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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

#141

Post by nalllar »

JshWright wrote: post #135
nalllar wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's incredibly easy to "typical mind" and expect that the normal inner experience of being human is the same for everyone else as it is for you. There's a wide variance in visual imagery. I know people who can vividly imagine things with their eyes open, find it easy, almost automatic, others who have to try, and some who can't at all. Similarly there are wide variances in how people think: some think very visually,…

What sort of "training"?

Focusing on spending time around the edge of sleep on thinking about things -> sometimes seeing flashes of them -> eventually can do it on demand more? Now focusing on those -> trying to imagine more intricate details.

Afraid it's hard to explain, and if I'd been fully aphantasic to start (including when nearly asleep) would not have been able to make any progress.

Same type of issue as trying to explain how to move a specific muscle or unfocus your eyes

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

#142

Post by jooize »

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #94
JshWright wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess I should clarify that I don't think you were arguing in bad-faith ("moving the goalposts" is a bit a of a charged phrase in the current political climate). I appreciate the conversation!

It's frustrating that so few people argue on simulacrum level 1. (Reference: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fEX7G2N7CtmZQ3eB5/simulacra-... ) Moving the goalposts is bad arguing. Bad arguing is often due to bad-faith arguing; but good arguing is hard , so it's also often accidental. Yet, people equate pointing out flaws in an argument with accusations of intellectual dishonesty: it's been politicised.

Thank you for these thoughts and that link. Spent an hour reading there, the article[1], and about The Gervais Principle[2].

[1]: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fEX7G2N7CtmZQ3eB5/simulacra-...

[2]: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

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

#143

Post by peebeebee »

3f34f34f wrote: post #20
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…

I think most people and journalists who speak about aphantasia are exaggerating or misleading others. If you actually are able to imagine an picture with your eyes open and have it cover the real world, that's called hallucinating. Some people can visualise things stronger than others, some cannot at all, but let's not pretend like actual visualisation (hallucinating) is the norm or that more than a few people on ear…

A good test for me was this: ask someone to close their eyes and visualize an apple. Ask them what they experience. Some only 'see' the concept. Some only outlines. Some see black and white. Some see colors. Some see very specific things, like the brand. Some experience an entire scene, with smells and all.

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

#144

Post by Tor3 »

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…

If there is sound (e.g. someone says something) and I'm not actively listening to it, but suddenly I have to focus on what was said then I can replay the last few seconds and catch up. I guess this is common to some level at least - it's hard to see how it's possible to communicate otherwise. After all we kind of have to keep a full sentence in our heads in order to understand it.

What I definitely can't do is replaying something that visually happened if I'm focusing on something else, or not paying attention. The same goes for other physical stimulation like touch etc. If I'm not conscious about it I can't tell what happened before the moment I focused. So, if I suddenly find myself in a slightly embarrassing position relative to someone else in a crowded pub, for example, and I didn't pay attention, I couldn't tell if it was because the way I was moving or if it was because of someone else. But if someone said something I'll just replay it. Works nicely for listening to a language I don't know that well too, I just replay it and translate it. But in a conversation there's no time to do that, so I'm stuck.

(I'm not talking about creating or remembering a sequence of events and playing that in my head as a movie - that's not a problem. But there seems to be an always-on "cache memory" for audio while there's none for visual or other stimuli. For me, at least. What I'm wondering is - do other people have "cache memory" for visual or other input interfaces?)

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

#145

Post by Tor3 »

achenatx wrote: post #92
m3kw9 wrote: post #89

I’m not getting how someone can close their eyes and a high res picture shows up like the image on your desktop background? Is that even possible?

yes some people dont have to close their eyes.

It makes no difference for me if I close my eyes or not. On the other hand the ball isn't as clear as a real image, most of the time, I see the black pentagons but if I try to count them I lose focus on the ones I'm not currently counting.

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

#146

Post by Tor3 »

tgb wrote: post #26
missingrib wrote: post #3

I'm worried I have this but I'm not completely sure I do. My dreams are not very vivid at all and usually I just "know" that things are happening in them instead of vividly seeing what's going on. However I can hear music very clearly in my head. If asked to visualize, say, an apple in my head I really don't see it very vividly at all. It's depressing if I'm being honest.

Your descriptions of dreams is what my visual imagination is like, but my dreams are completely vivid. On rare occaisions, I'm aware of the transition from non-dream to dream which is like a lightbulb switching on and suddenly my visual imagination goes from "there exists a face" to "I see a face, with color and texture and motion as if it were in front of me". For sound, I can imagine sound and hear it essentially e…

> when on the verge of sleep my sound imagination can switch on and I hear music as if I were at a concert hall - dramatically different from my day-to-day experience.

I used to be like that in the past. I would sit in a chair and the music would come. Then I knew I was close to sleeping, and it happened every night when going to bed. When I woke up the final stage of sleeping also had music, then it was suddenly, brutally switched off and I was awake. It felt as real as if it was heard live. The thing is, the music was always something I'd never heard before, and it was huge and with lots of instruments. Classical, mostly. It was very similar to the "music everywhere" experience in the Salaxian ship described in the novel "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency".

For various reasons I went through a sleep-deprived phase, and after that time I lost the music. No music when going to sleep, and none when waking up. After many years I started to get a different experience, I would dream about music events (watching some band, for example, or some other event), hear nice (non-classical) music, and, if I woke up, trying to find a pen and write down the chords or the music - but it fades so quickly that after writing down the beginning it would all be gone.

The brain is the strangest thing.

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

#147

Post by Tor3 »

cortic wrote: post #61
jjk166 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at your computer screen. Really take it in. Where is the banner? Where is the exit button? What is the color of your underwear? Perhaps you will remember what color underwear you put on this morning, perhaps you will check, but it would be pretty weird if your underwear's color was constantly on your mind. Nevertheless, I doubt you would argue that your underwear did not have color while you weren't thinking of…

I think you are cheating a bit, first the instruction was to picture a pirate, not a bit of one. Second, the exercises purpose is to demonstrate that missing information in an image is obvious whereas missing information in a mental image is not. And the point is that picturing something to many feels the same as looking at a picture, but in actual fact that feeling is an illusion. >my perception of my visual thought…

> I think you are cheating a bit, first the instruction was to picture a pirate, not a bit of one.

But the idea that when you see a (real) picture, or scene in the real world, you actually see it all - thats an illusion. The mind doesn't work that way. You only see the little bit you're focusing on, but the brain tries to trick you into believing that you see it all. What really happens is that when you want to know about the trousers you focus on the trousers. Until you do that you don't actually know. If someone asks you to describe details about the pirate's clothes you'll first scan every part sequentially, add what you see to a list of answers, and then answer. Things work the same when you imagine a picture (for those who can do that) - you'll know the details only when you focus on each detail, and, as the image wasn't a physical one on the table top the mind fills in as and when it's needed. Just as when you process a physical picture.

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

#148

Post by cortic »

Tor3 wrote: post #147
cortic wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are cheating a bit, first the instruction was to picture a pirate, not a bit of one. Second, the exercises purpose is to demonstrate that missing information in an image is obvious whereas missing information in a mental image is not. And the point is that picturing something to many feels the same as looking at a picture, but in actual fact that feeling is an illusion. >my perception of my visual thought…

> I think you are cheating a bit, first the instruction was to picture a pirate, not a bit of one. But the idea that when you see a (real) picture, or scene in the real world, you actually see it all - that s an illusion. The mind doesn't work that way. You only see the little bit you're focusing on, but the brain tries to trick you into believing that you see it all. What really happens is that when you want to know…

Are you really saying that if i gave you a picture of a pirate with no pants on, you wouldn't notice unless i asked you what color his pants were?

A glance at the image would tell you those kinds of things, a 'glance' at a mental image should tell you the same, but it doesn't.

I agree that our experience of sight is an illusion as well, but its demonstrably different to the illusion of our experience of imagined imagery.

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

#149

Post by yencabulator »

smabie wrote: post #119
yencabulator wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dreams are very spatial, contain movement, indistinct dialogue, and sometimes an "emphatic" sensation of feelings of the characters present. There's pretty much no color, no exact shape, clothing detail etc. No surface has any pattern, really. But I know extremely clearly how 3 people in my dream were positioned relative to each other and the room.

How about doing math in your head? If I couldn't visualize the actual numbers I don't think I could do it at all.

I definitely don't "see a number" in front of me. There is some sort of shortcut memory that says 7 * 6=42, of course.

For massaging an equation into the desired form, I see its "shape" (abstract from the numbers, like we had to in school with variables) and know what changes of shape are desirable. More complex math, let's say, 700 * 13, I do in my head pretty much like those equations; shuffle it to be 7 * (10+3) * 100, (7 * 10 + 7 * 3) * 100, etc. In no part of that do I see the figure of the number seven; there's a "slot" that's a concept of seven, but it's not the shape of the drawn number.

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

#150

Post by Tor3 »

cortic wrote: post #148
Tor3 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you are cheating a bit, first the instruction was to picture a pirate, not a bit of one. But the idea that when you see a (real) picture, or scene in the real world, you actually see it all - that s an illusion. The mind doesn't work that way. You only see the little bit you're focusing on, but the brain tries to trick you into believing that you see it all. What really happens is that when you want to know…

Are you really saying that if i gave you a picture of a pirate with no pants on, you wouldn't notice unless i asked you what color his pants were? A glance at the image would tell you those kinds of things, a 'glance' at a mental image should tell you the same, but it doesn't. I agree that our experience of sight is an illusion as well, but its demonstrably different to the illusion of our experience of imagined imag…

If there's something in a scene or picture that sticks out, like a green vest or a red spot in an otherwise gray image then your consciousness is made aware of this by whatever processing elements the visual system does for you. So your focus gets drawn to the missing pants (unless something else gets a higher priority - ref. the gorilla suit experiment).

But that's beside the point. For me or you to have a mental image of a pirate with no pants on we'll have to create that image in our minds first, with missing pants and all, so how can you compare that with being presented with a picture on a table?

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