<story><title>Our Visual Imagination Is Severely Limited</title><url>https://undark.org/article/visual-imagination-brain-implications/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>phkahler</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to reconcile this with the fact that some people can solve a rubik&amp;#x27;s cube blindfolded after having a good look at it. It seems like they have the ability to imagine the relative movements of 26 objects at once.</text></item><item><author>SubiculumCode</author><text>Very nice article. It is so refreshing when someone who really knows what they are talking about writes in the popular science writing style. As a post-doc in a related field of cog neuroscience, I give the article my thumbs up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shmageggy</author><text>It is well known that while everyone has roughly the same capacity of visual working memory, expertise in an area drastically alters our efficiency in utilizing that memory. For example, chess masters are much better than novices at recalling chess positions when they look like typical middle-game positions, but they perform nearly the same as novices on random arrangements of pieces [1]. In the rubik&amp;#x27;s cube case, the expert is not memorizing 54 individual squares, but rather they are taking advantage of learned patterns to store fewer, larger chunks.&lt;p&gt;For another example, consider memorizing strings of letters: Which one do you find easier? GKAMIFTBW or IBMFBICIA&lt;p&gt;[1] Chase, W. G., &amp;amp; Simon, H. A. (1973). Perception in chess. Cognitive psychology, 4(1), 55-81.</text></comment>
<story><title>Our Visual Imagination Is Severely Limited</title><url>https://undark.org/article/visual-imagination-brain-implications/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>phkahler</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d like to reconcile this with the fact that some people can solve a rubik&amp;#x27;s cube blindfolded after having a good look at it. It seems like they have the ability to imagine the relative movements of 26 objects at once.</text></item><item><author>SubiculumCode</author><text>Very nice article. It is so refreshing when someone who really knows what they are talking about writes in the popular science writing style. As a post-doc in a related field of cog neuroscience, I give the article my thumbs up.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>thethirdone</author><text>Or perhaps just memorized the solution (that they figured out while still being able to see the cube).&lt;p&gt;I haven&amp;#x27;t ever tried doing it blindfolded, but I would expect there is not too much visualization behind it.</text></comment>