What a wonderful thread. I read all of it, partially visualizing (avatars help), partly imagining, and partly just "sensing" it. Practically all posts could be commented. I choose two major themes and two small (one funny).
Observation
I start with a
small theme, foreign languages' positive (negative) influence
Spoiler:
Adoby does not enjoy reading fiction in Swedish, his native language, as much as in English. For me it is exactly the same but with Italian. A part from the offer one finds. I have an explanation for myself. I studied English for 8 years at school, but I really got into it when I started to read fiction. There, to fill the vocabulary gaps without resorting to a dictionary or to make pencil notes for further study, like some do, I had to imagine more and to rely on the imagination to give continuity to the narration. I was not yet trained in abstract thinking as I am now (although I had 8 years of Latin, that with Greek is the most common gateway to abstract thinking), so more images were used. The use develops the organ.
Lo Zeno has just the opposite experience.
Immersion Spoiler:
It takes an Author,
Vintage Season, to call into play the magic word, immersion. I get totally immersed in the spiel with many authors. I choose two at the opposite range of style. Joyce in Ulysses is generous and accurate and evocative as Leonardo when he painted every leaf of the trees. Hemingway reduced it to the most essential core, (take any of the stories as example) often leaving the description in our mind. Both had huge influences. Both allow me to get hyperdimensianally immersed in their narration.
Visual, "sensed", abstract
Spoiler:
At least 5 posters make it clear that they not make recurse to images. mental crutches, hindrances to their speed in reading, declared or implied. General surprise. Not at all. Myself I can control it. I can switch from highly detailed visual to wherever rarefied I can reach. I have been trained in abstract thinking, by myself mostly, as an advanced professional tool, in mathematics at first, but then to practically everything, even with sentiments and feelings. Before making my statement on the actual theme, let me make two short and contrasting considerations. Geometry was developed in ancient Greece, to a level that was not fully understood until recently (time scale centuries), without making use of drawings. Purely abstract concepts. The single thing that I learned that was most useful to me in all my professional life was said to me, decades ago, by a highly influential and successful professor of a renown American University: If you can draw it you have it. Which does not mean that to have it you have to draw it. This one liner has been worth to me at least half of my total earnings since. Visualizing is very useful for checking. To make connections between concepts it is often better a higher abstract level, maybe in "sensing" mode, almost visual but not with forms.
It is just a matter of focus. Even the highest and more abstract concept of the most abstract of the theoretical mathematics have to be imagined before being highly polished and stream lined down to their final formulation. On a piece of paper in symbolic form or in the mind.
Visual imagined? Not necessarily, but why not.
A small funny theme