Submitted by QuiQuiBelles t3_1025cjv in books
What do you "see" while you're reading a book? Do you just see the words on the page, or do you have a running visualisation in your mind of what's happening? I've heard of people imagining a "movie" while reading. I've heard of people taking in the text on the page at face value without imagining anything else. I've heard of people imagining faceless people and blurry backgrounds. I'm aware this probably has everything to do with aphantasia, which is a person's in/ability to create images in ther mind's eye, and the fact that it's impossible for human brains to make up a face they've never seen before. This all just makes everyone's experiences even more interesting to me.
I have adhd, which means holding onto a thought for very long at all — which for reading sessions for me means a half hour to an entire sixty minutes — takes a lot of intense concentration out of me and sometimes just isn't possible at all.
While I'm reading, I'm either picturing a cinematic, fully detailed, color graded movie in the style of the art on the front cover, or I'm seeing the same thing in a blurry, more conceptual version when my concentration is slipping and I have to focus more on the actual reading-the-words-on-the-page part of reading. At these concentration dips, I often have to pause and reconstruct the visuals in my mind before continuing. If the cover is in a semi-realistic art style, like it is for Kings of the Wyld (a book I'm reading right now), then the "movie" I'm imagining will be exactly that. This is part of the reason I enjoy reading so much. You will practically never see a movie in that style because of how difficult it would be to animate. This is also why I gravitate towards drawn covers, because I know that its going to "look" visually pleasing as I read. If what I'm picturing is aesthetically ugly, it can even start to affect my enjoyment of the book.
I think this is super fascinating. Please share what you "see" or even "hear" while reading!