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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

#181

Post by philsnow »

Hupriene wrote: post #113
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…

Try this: Imagine an image split vertically down the middle. The left side of the image is solid black. The right side is the right half of your mom's face. Does that make it easier? It does for me.

How did you stumble upon that trick?! That's amazing!

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

#182

Post by monkbroc »

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…

8/40

I heard the story of the Exeter research on NPR while driving back from the airport at night last year at it floored me! I never realized that other people could actually picture images in their minds. I also thought this was entirely metaphorical. I wrote to the researchers back then to be included in further research.

I'm a computer engineer.

Anyone know if there a community group of people with aphantasia?

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

#183

Post by bjz_ »

Natanael_L wrote: post #173
neilk wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For me it is usually either a spatially disconnected weak image not anchored anywhere, or when I try to picture things within my field of vision it is like my imagination is being shown as a reflection in glass, like when you look out through a window at the real world and see your room faintly in the reflection, where I see my imagination like that reflection. The strength of it varies with my focus and general ment…

Great description, and makes me feel less handicapped for not having a very vivid mind's eye.

I wounder though whether somebody with aphantasia could really understand that description. After all, they would have to actually visualise a reflection to get to grips with it.

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

#184

Post by thaumasiotes »

kazagistar wrote: post #120

I'm... halfway. When I try, I can generate images, but I only do so occasionally. Most of the time, my thinking is exactly like the author describes. Facts, ideas, connections, hunches, intuitions, etc. The images are kinda like a serialization of this, no more: they have exactly the data I put into them, and not really any more "detail". But what really blew my mind was when I realized that people think with words.…

> But from what I hear from others, apparently people actually think about things with words, and which words they have both enable and limit their thinking. I still don't exactly know how that works, but apparently its common?

This isn't common at all, but the belief that it's happening is common.

What's actually happening is that people's thoughts automatically trigger language production, and they hear the words, the output of that process, in their head. But the thought comes first and the mental words are a side effect. Imagine your brain having an internal narrator who constantly reads your thoughts and shouts them out as formed sentences.

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

#185

Post by matthewrudy »

I experience something similar but different in my ability to recognise Chinese characters.

When I see a Chinese character I immediately know what it means.

But beyond the most simple characters I cannot summon them into my mind.

As an example, I cannot hope to handwrite them.

I guess this is the difference between recognition and recollection.

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

#186

Post by _Adam »

crb3 wrote: post #169

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 -- song…

I'm sorry to hear you went through that. Did your abilities return once the course of antibiotics was completed?

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

#187

Post by _Adam »

Hupriene wrote: post #113
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…

Try this: Imagine an image split vertically down the middle. The left side of the image is solid black. The right side is the right half of your mom's face. Does that make it easier? It does for me.

Helped me! I can now clearly see the wrinkles in my mom's face (sorry mom!). Do you have any other similar methods for visualizing other stuff?

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

#188

Post by commieneko »

I'm exactly the opposite. Everything in my head is an image. When I do math, I'm manipulating shapes, connections, colors. The space seems to be higher dimensionally, as things can be close and far depending on how I'm "gazing" through the space. While I can visualize systems as I might see them, I can also visualize them topologically. That's basically how I write code. I can "see" the path of operation through a ghostlike view. But only a few paths are in focus at any one time. Focus is not a great way to describe it, as it's not like the optical effect of focus. It's more like being able to feel a tension on a path. The path's I'm "seeing" are tight and the one's I'm not seeing, are still there but I have no "purchase" on them until I follow them.

The way I do calculations used to drive my teachers nuts in grade school. But my systems always worked. I do addition and subtraction as complements, which is how I see them. I do multiplication and division by what I can only describe as folding number lines. Individual numerals have colors and sounds, and what I can only describe as personalities. That is, in base 10. In other bases numbers seem boring and flat. I'm not sure what to make of that. What if I'd been raised using octal or hex? Binary makes me nervous.

I make my living as an illustrator and animator, I've been doing CGI since the late 1970s. I've tried to draw some of these things, but when I try and project them into 2D, I can only get what to most people seems nonsensical. But if I close my eyes or concentrate they are visible inside my head. I don't try and do this very much anymore, because I've found that sometimes this "breaks" the system and I can't see it anymore.

My dreams are very visual. Often my dreams are multi-threaded, with several plots and sets of characters. I'm often more than one person in the dream, or sometimes not present at all. I generally remember the dreams as a linear thing, but they are often connected and "inside" the dreams they seem simultaneous. I've no idea how to describe the experience better than that. When I was very young I used to have terrifying dreams that I can only describe as geometric. Things seemed connected in dangerous or threatening ways.

As I've gotten older, I've found that I have to work on problems with more consecutive steps. When I was younger I could "fold" several operations at once.

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