Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind • Hacker News Board

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#61

Post by frooxie » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 2:58 PM UTC

blakeross wrote: post #29

I would be curious to see how the HN community scores on this aphantasia survey embedded in the BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054 . Perhaps there's a connection between programmers and this condition. Will you take it and report your score? The survey is oversimplified, obviously, but it was devised by the Exeter neurologists who are studying this. I got the lowest score (8/40) since none of the qu…

31/40, but when I'm asked to visualize something I don't immediately conjure up a detailed picture, it's more like a cursor going over a scene and adding details as needed.

For instance, until I was asked to "Rate how vivid the colours of that person's clothes look in your mind?", I hadn't even imagined his clothes being ANY color. Once I decided that he wore a green sweater, I could "experience" the green color vividly.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#62

Post by beeboop » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 4:04 PM UTC

kaoD wrote: post #3

> If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. Yes, with great detail. > If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing. Yup (and it's spinning for some reason!) > And mom’s face? Of course. Not at all! I've always been intrigued about this. I have a very rich "mind's eye", but always struggle with drawing faces in my mind. My experience with imagining faces: I get th…

I am the same with faces, but I have the same problem with everything I imagine. It's as though I can imagine things, but only in the same way you can look at a photo for 1/5th of a second. You get the general concept but no details.

I doubt I am special in this regard, but perhaps just on the lower end of the spectrum for normal. I cannot draw to save my life because I can't usefully imagine it in my head before it goes on paper.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#63

Post by 83457 » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 4:34 PM UTC

blakeross wrote: post #2

I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions. About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox. My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird discovery for me given this new focus.

So just to get this straigh... you worked on software projects with user interfaces but could not actually picture the actual interfaces in your mind?

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#64

Post by heed » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 4:54 PM UTC

kaoD wrote: post #3

> If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. Yes, with great detail. > If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing. Yup (and it's spinning for some reason!) > And mom’s face? Of course. Not at all! I've always been intrigued about this. I have a very rich "mind's eye", but always struggle with drawing faces in my mind. My experience with imagining faces: I get th…

I have poor recall for faces but I am able to recall voices with surprising clarity.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#65

Post by Grambo » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 4:59 PM UTC

kaoD wrote: post #3

> If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. Yes, with great detail. > If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing. Yup (and it's spinning for some reason!) > And mom’s face? Of course. Not at all! I've always been intrigued about this. I have a very rich "mind's eye", but always struggle with drawing faces in my mind. My experience with imagining faces: I get th…

Actually I think there's a reason for this. I took a cognitive science class once where our professor said that many believe that the portion of the brain responsible for recognizing faces is separate from the portion that does all other visual recognition. Perhaps that's why people have a hard time remembering what a face looks like. It's also why some people can lose their ability to recognize faces but can still recognize all other objects.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#66

Post by joshvm » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 4:59 PM UTC

blakeross wrote: post #2

I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions. About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox. My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird discovery for me given this new focus.

Great article!

What is the overlap between aphantasia and absence of memories? The example you gave was that you couldn't remember going to see Les Mis a year before, so that's not stored as a fact somewhere?

There was a (possible hoax) story a while back about a guy who could only remember the previous 15 or so hours of his life. He kept journals and had to jog his memory daily. One interesting proposal was that he was in a unique position to re-watch his favourite movies and compare his previous reviews to see, unbiased, if there was any change in opinion. Aside from the awfulness of the condition, that particular aspect sounded quite cool - you could experience things for the "first time" multiple times.

Does the same thing occur with aphantasia? If you see a movie that you love, presumably you can't remember any scenes from it later (though you I assume you would remember the plot)?

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#67

Post by mcweaksauce » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 5:05 PM UTC

The last chapter in Oliver Sacks' book "The Mind's Eye" discusses this phenomenon and how people who became blind adapted and compensated. Highly recommend it. He suggests a phenomenon like this is primarily biologically predetermined.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#68

Post by barrkel » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #52

There are a lot of basic assumptions about thought that don't apply to everybody. My wife, for example, can't process "left" and "right" without great effort. She's intelligent and is a gifted artist in a variety of mediums, and is not dyslexic in the least. But if you tell her to "turn right" in a car it's very confusing for her to translate that into which direction she should take. Even more confusingly, she's a v…

I have zero difficulty with left or right, but great difficulty recalling which way is west and which is east.

Usually I resolve it by remembering that west is left and east is right when looking at a north-up map, but I have to recall it every single time. I have never been able to bind the west / east words directly to directions.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#69

Post by bjz_ » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

kaffeemitsahne wrote: post #32

As someone without a mind's eye it's hard to imagine how much this "visualization" resembles normal vision. I remember from reading up on this earlier that some people can even superimpose things on an empty sheet of paper, or in the air. That would almost seem like a hallucination to me. Key quote from the article IMO: " I thought “counting sheep” was a metaphor. " I've always thought the same way about daydreaming,…

I can definitely visualise things in my head, but it takes effort to resolve things into clearer detail. It's more hazy and abstract than normal vision. I've never really thought about it until now. I would be fascinated to know if other people have a mind's eye on par with regular vision.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#70

Post by CDRdude » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 5:23 PM UTC

josephagoss wrote: post #60

blakeross wrote: post #2

I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions. About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox. My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird discovery for me given this new focus.

Have you ever tried any psychedelics? Feel free not to answer. I am very curious if they could make that connection. I know LSD puts the brain's visual processing into overdrive, perhaps it might make the connection strong enough to give you this mind's eye, even if only temporary.

I have been interested in trying psychedelics for this reason. I have some ability to visualize, but it's pretty limited. I experienced similar surprise when learning that doing things like picturing yourself on a beach was not meant to be a metaphor. I hope it's something I can experience at least once in my life.