Can you enter the Matrix? The deliberate simulation of sensory input.

I have difficultly visualizing faces as well. When I read a novel, I find that I visualize/imagine the setting and action, but not what the characters look like up close. I've never thought of it as "weird" because that's what I'm used to, but I guess it is weird, isn't it?

I suspect such visualisation is not a binary ability but a spectrum of "realness", a skill you can be better or worse at. I don't identify with your description fully, I wouldn't call what my imagination does "entering the Matrix", but in some ways it's like actual sensory input, just much less intense.

I also observed this spectrum in my dreams - some are more vivid and detailed, some more like the waking level of imagination, and some remain mostly on the conceptual level.

I would very be interested to know if it's possible to improve your imagination's vividness by training.

I would order my intensity of imagination tacticle, visual, auditory, olfactory. Much like you, I am unable to picture faces, but this extends beyond merely described faces. Although I have few problems recognising people (bar ones I have not seen in a long time -- I often end up in the embarassing situation of not remembering someone who has come up to me out of the blue to talk to me), I have extreme difficulty brining even the most familiar faces to mind if they're not right in front of me.

I remember when I was younger that my auitory processing seemed stronger. I would often imagine people calling my name, and was unable to tell whether it was a real noise, or just in my head. The last time I remember this is about the age of 5 ot 6 though, and I've never had it happen since then.

As far as tactile impressions go, I sometimes find that my imagination can make a tactile sense more interesting / strong than the axtual experience of it. For instance, I remember being disappointed with how much less snowy snow was than how I'd always pictured ("felt"?) it, when I finally came into contact with it.

I can "play back songs in my head" pretty well, especially something simple like this; on occasion, I've had trouble telling the difference between a sound I was imagining and a sound with an external source. Visually, I have more difficulty; I can pretty much only picture a small piece of an object at a time, and everything tends to be in front of a black background. Visualizing a whole scene is hard for me; I either have to spend some time filling in all the visual details or end up turning things into abstractions instead of simulated sensory data. (Maybe this has something to do with limitations of peripheral vision.)

Hmm, I have a few more thoughts to add.

The word "face"on its own can't be expected to convey anything more than eyes + mouth. An equal sign followed by a parenthesis is a face. That region of the body above the neck is not a "face." That is, when one human sees that region on another human, its brain doesn't just process "face", it processes all sorts of subtle details that authors fail to recreate in their writings, although it is difficult I'm sure.

And about my other imaginative capabilities--well, for one I can't hold a scene in my waking mind's eye (with no sensory input) much longer than a long GIF animation. I have to pause before I can continue and the clarity is gradually lost no matter what I do. The scenes are clear enough for me to describe where various items like furniture or people were situated and even sketch or map on paper, but it's all very noticeably hazier than seeing with my eyes and the field of view is reduced. With math I can roughly translate the notation into 2D graphs and some simple 3D shapes. I can't do anything like rotate a dodecahedron with distinctly colored sides in my mind and keep track of which colored sides are adjacent to which.

XiXiDu, are you well above average in mathematical ability? Your trait is correlated with it, strongly IIRC. At any rate, you should get yourself under an fMRI for science.

I used to have a lot of trouble seeing faces in both books and dreams, and I can only guess why I got better. To better visualize the faces of characters in books I consciously "cast" friends, actors, and mostly generic ethnic looks. And I also mentally design faces--I can choose brachycephaly or dolichocephaly, a concave or convex nose and anything in between, recessed eyes or bug eyes, jaw curvature and slope, etc. I can also classify anyone from Iran to Ireland with relative accuracy, and East Asians/Sub-Saharan Africans by broad geography. My guess is that my former interest in anthropology (e.g. looking at portraits with the nationality of the person captioned underneath)and real-life practice have trained my brain to make these distinctions, as well as the crowd I keep, but there's surely some heritable component to this ability.

I am extremely poor at visualization, can't even picture a line or a circle (I just tried it) and I don't remember images from my dreams. Strangely, when I was a child, I was sometimes able to visualize, but only with extreme effort. More recently, I have experienced what I would call "brain movies", involuntary realistic visualizations, under the influence of opiates.

It seems I am fundamentally capable of visual thinking, but my brain is just not in the habit, though I wouldn't mind being able to summon the ability. It sounds kinda cool.

I'm very good at entering the auditory matrix--I can "listen to" music without needing to have an external source, though sometimes the record player in my mind gets stuck on certain parts. Most of my thoughts are auditory/verbal, as if I am constantly talking to myself. (And when I collaborate with someone or have an intense conversation I prefer to type it, because I feel like I can't think when I can't listen to my internal monologue--I feel like I am slow in conversation because the time I'm listening to someone else I'm not doing any thinking myself. It may just be in comparison with my SO, who speaks quickly and has no problem thinking and listening at once.)

There's no other sense where my mental recreation of it is at all comparable to really experiencing that input. I can visualize things I already remember well, or with non-spatial alterations. There are not many visual things I remember well, and anything that requires spatial skills beyond the most basic ("picture this rotated 120 degrees and turned inside-out") is quite difficult. I don't try to imagine physical sensations much, so it doesn't surprise me that trying to do so now is quite difficult. Smells are so-so; it doesn't really feel like it's real, the way I really hear the music in my head.

On a scale of 0+ to 100-% my visualization ability is 10%.

In order of my ability to call up the relevant experiences: audio, tactile, scent, visual, faces. I am ok at calling up visual memories but terrible at constucting new ones, and using visual modality is quite costly for me. When I read books I very rarely visualise anything, and when I read comics I usually read the text first and look at the pictures more as an afterthought.

I would say this is quite reflective of how I experience reality too, which makes sense - when you use your imagination you're just extrapolating from memory, after all.