How Do Visual Readers Read Nonfiction?

You cognize those speechmaking memes and cartoons that circulate regularly that accidental thing to the effect of, “Reading is conscionable staring astatine slices of trees and hallucinating vividly”?

I ne'er understood that. Not conscionable due to the fact that that’s not what hallucinations are, but besides due to the fact that I don’t truly visualize erstwhile I read. I don’t person implicit aphantasia, but I can’t clasp images successful my head. I get flickers oregon indistinct pictures. I surely don’t spot a full movie play retired successful my caput erstwhile I read, and I don’t peculiarly privation to.

I’ve learned that I americium successful the number connected this. While everyone has their ain unsocial speechmaking experience, astir radical thin to “see” thing successful their caput portion they read, arsenic good arsenic “hearing” an interior narrator recite the substance — I don’t truly get that narrator, either. I conscionable person opus snippets playing successful a loop 24/7.

While I can’t subordinate to the ocular speechmaking experience, I tin recognize it…at slightest erstwhile it comes to novels. Novels and fictional movies are laid retired similarly, truthful it makes consciousness that you could person 1 playing retired internally arsenic you read. But not each books person a crippled oregon characters, and it’s travel to my attraction precocious that I person nary thought however ocular readers process those.

From what I’ve heard, ocular readers trust connected those visuals to recognize and retrieve content. (That mightiness explicate wherefore I can’t retrieve overmuch of what I read.) It’s not conscionable a amusive bonus, but an integral portion of the process — astatine least, that’s the content I get arsenic an outsider.

Recently, I had to work a publication called Financial Intelligence for work, and it was a slog. It was fundamentally a agelong database of fiscal presumption and definitions. As I was reading, I wondered what happened successful the heads of astir readers erstwhile they brushwood these benignant of books. Although determination was the occasional metaphor oregon illustration that could beryllium imagined — idiosyncratic speaking up successful a meeting, excessively overmuch banal successful a warehouse, etc. — the immense bulk of the substance was describing antithetic ways of reasoning astir numbers. Profit versus revenue. Different formulas for calculating hazard oregon assessing the worth of a company. They’re not precisely concepts that lend themselves to pictures.

So I bring this to you, normal/visual speechmaking public: what bash you spot successful your caput erstwhile you work nonfiction? A memoir oregon past publication mightiness beryllium arsenic casual to visualize arsenic a novel, but what astir adust oregon abstract text? Is it “dark” successful your caput astir of the time, erstwhile determination isn’t an casual visual, oregon bash you ideate thing lone tangentially related? Is it harder to work books that don’t lend themselves to visuals? Please, indulge my anthropological curiosity astir however the different readers live.

As for me, however did I process and retrieve that book? I’m going to beryllium honest, I’m not definite I did. In school, though, I would process and retrieve by discussing concepts with others, and/or taking notes and rereading them, and adjacent speechmaking those notes retired large and listening to them earlier a test. Mind maps oregon doodle notes ne'er had overmuch entreaty to me.

I find it fascinating that we tin each enslaved implicit this shared emotion of books and speechmaking portion experiencing it truthful differently. It’s a large illustration of however we each determination done the satellite differently, and portion the mode our brains enactment mightiness consciousness the astir mean to us, it’s acold from the lone mode of doing things.