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Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

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

#161

Post by qubyte »

dempseye wrote: post #148

I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for richness of mental imagery. I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine" things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently impossible. And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the counting and that nobody could actually see sheep when they did it. Do people really see shee…

Ditto on all counts.

I've only recently become aware that the way I experience or remember the world is in any way unusual. I'd always thought that mental imagery was a metaphor for something or hyperbole. It also explains why my memory seems deficient. I've no problems with facts, but I have no memory of being a participant in events.

Contrary to the article, I have no problem recognising people. It's like I keep a hash of faces. If I close my eyes I'll have no idea what the person in front of me looks like.

The whole thing has me slightly sad.

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

#162

Post by dempseye »

hackinthebochs wrote: post #152
dempseye wrote: post #148

I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for richness of mental imagery. I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine" things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently impossible. And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the counting and that nobody could actually see sheep when they did it. Do people really see shee…

This is precisely my experience. The interesting thing is that I recognize faces extremely well, perhaps even to the level of super-recognizer, contradicting the guy in the article. I also score really well on spatial reasoning tests and do extremely well at mathematical and abstract reasoning. I wonder if there's a connection. As far as the nature of my minds eye, I definitely don't see pictures at all, but as you s…

I'll put it this way:

I have no problem imagining a physical system in my head and running a simulation of it, but it is as if instead of receiving the output of the simulation as images on a screen I am receiving it in the form of instantaneous knowledge of the state of the system.

It feels very similar to modelling program state in my head while debugging or whatever.

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

#163

Post by theoh »

Roritharr wrote: post #145

Weird. This explains a lot of my abilities much better than hightened IQ or something like that. The test, which basically asks you multiple versions of "how clear can you picture X", told me I'm in the top 20% of people with Hyperphantasia, although I might misjudge my experience greatly. Being able to quickly and accurately create mental models is essential to most of my workflows. Now I really regret not having le…

Just learn now. But be aware that observational drawing is a different skill than illustrating your "phantasy" mental images.

In the second category, the engineer Elmer Sperry apparently had a serious facility for visualizing machinery, and would hold out a pen and paper to "just draw a line around it". It's mentioned in Eugene Ferguson's book Engineering and the Mind's Eye: https://books.google.ie/books?id=WcqaKE_Eg1IC&pg=PA51#v=onep...

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

#164

Post by dempseye »

qubyte wrote: post #161
dempseye wrote: post #148

I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for richness of mental imagery. I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine" things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently impossible. And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the counting and that nobody could actually see sheep when they did it. Do people really see shee…

Ditto on all counts. I've only recently become aware that the way I experience or remember the world is in any way unusual. I'd always thought that mental imagery was a metaphor for something or hyperbole. It also explains why my memory seems deficient. I've no problems with facts, but I have no memory of being a participant in events. Contrary to the article, I have no problem recognising people. It's like I keep a…

No problem recognising people here either. It's like a hash, as you said. I'd say it operates more like a bloom filter in my head, as I will always remember an image if I see it again, but previously unseen images can still occasionally spark a feeling of recognition.

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

#166

Post by canam »

dempseye wrote: post #148

I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for richness of mental imagery. I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine" things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently impossible. And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the counting and that nobody could actually see sheep when they did it. Do people really see shee…

Yes, that is my experience exactly. No mental images at all. I've tried to learn, but nothing has worked. Yet I can drive somewhere once on vacation, and a decade later drive the route without a map.

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

#167

Post by neilk »

dempseye wrote: post #148

I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for richness of mental imagery. I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine" things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently impossible. And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the counting and that nobody could actually see sheep when they did it. Do people really see shee…

Yes, some, probably most people, "see" sheep. After reading Blake Ross' discussion of this I've been wondering how to explain it to the aphantasic. It's a little bit like having a second monitor except it doesn't occupy a part of your visual field. For most people, except da Vinci, it's fainter and less detailed than a real sense impression. Like I can be sitting in a coffeeshop and think of a sunset. The first sunset image I get is almost involuntary. For me it will be cliché, like a stock photo, but I can alter it, or add detail. (Other people may get fantasy landscapes or particular sunset memories).

I can tell you what the colors are like, but it doesn't replace my current visual image. If I focus strongly on the sunset, I may miss things happening in reality, but reality is never fully replaced.

That said, don't take an internet social science quiz too seriously or think you're deficient. People are different.

Blake Ross noted how this seems to be related to how he just doesn't remember a lot of sensory details that other people find important. So perhaps there is some general purpose sense-memory reconstruction and recombination system. But the nature of what you get might depend on what was available. Perhaps for you, remembering a place would be about reconstructing the layout of it. For others it might be visual details, for still others important events or people they shared the space with.

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

#168

Post by dempseye »

stupidcar wrote: post #153

I wonder if it's possible to improve your visual imagination through practice? My own mental images tend to be dim and fuzzy, far from the photorealistic scenes some people seem to be able to conjure up. But I wonder if there's a feedback effect here, where people whose visual imagination is stronger to begin with tend to use it more, thus further strengthening it, while people whose visual imagination starts off wea…

> I wonder if it's possible to improve your visual imagination through practice?

There are various meditative and esoteric practices based on exactly that.

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

#169

Post by crb3 »

I'm so much the other way that it's scary, because it's a vulnerability, one I didn't know about until it happened.

Musical/artistic family, multi-talented all around me. I'd keep my suburban-bicycled paper-route from getting boring by playing back in my head music I'd heard and liked. Stumbled into hardware, then software, as something I could do and do well and get paid to do it. Whatever it was I was doing -- songwriting, drawing, carving, circuitry, code -- I visualized/audialized it first, working it out on the sketchpad viewscreen of my mind before committing the work to physical fact.

And then I found out how easily the whole thing could be shut down. Stressed-out bowstring-taut -- pending divorce, single-parenting, work stresses -- and it was enough to let staph take hold, in my elbow of all places -- and suddenly the ibuprofen didn't keep the fevers down and my visualization got fevered and dissolved away and I couldn't code, couldn't create, because I couldn't visualize, until the antibiotics finished killing off the infection.

Anybody else gone through this?

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

#170

Post by dempseye »

neilk wrote: post #167
dempseye wrote: post #148

I took the test and apparently I fall into the lowest five percent for richness of mental imagery. I recall being frustrated by exhortations to "close [my] eyes and imagine" things as a child, as if I was being asked to do something evidently impossible. And I always assumed that the counting sheep thing was mostly about the counting and that nobody could actually see sheep when they did it. Do people really see shee…

Yes, some, probably most people, "see" sheep. After reading Blake Ross' discussion of this I've been wondering how to explain it to the aphantasic. It's a little bit like having a second monitor except it doesn't occupy a part of your visual field. For most people, except da Vinci, it's fainter and less detailed than a real sense impression. Like I can be sitting in a coffeeshop and think of a sunset. The first sunse…

There is a language problem here where it is impossible to be sure that when people describe subjective experiences in the same words they are actually having the same qualitative experience.

I don't take it too seriously. It's just a jumping off point for a conversation about an interesting perceptual quirk.

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