Can anyone else picture things very well?

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Can anyone else picture things very well, like whole rooms almost as if your in the room for real? Or you can re-read something you seen, as in can imagine it and re read it but like you can see it rather than just memory.

Curious

Nope....not me.

But Temple Grandin probably could.

No. I'm good at picturing specialized things, but I'm not much of a visual thinker.

Yes. I remember reading a couple of novels, that were later made into movies and it was funny that the movies were exactly how I pictured it from the book. My husband always laughs about this, as I am able to decorate, etc. and see how things will look and he can't do it at all. My son is the same. In fact, yesterday, while we were shopping for his Halloween party this year I asked him, "So do you have a list of things? If you had a list I could help you look for stuff." His response? "Mom, my brain is like a TV, I can see everything I need and where it is going to go in the house when we decorate, so it's ok, I can handle it".

PS the downside? That I have sadly seen some horrific things in my life, i.e. a bear tied to a pole and getting bitten by dogs, a dead guy on the sidewalk, an abused animal on the street, etc. and I cannot get it out of my mind no matter how hard I try...it's like the picture is crystal clear as if I was seeing it again

To some extent, yes.

Are you talking about Aphantasia? If I try to remember someones face I can vaguely see the features such as the nose or eyes but I cannot see the whole face. Its hard to describe as what I see is not very clear.

No, I can't do that well. I'm also bad at visualizing things I read/hear about.
Apparently some can imagine any object and spin it around and zoom in and out in their mind. I can't.

It might tie in with me not being a visual but a verbal thinker.

Yes. I'm great at turning concepts into mental pictures and vice-versa. At work, I'm the man to ask about complicated system processes... just don't ask me where I parked or who I talked to five minutes ago!

My visuals are odd. I'm still trying to understand it properly. Im very visual in my head, but I miss a lot of detail, almost like my visual mind is partially blind. Every word is an image I can't properly see.

Same, dead cat with eyes gouged out in the forest. Still seeing it.

On the plus side, I can imagine mathematical things in my head, like plains and 3D-functions.
I can rorate objects, I can rotate my position in the room as if seen from another perspective (but I don't think that one's perfectly accurate).
When I see a picture I can draw imaginary lines on it.
I can remember concepts easier in picture-reasoning form than in words.
I don't "think" often. When I think, not in words, but rather imagined situations or a very abstract way I can't explain. Those are my words.
I think that's one reason why I have problems verbalizing my thoughts.

I remember things as pictures. I can visualize myself getting in specific places(real/imaginative) and looking around from corner to corner and walking through. I see unconsciously many things as a shot of picture. I have tendency to capture three or four sentences as if they were A picture of lines, so many times I would misunderstand the content if I fail to pay attention to every word.

Rooms - yes, although I experience tunnel vision when I do it. I see clearly only what I am directly looking at. Peripheral vision is too dark.
Texts - no. I can see how the page looked like (diagrams, headings, amount of text) and point area where a specific information was written in but text itself is blurry and unreadable.

I also see "movies" in my head when I am reading but my imagination usually turns out different than the movie. What I see is clear like reality but it is different than what other people decided will be in the movie. For example when reading Harry Potter I pictured death eater clothes as similar to monk habits, not ku klux klan tiaras, lol. It was bothering me for a while because it was so different from the image in my mind.

I can't re-read things, but picturing spaces is common for me. When I was a kid, I used to like to close my eyes and rotate spaces or objects I'd seen and imagine what they look like from a different perspective. I remember being startled when other people couldn't tell even roughly what buildings look like from the sky after passing them in a car. I also dream in complex spaces, that I recall with extreme detail the next morning. For instance, I just woke up, and had a dream about spelunking in a cave. I recall the entrance and two of the caverns I visited, as well as the topography I climbed to get there.

That is definitely not me. I generally find it hard to remember things like that. I can remember how close family and friends look like but only very vaguely.

On the other hand, I can imagine a dice or look at an abstract shape on a piece of paper (like those you find on IQ tests) and rotate or unfold it in my head quite well, which is also kind of visual but more abstract. This reminds me of Temple Grandin's three different categories of minds:

1. Photo-realistic visual thinker
2. Pattern thinkers / abstract visual thinker / math and music minds
3. Verbal/fact thinkers

I fit category 2 exactly: I am talented at math, music and other pattern things such as minesweeper and tetris. I used to be terrible at reading and writing, but that has changed somewhat because I have focused a lot on it. I read slowly but I've mostly been able to read scientific literature. I used to have this strange problem when reading novels, however, that I could not both read and imagine/comprehend what I had just read. I think I somehow tried to turn every sentence into a fact that must be strictly remembered as part of a logical argument. A bit like when reading a scientific paper. After a while I would just read while my mind was elsewhere, and I had to start all over. It was a pity because I was always a bit envious of people who could drift into a dream world by reading books. However, at age 24 I picked up the book "Flatland" which I managed to complete. From then on I kind of learned how to read novels, i.e. not trying to remember all the sentences as facts, and I havve been able to read novels since (albeit slowly). (Anyone else familiar with this?) When it comes to writing I used to be poor at that as well, but I think I've become good at authoring the reasoning kind of literature, i.e. scientific work. I'm probably not a very good story writer though.

Anyhow, what I actually intended to say, was that maybe there are others here mixing up the two kinds of visual thinkers? Maybe those of you who say they can imagine some visual things but not how a room looks like are actually pattern thinkers and not photo-realistic visual thinkers?

EDIT: On second though, this does not apply to many of the posts above. I also did not actually mean to be educating you about Grandin although I see know it may appear that way. I do believe most of you are familiar with her work.

I can't picture anything at all when my eyes are closed, except during sleeping dreams.

I am both: photo realistic and pattern thinker.
I can picture things just as clear as I see the reality but they can come with patterns too - I can see lines and spaces in front of the mental photo, like an outline. And sometimes I see the outline only, without the actual mental photos. It's a matter of focus and purpose.

I was always good at math but not music. I can hear songs in my mind so I was always good with singing (I hear the music and the singer voice in my head as if my real ears were hearing it so all I have to do is sing with it) but I could never understand how notes turn into music.
Geometry was a bit harder for me than algebra but I can't say I was bad at it - I was still having an A, it just required a bit more focus than algebra examples. Algebra was very easy because it followed clear, repeatable rules that never changed but geometry required adjusting data:"height" was sometimes actually horizontal like the "base" should be etc.

Only verbal thinking doesn't come naturally to me. I started speaking early and I speak well but my thoughts remain pictures and patterns most of the time and I have to translate them to words if I want to communicate. I become fluent in it but it's still like using second language.