There are so many subtleties to this concept that it actually far more disturbing/fascinating (depending on your viewpoint) than this article briefly surveys.
Even when we are looking at a real tiger with our real eyes, we cannot likely count the stripes unless our eyes are looking directly at the stripes. But when we are looking directly at the stripes, we are no longer seeing the whole tiger, even though it is there. People have no idea how selective human vision actually is even when looking at real objects.
Now moving this into the realm of a mental picture, I indeed see a tiger, head-on and from the side in my mind. But because mental constructions are more of a visualized gestalt than a detailed image, when I move from seeing the tiger itself, I no longer have a real tiger there at all. In fact, you have nothing at all. When I focus on the stripes in my mental picture, the tiger of my mind (how's that for a philosophical concept?) ceases to exist as anything but a peripheral concept with a not so clear form or substance, and there are only stripes.
I suspect this is true of most visual thinkers because it also happens to be how we see! We may be aware of other things besides what we are directly observing, but our mind does not deal with them except as an approximation. Our brain literally filters out of our visio-spacial conception that which is not relevant to our current point of attention. But in the real world, at least, what we are not focusing on remains what it is, even when our attention is not on it. Not so with mental pictures. I may convince myself the tiger is still there, until I realize that with my mental tiger, I can make it have as many or as few stripes as the parameters of my mental concept of a tiger allows.
Obviously, the point of the article is that this is different for different people. Everything I think about is visual, sometimes in vivid detail. Even when I am thinking about abstract concepts, I do so visually, although for the life of me I couldn't describe what I see to you.
Even when we are looking at a real tiger with our real eyes, we cannot likely count the stripes unless our eyes are looking directly at the stripes. But when we are looking directly at the stripes, we are no longer seeing the whole tiger, even though it is there. People have no idea how selective human vision actually is even when looking at real objects.
Now moving this into the realm of a mental picture, I indeed see a tiger, head-on and from the side in my mind. But because mental constructions are more of a visualized gestalt than a detailed image, when I move from seeing the tiger itself, I no longer have a real tiger there at all. In fact, you have nothing at all. When I focus on the stripes in my mental picture, the tiger of my mind (how's that for a philosophical concept?) ceases to exist as anything but a peripheral concept with a not so clear form or substance, and there are only stripes.
I suspect this is true of most visual thinkers because it also happens to be how we see! We may be aware of other things besides what we are directly observing, but our mind does not deal with them except as an approximation. Our brain literally filters out of our visio-spacial conception that which is not relevant to our current point of attention. But in the real world, at least, what we are not focusing on remains what it is, even when our attention is not on it. Not so with mental pictures. I may convince myself the tiger is still there, until I realize that with my mental tiger, I can make it have as many or as few stripes as the parameters of my mental concept of a tiger allows.
Obviously, the point of the article is that this is different for different people. Everything I think about is visual, sometimes in vivid detail. Even when I am thinking about abstract concepts, I do so visually, although for the life of me I couldn't describe what I see to you.