Remarkable variance in visual imagination

Not remotely scientific, this twitter poll nevertheless is really interesting:

When told to visualize a red star, what do you see?

Apparently, when told to visualize a red star, a rather sizable proportion of respondents don’t see a red star.

That’s so interesting. Stumbling across evidence that many people don’t live in the same sensory world you do is always so jarring.

Now I am literally unable to decide whether I’m really visualizing a red star, or maybe something that is actually not red or not a shape or whatever. I feel like I might have the idea of a red star in my mind, without a clear visual image. Yet I think I must have a pretty adequate ability to visualize scenery. I mean, I kind of do that all the time. Or something that I think of as “visualizing scenery.”

It’s all very odd. So I have a follow-up question for you all:

Look away from the screen and visualize a blue half-circle. Are you sure you can visualize a blue half-circle? Or are you possibly doing something else and calling it visualization?

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