I couldn’t visualize the mountain at all. …but I feel like I was able to visualize an orange’s innards in high fidelity—which surprised me, because I often fail at 2d visualizations which seem to be easy for the majority of the population. I attribute the difference between the orange and the mountain to simple subject familiarity; I actually do know what’s in an orange.
I also had the experience of feeling like I was able to visualize 4d spaces in some non-abstract way when I studied non-Euclidean geometry in my early teens. I used visualizations in a 13-dimensional space in designing some software about 7 years ago, and am currently using a visual argument in a 5+ (variable) dimensional vector space to “prove” that a subsystem for my video game will achieve its purpose. I sometimes make 3d model assets by visualizing the 3d shape and then manually typing in coordinates for each vertex.
My case seems to me to suggest that 3+ dimensional visualization is a distinct skill/ability from 2d visualization—and that high competence in 2d visualization is not a prerequisite for higher-dimensional visualization. It also “feels” introspectively like a single skill for 3+ dimensional visualization, NOT a separate skill for each dimensionality as might be assumed due to 2d seeming to be a special case.
The existence of the 2d special case in my brain seems curious; naively, if I can handle any dimensionality 3+, I ought to be able to simply use that skill if it’s more competent than my 2d visualization. There having ever been a 2d special case makes some sense; I can imagine some instinctual ability there, or perhaps it being inductively simple to create given the 2d input data. But why did the 2d special case persist after it became outclassed by an emerging 3+d ability?
I’m now curious about what may happen if I attempt to explicitly involve my 3+d ability to take over for 2d visualization tasks. Can I gain 2d visualization capacity this way? Why is suppressing the “native” 2d mode so difficult for 2d tasks? If I do, will it break anything? I’d be worried about e.g. loss of other plausibly-instinctual visual abilities like facial recognition, emotion recognition, etc, but I already seem to be inept at those skills; I don’t have much to lose.
An anecdata point:
I couldn’t visualize the mountain at all. …but I feel like I was able to visualize an orange’s innards in high fidelity—which surprised me, because I often fail at 2d visualizations which seem to be easy for the majority of the population. I attribute the difference between the orange and the mountain to simple subject familiarity; I actually do know what’s in an orange.
I also had the experience of feeling like I was able to visualize 4d spaces in some non-abstract way when I studied non-Euclidean geometry in my early teens. I used visualizations in a 13-dimensional space in designing some software about 7 years ago, and am currently using a visual argument in a 5+ (variable) dimensional vector space to “prove” that a subsystem for my video game will achieve its purpose. I sometimes make 3d model assets by visualizing the 3d shape and then manually typing in coordinates for each vertex.
My case seems to me to suggest that 3+ dimensional visualization is a distinct skill/ability from 2d visualization—and that high competence in 2d visualization is not a prerequisite for higher-dimensional visualization. It also “feels” introspectively like a single skill for 3+ dimensional visualization, NOT a separate skill for each dimensionality as might be assumed due to 2d seeming to be a special case.
The existence of the 2d special case in my brain seems curious; naively, if I can handle any dimensionality 3+, I ought to be able to simply use that skill if it’s more competent than my 2d visualization. There having ever been a 2d special case makes some sense; I can imagine some instinctual ability there, or perhaps it being inductively simple to create given the 2d input data. But why did the 2d special case persist after it became outclassed by an emerging 3+d ability?
I’m now curious about what may happen if I attempt to explicitly involve my 3+d ability to take over for 2d visualization tasks. Can I gain 2d visualization capacity this way? Why is suppressing the “native” 2d mode so difficult for 2d tasks? If I do, will it break anything? I’d be worried about e.g. loss of other plausibly-instinctual visual abilities like facial recognition, emotion recognition, etc, but I already seem to be inept at those skills; I don’t have much to lose.