I want to ask you, if you have time, to tell me about how you visualize people you haven't seen in person.
There was this amazing discussion on Radiolab just now between and about two blind people. Both of them were born sighted and lost their sight later in life.
One of them reacted by choosing to consciously expunge any visual imagery from his internal world. When something would bring up a visual memory, he pushed it away, purposefully forgot about it. The second person reacted go going blind by visualizing everything around him very intensely by proceeding from his remaining sense. He goes up on his roof and replaces shingles, for example, because he feels he can picture his surroundings well enough to do it safely. (This disturbs his neighbors, apparently.) He can describe subtle nuances of his wife's face even though he's never seen it.
Near the end, there was a talk about whether it's possible for human beings to relate emotionally to another person without some kind of visual image to attach to the concept of person. Someone on the radio, for example. People will create an image of that person in their head, and then might be very surprised when they see that person for the first time and he/she does not fit their image. This made me think, too, of a talk I had with someone about an assignment for a class where people interacted with various people online and then had to write about what they thought those people looked like. A clear assumption was being made that the students would have formed mental images of the people they interacted with online.
I do not do that. If I only know someone online, I do not create any kind of mental image of them. If I hear their voice on the radio, I sometimes have a guess at their ethnicity by accent or other sound qualities, but I know that I'm sometimes wrong about those guesses. And I'm certainly not able to construct an imagined portrait.
But I think the way visual perception of people works for me is very outside the mainstream because of being prosopagnosic. Faces aren't really that important to me. When I think about the people I know, it's very difficult for me to imagine their faces; other things are more important, like conversations I've had with them, experiences I've shared with them, and more abstractly, my non-visual experiences *of* them.
I think I'm going to ask a few people how they do this in their own heads. Whether they imagine what people look like before they meet them. Whether they can have an emotional connection to a person whose appearance they don't know without forming some kind of image, however vague, of what they look like. I'm going to ask here, even.
Here's the Radiolab piece that inspired this line of thought. I love NPR. I'm going to buy a membership to WBEZ when my financial aid disburses.
http://www.radiolab.org/blogs/radiolab-blog/2012/oct/22/seeing-dark/
