visual experience

[ursula]

tejolote also asked me to "Talk about visual experience, how that works for you."

I remember things, both real and imagined, in still images with a definite point of view. I can fail to recognize a building or a person because my mental snapshot was taken from a different angle. If I'm thinking slowly, or trying to understand a foreign language, I echo inner monologue and outer dialogue as text. This is visual memory, not visual experience, but anyone who has spoken to me in person has no doubt observed that I'm terrible at separating the two. It's very difficult for me to remain aware of the world around me for any continuous length of time: if I try too hard, I'll start analyzing my own effort, faces or books will float before me, and I'll be lost again. It's possible that those intensely remembered images are simply the moments that I looked where my eyes were pointing . . .