE reader, and reading books has been a great way for me to escape into a different world when my real life hasn’t been the best. It creates an entirely new world where I can be a different person, in a different place, doing different things. Once I’m in that stage where it’s difficult to pull me away from the book I’m reading, I visualize it as vividly as a movie. Just as if the screen was in my head.
Oooh yeah I also play out books as movies in my head, and the voice acting is my favorite part! Though I am bad at coming up with the appearances of original characters, so I tend to just “borrow” other characters and voices I like from visual/voiced media to stand in as the actors XD
Anyone interested in this topic should check out the book “What We See When We Read” by Peter Mendelsund. It’s awesome and beautifully designed!
I can and do visualize what I’m reading, but most of the time it’s more of… An impression than a full blown visualized scene.
Depending on how vivid the author weaves a story, I can picture things pretty well. I read The Paris Wife and had dreams I was wandering the streets for days.
I cannot. Especially when the writer describes a fancy setting like i dont even know what half the words mean.
I’m just gaslighting myself into thinking that i have a faint image in my head but i dont.
Picture a green apple. Can you? There are people walking around in this world that can’t.
There are also people who don’t have an inner monologue. I don’t understand how these people read, because my inner monologue is the same as when I read.
Also, I’ve gone down a lot of rabbit holes trying to figure out what it’s like for a deaf person to read.
Not really. At least, not how most of the other commenters do. I can like, I don’t know, hear the story. Like an audiobook, but I never really got into audiobooks, you know? And I can imagine scenes. But more like snapshots or small scenes. Not like a whole movie playing in my head.
Like, for example, I remember reading the scene where Fred and George were on their brooms leaving Hogwarts for the last time and said, “Give her hell from us, Peeves!” And the poltergeist saluted or whatever. I paused what I was reading, laughing hysterically, and I imagined the salute and I could hear them shouting while I was reading. But I didn’t visualize the whole scene.
I like to call it the “readers high” when I read a really good book at some point I forget there are words and a story unfolds in my head. I love that feeling.
tl;dr Yes, but it took me a while.
I’m teaching myself how to do that. I learned how to read so young that I have no memory of learning, like sitting on my mom’s or dad’s lap and going over words with them, that kind of thing. i’m in my early 40s and for most of my life I would rush through books as quickly as possible. I could recall facts really good. I was on the literature ace team all four years of high school. In Virginia in the 90s Ace (a.k.a. SCAEL) was a scholastic competition. I don’t know if it still exists or if it’s done in other states. I’m also not 100% sure I wrote that acronym correctly. Since I read as fast as possible I never gave myself time to slow down and savor books. And honestly I didn’t know anybody did that. I have never had many friends who like to read and even the couple who do, we have different book tastes and don’t discuss books. it’s being here on Reddit and reading comments that’s made me realize that books are meant to bring a world to life and that I am supposed to become part of that world.
Kinda. I have a hard time picturing long descriptions. Characters have some vague features. Images are disconnected and a bit cartoonish. It’s almost like I have stock videos in my head that I reuse for environments or locations.
I can sort of see what I’m reading in my head, but its almost always what I’ve seen in a movie. Like a house I’ve seen will be the setting. I can’t really imagine ‘new’ places.
I “cast” the characters in books. I need a specific face to visualize, so once I have a general understanding of what a character looks like, I’ll pick someone to “play” them in the movie I’m watching in my mind. Often this results in funny combos, since sometimes I use actors/famous people, but sometimes I just use people I know from life. Same thing with settings. So I’ll have Rami Malek playing alongside my friend’s dad acting out a scene in my old apartment.
I have never been able to visualise what I am reading. It confused me so much as a school-aged child when we were told to draw a character or a scene from a book, I was always completely baffled by how we were meant to know what that looked without an illustration in the book itself.
Now, thanks to the internet, I know it’s relatively common, and what people can see in their head actually varies wildly. Like most things, it’s a spectrum.
I don’t just visualize what I read. I hear, see, and feel as if I’m actually there. I stand in the middle of that world and look around, the sky, the ground, everywhere. I notice it as I look at it, just like in real life. The details aren’t HD, unless they need to be. And I have an internal monologue all the time, which somehow works with, but doesn’t replace, the narrator I automatically hear in my head part of the time too. Sometimes I visually see the world as 1st person, and sometimes I’m outside my body watching myself interact with the book’s world. I experience the book from every angle. I like enough important details, but am bored if the author uses too many details. I basically experience the worlds in books as a co-creator. My imagination ponders and fills in the gaps.
No, I can’t picture the book in my head when I’m reading. When I read, it’s like listening to someone telling me a story.
I just recently learned that I am the only one in my family who has this “ability”, if you can call it that it’s not as if I practice, it’s just something that happens. I’m also the only one in my family with a running inner monologue. My sister brought it up to me at a family function as her and I are the only major readers in the family. She saw it in a tiktok video and asked if I see books when I read. And I told her yes, but that it extends to more than just books. If someone is telling me something, like a story about something that happened during their day, then it happens too. Or if someone asks me to get them something from the fridge, for example, then throughout the course of them asking me, I’ll have a fully realized “scene” of me having done that task by the time they’re done asking me. She looked absolutely dumbfounded. So we started asking our other sister and parents the same questions. Then my wife and brother in law. None of them experienced what I do. And I had no idea that this wasn’t something other people do, I thought probably everyone did this. That’s when I asked everyone about their inner monologue. And they thought I was talking about reading in your head or thinking or something. I told them no, like I have an inner voice in my head that basically narrates the world around me. It’s not my voice because it has a highland Scottish accent, the same voice non-dialogue text has when I read. So my family basically thinks I’m a freak and going crazy. Lol.
Also imagine the smells, sounds, how the weather feels etc. More than just how it looks.
For me reading a book is like daydreaming a movie. People, scenery, action, all of it. I get very immersed and won’t hear people talking to me even. It’s really strange to me that I’m so good at it because my sister has aphantasia so can’t picture things in her mind. Didn’t realize how much of a handicap it was for her until some of her kids pictures were destroyed and she was devastated because she can’t see them as babies in her head so for her that’s just gone forever. I don’t know why one of us can imagine visually and one can’t but I wish I could share it with her.