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Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

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Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#31

Post by merpnderp »

That was seriously uncool and no fun. I almost immediately saw crosshatching bars and shapes maybe like fractals, and then the center of the screen seemed to form a white sphere and a f'ing nightmare came crawling out of it filling me with dread, and then I closed the page. Took about a minute.

Did it a second time maybe 30 minutes later and it quickly resolved into spinning wind turbines blades, dozens of them, circling the middle of the screen, in a random circle-ish flow that moved like waves. After a few minute of that, it seemed like I was falling through a warp tunnel with stars connected by glowing arms flashing by, then hands and arms started to reach up from the bottom of the screen and I turned it off.

I just let my eyes relax and didn't really focus on the screen, but when I did focus, that's usually when the unpleasant images appeared.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#32

Post by miloignis »

postalrat wrote: post #27

Somewhat unrelated but has anyone here experience fever dreams where you are surrounded by something you can't quite comprehend and can't do anything but try to comprehend it? It's almost like a huge maze, grid, or some other pattern but painful to look at. The dream tends to be extremely unpleasant and usually returns after falling back asleep. I was trying to explain it to a friend the other day and didn't do a ver…

I think I have experienced something similar, where I have to find the right configuration for some pattern, sometimes grounded in like how my sheets and blanket wrap around my body in order to create or fix some dream machine. It's not a fully formed concept, but I'm trying to fix it and arrange the pattern in my mostly-sleeping state - it's always impossible and I have to recognize what I'm doing, fully wake myself up, and then try to go back to sleep to get out of it.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#34

Post by hairofadog »

irjustin wrote: post #25
dorkwood wrote: post #21

I watched this for ten minutes and didn't see anything (apart from a flashing red screen). I'm supposed to be the artistic one in the family, so I can't help but feel slightly disdapointed. I've always suspected that people who claimed they could visualize things with great clarity were lying (the "images" in my mind's eye are very fleeting, lacking in detail, and can't be focused on -- like they're on the extremes o…

Question: When asked to remember a person's face, can you see it in your head/"mind's eye"? FWIW, I don't think the ability to visualize something specifically in your "mind's eye" has a lot to do with creativity. I interpret this as more about direct recall of memory. The stronger the visuals the more likely you are to be able to recall a specific event/visual in more detail (whether it's accurate is up for debate).…

It’s a very interesting question, because I can call someone’s face into memory, but as if I’m seeing it in my peripheral vision, which is to say the details aren’t there. I have some experience drawing, and I can knock off a pretty good likeness, but I couldn’t do that from memory. Yet I can definitely picture their face.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#35

Post by tonystride »

postalrat wrote: post #27

Somewhat unrelated but has anyone here experience fever dreams where you are surrounded by something you can't quite comprehend and can't do anything but try to comprehend it? It's almost like a huge maze, grid, or some other pattern but painful to look at. The dream tends to be extremely unpleasant and usually returns after falling back asleep. I was trying to explain it to a friend the other day and didn't do a ver…

Yes, for me I usually get trapped in a fractal maze of whatever media I consumed last. Video games, tv shows, etc. after my second Moderna dose I binged ‘The Circle’ on Netflix, that was a mistake when I dipped into the fever dreams...

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#36

Post by endisneigh »

Watching the flicker thing for a few moments made me think: is it possible that some sort of sensory stimuli could paralyze you?

It would be fascinating if some crazy combination of stimuli could have sort of a “reset human” sort of effect. Given that we’re revolved organisms and not machines it’s hard to imagine any evolutionary purpose, but it’s fun to think about.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#37

Post by nasalgoat »

Absolutely nothing for me, but after reading up on Aphantasia and the link it has to a lack of autobiographical memory, it makes sense. I have a condition called Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory (http://sdamstudy.weebly.com/what-is-sdam.html) which means I can barely remember anything from my life and what little I do remember is vague and fuzzy.

Intereesting correlation.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#38

Post by Jakobeha »

postalrat wrote: post #27

Somewhat unrelated but has anyone here experience fever dreams where you are surrounded by something you can't quite comprehend and can't do anything but try to comprehend it? It's almost like a huge maze, grid, or some other pattern but painful to look at. The dream tends to be extremely unpleasant and usually returns after falling back asleep. I was trying to explain it to a friend the other day and didn't do a ver…

Not quite, but I experience very bad logic and logical inconsistencies in dreams. For example:

- Can't even do basic math, or I solve it wrong (e.g. 2 + 3 = 7) - Impossible (non-euclidian) spatial arrangement - Leave out big gaps of details, which I have to fill in if I remember the dream. Not that I'm forgetting stuff, I just never thought of it in the first place - Misremember stuff from the past

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#39

Post by armchairhacker »

The Ganzflicker is very cool.

I only did it for 2 minutes, and it wasn't strong or overpowering. But I saw a) a blurry checkerboard, and b) ripples coming out of the 4 corners of the screen.

It turns out, 4 ripples coming out of the screen creates a blurry checkerboard! See https://www.falstad.com/ripple/, set to "Example: Four Sources". That was exactly what I saw, but sped up, in red instead of green, and the ripples came out of the corners instead of east/north/west/south.

Re: Simple test reveals if your mental images are more vivid than other people's

#40

Post by the_af »

dorkwood wrote: post #21

I watched this for ten minutes and didn't see anything (apart from a flashing red screen). I'm supposed to be the artistic one in the family, so I can't help but feel slightly disdapointed. I've always suspected that people who claimed they could visualize things with great clarity were lying (the "images" in my mind's eye are very fleeting, lacking in detail, and can't be focused on -- like they're on the extremes o…

> I've always suspected that people who claimed they could visualize things with great clarity were lying

I know this will do nothing to dispel your suspicion, but I can see people and places with great clarity, detail, in color and moving, and if I focus on them they are not fleeting (I get involuntary images that are fleeting though).

You'll be right to dismiss my claim -- I'm some random stranger on the internet after all -- but I can only assure you that not only am I not lying, until very recently I thought this was the norm. In fact, I had to be convinced by a friend who suffers from it that aphantasia is not a hoax. I still cannot understand how someone can be unable to see the face of their loved ones unless they are actually in front of them.

As for the red lights in this experiment: they started to change as my eyes became unfocused, and I got some "hypnotic" dizzy feeling after a couple of minutes, but didn't see any shapes and got bored with it so I closed the window.

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