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People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

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Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#121

Post by thedevelopnik »

_ink_ wrote: post #120

I only learnt about aphantasia very recently. I seem to be affected. It was very surprising to me, that people can "see" things only by thinking about them. It explains a lot. For example I never understood what's so great about reading books. But I can imaging that this is great if you actually see the things you read about. I can also confirm the findings of this study. I rarly dream. I cannot hear music in my head…

I believe I’m aphantasic and I still enjoy books. I think about the things described. To go the other way, I read recently that the author of the Witcher books doesn’t “see” the things he’s writing, it’s pure text description for him but his books are still great.

Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#122

Post by c3534l »

raxxorrax wrote: post #5

How would you test such a condition? When I paint (bloody amateur) I certainly can imagine a generic tree or house or something specific like my house or my garden tree. The latter takes more form of an image, but it is still quite abstract. It is not really a picture, it is a memory and quite fleeting. But if I would see a real picture, I would go to the doc. What do you mean they cannot conjure an image. If you ask…

There's an aphantasia subreddit I checked out once. There was a discussion where people mentioned that they could hear a song in their head and play it back, and they could recall a voice or speak in their head, but it had never occurred to them that people could do something like that with images. I asked someone if they could visualize red versus blue in their head and they said they could not, they could only think of the words red and blue and not imagine what the colors looked like without actually looking at something red or blue. One person told me they had absolutely no imagination at all and could not, for instance, recall the sound of someone's voice or imagine warm sand between their toes.

Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#123

Post by c3534l »

I came to the realization that not everyone feels emotions the same way. In therapy, I often had people ask me to try to describe my emotions in terms of bodily images and ask me to justify how I know I'm sad or angry or whatever. It always seemed like such an absurd waste of time, but apparently some people don't actually feel emotions, they infer them from their own behavior. My therapist seemed surprised that the sensation of sadness is an abstract feeling that I experience, like you would feel pain or coldness, and the same goes for all the other emotions you might feel. The idea of getting in touch with your emotions is like getting in touch with a punch in the gut.

It makes me realize there's a lot of experiences we probably all take for granted and assume that everyone experiences the way we do, but we just kind of assume that when someone says they can see it in their head or they can feel it in their heart we just assume everyone means that metaphorically.

Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#124

Post by khazhoux »

Glad to know there's a word for it. I'm aphantasic. I can't see things in my mind, and the vague imagery I do see literally cannot hold still for even a second -- any image I conjure up will twist and shift from one shape to another.

Somehow, I can draw quite well though. But not from mental imagery.

And, I can hear music clearly in my head, with a very long memory. I can easily play back a song as almost perfect audio, even if I haven't heard it in decades, with clear little details.

But I mostly can't make out the words of any music I remember, and in fact I struggle to remember lyrics in general, even of songs I've listened dozens of times. And my sequence-memory is crap.

Sigh... memory is fascinating.

Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#125

Post by unexaminedlife »

I'm pretty sure I have this condition. Never even knew the vast majority of people experienced the world differently than I do until recently.

One of the perceived benefits IME has been that I seem to have a substantially higher capacity (on average) to understand things at a conceptual level than my co-workers.

Not sure if that's just a testament to how I learned to learn early in life, or if it's somehow a way my mind has compensated for the lack of sensory info in my imagination.

Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#126

Post by madaxe_again »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #67
madaxe_again wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As complete as it needs to be. I can see and hear my imaginings quite clearly, and often use mechanical analogues to test non-directly visualisable abstract ideas and logical flows. In more general terms, I can see and explore real and imagined environments, and listen to music with perfect fidelity - although doing the hearing bit only works well with considerable focus, and peace and quiet - visual I find easy enou…

I have a very hard time believing claims like this. Not to single you out, but you should be able to draw perfectly then and imagine whole systems in your mind. The latter is especially unlikely given that most people are limited to 5-7 "items" in their working memory. To design even a simple system, e.g. a brake caliper, that's way more than 7 items, and they aren't "atomic" items either. Again, this isn't a stab at…

It’s about levels of scale and abstraction. When you’re designing a car you don’t care about the innards of the calliper. Reducible complexity, and modelled inputs and outputs. If something seems wonky it gets looked at more closely - either the model or the concept is wrong.

I can’t draw for shit, but I can and do make complex devices and systems with no written plan, just a picture in my head.

Oh, and I’ve put on well over 5lb of muscle this month, by doing brutal hours of manual labour and eating like a horse. Being out of shape but historically stacked makes it a world easier.

Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#127

Post by starky »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #2

"Not everyone can see pictures in their minds when they close their eyes and summon thoughts - an ability many of us take for granted." I used to be into visualization as focus training. I can't "see" and change (move, change color) shapes in my mind at all. Artists I know claim to be able to do this. Obviously, Tesla (, Nikola) supposedly did this. For those who can do it - to what degree can you do it? Can you imag…

I can pretty much visualize things as if they were in a 3D modeling system (there may be a reason why I work in mechanical product design). I can take some object and imagine it flipped around to another orientation or imagine how a complex mechanism will operate. I'm so adept at doing this that I very rarely actually draw things out before I start doing CAD work.

I would say my ideation process starts with a vague view of what I am trying to accomplish, and then gradually becomes clear. I'll have a general concept and can picture the end result, but without understanding how it is accomplished at first, which gradually becomes clearer as I think about it. I generally know I've got something when it "feels right".

My main artistic hobby is photography. One of the things I most enjoy doing is going out without a specific shot in mind and trying to "find" a photo by deliberately experiencing my surroundings. It is almost have an aversion to have a shot in mind before I go out to take it because it invariably doesn't live up to the visual I have in my head.

Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#128

Post by andromeduck »

c3534l wrote: post #122
raxxorrax wrote: post #5

How would you test such a condition? When I paint (bloody amateur) I certainly can imagine a generic tree or house or something specific like my house or my garden tree. The latter takes more form of an image, but it is still quite abstract. It is not really a picture, it is a memory and quite fleeting. But if I would see a real picture, I would go to the doc. What do you mean they cannot conjure an image. If you ask…

There's an aphantasia subreddit I checked out once. There was a discussion where people mentioned that they could hear a song in their head and play it back, and they could recall a voice or speak in their head, but it had never occurred to them that people could do something like that with images. I asked someone if they could visualize red versus blue in their head and they said they could not, they could only thin…

Yeah, as one of the more extreme cases Im honestly pretty jealous. All my memories are essentially abstract ideas/connections. Memories of places for example is mostly how they're spatially connected, rough dimensions, how it was constructed, how it operates, and sometimes how it made me feel the first or last time I saw it. I can't conjure the face or voice of any loved one nor the feeling of walking into a cold lake for example only an abstract description like if you were writing in a journal. When music triggers a memory, what is recalled is the feeling or train of thought when that memory was formed.

Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#129

Post by di4na »

cj wrote: post #88
di4na wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can draw you a dog, but if you ask me to picture a ball on a table, i do not picture anything specific. It is just the abstract idea of a ball on the table. It does not have colour, substance, space, nothing.

Same, at first, but if I try I can conjure a vague / unspecific mental image (the harder I mentally try, the clearer the image gets, but it never gets anywhere near perfectly clear). For example: Are you able to take a table in your house and then imagine a soccer ball on it? Or do you still come up blank with just the concept and absolutely no mental imagery?

Still blank with the concept

Re: People who can't see things in their mind could have memory trouble too: study

#130

Post by di4na »

smabie wrote: post #110
di4na wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can draw you a dog, but if you ask me to picture a ball on a table, i do not picture anything specific. It is just the abstract idea of a ball on the table. It does not have colour, substance, space, nothing.

What about dreams? Presumably you see images of stuff when dreaming?

Nope. Tbh i do not dream a lot.

But even in dreams, it is all about abstract things that move around me.

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