Can you think in 3D?

Society tends to visualize objects and ideas with their logical mind. Thinking like this would not really accomplish a 3 dimensional thought. The ones that use their visual─artistic─mode can usually think it out. They are the ones that always become the very good artists and make us look bad with our stick figures.

2-d bicamerally, thus, 4-d :D

Interesting - I can’t speak for ‘society’, but I’ve asked a lot of folk this question. Most say ‘I haven’t really thought about it’, and some can conceive it but not visualise it; some can visualise it but not draw it and a few can paint it but not describe any part of the process that is enabling them to do so. Some are good with metaphors or allegory - they tend to be ‘tell’ rather than ‘show’ people (the clues as to which is which are usually in the way they speak). A few ‘show’ senior managers can both visualise and draw it “de novo” as a 3D graphic on the fly while continuing to talk about it.

Someone suggested to me that we have two imaginations, one per hemisphere but genetically variable - and that most people with low spatial ability appear to overlay one image on to the other as a 2-D picture or just a general impression that is quickly converted to a stream of words. He thought that high spatial ability people should be able to picture the image with greater clarity and to rotate the image at will rather than see it as a photo. Across a large population of people though, there is considerable diversity. Maybe the neuroscience folk will explain it all later.

Some people are hopeless with maps and directions, while others can describe the route you should take by ‘flying a memory-cam’ along the route you should take and mentally watching the internal video for the landmarks that might be most memorable to you. They’re rare, but the ones I’ve talked to about this seem to be able to look left and right, back and forth as though part of their mind had access to Streetview - and this was before Streeview was available. I’ve continued to ask how many others can do this, and was slightly curious as to whether the video age was making it easier for people to achieve. You’d need to have seen how primitive things were in the days of monochrome TV to appreciate how much has changed, but I’m wondering if it is improving our mental abilities.

A wilder theory I heard was that the hunters were the ones with the high spatial ability, and the gatherers weren’t, but I’m not so sure about that. I could believe that the good hunters were the ones that didn’t know the non-hunters needed glasses, but after that it all gets rather speculative!