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Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

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Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#71

Post by spiralx »

racingmars wrote: post #48
joedevon wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been scared to take the VVIQ test because I guess, in the back of my mind, I feared, or kinda knew...that I have aphantasia. Even spoke about aphantasia at an accessibility talk a couple days ago. I finally pushed myself and took the test tonight. Of the 5 choices: 1. No image at all, I only “know” I am thinking of the object 2. Dim and vague image 3. Moderately realistic and vivid 4. Realistic and reasonably vi…

> and blown away that people actually see sheep when counting sheep hahahaha... yeah, I 100% relate to the feeling. When I learned about aphantasia as an adult, so much of what I've heard people say throughout my life suddenly made so much more sense from the perspective of, "oh, wow, people really mean something so different than what I experience when they say that." > Or that reading a book means literally seeing…

> Yeah. People say things like "I don't like the movie because it's not what I pictured in my mind" or "the character doesn't look like what I pictured while reading the book." I always assumed they just meant what I would mean if I said something like that... based on the literal description on the page, the character in the movie doesn't match the described hair color, height, etc. But no... I have more recently realized they mean they literally have an almost photographic picture in their mind of the character as they imagine it when they are reading the book. So wild.

Yeah it's a weird experience recontextualising something that's such a qualitative difference from the norm and that crops up so frequently yet so subtly throughout your life. I read books voraciously and incredibly quickly and I'm pretty sure not having to engage in visualisation helps with that speed. And also why I found Tolkien and his endless descriptions of the scenery incredibly tedious :)

Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#72

Post by spiralx »

thegabriele wrote: post #50
racingmars wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am very skeptical about the concept of aphantasia. > Also, it is near impossible to report objectively about your inner processes in a useful way. I agree that discussing our mental/inner processes is difficult due to a lack of a common frame of reference on which to base descriptions. (I'm reminded of McCoy and Spock's conversation in Star Trek IV... "Are you telling me I'd have to die to discuss your experience…

What if i ask you to visualize the road from your residence to the first stop you usually make? Kinda like using google street, but in your mind...Do you visualize nothing of the streets, the buildings, the crossroads, trees and the like? Do you orient yourself just by "instructions"? Thanks

I can recall visual "snapshots" of my road and places I know, but I can't hold them in mind or do anything with them, and as far as I can tell those flickers of visual memory are in part reconstructed from facts about those places, general knowledge and other snippets of visual memory. I very rarely don't know where I am or how to get somewhere, but that's based on knowing the connections between places as a network, not visualising a journey.

Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#73

Post by WaffleIronMaker »

fwlr wrote: post #28

Research and discussion of mental imagery has always confused me. It seems like there is a perennial surprise at conditions like aphantasia, or of discoveries that some people have high fidelity mental imagery while others have low fidelity mental imagery. But one of the very first major published papers on mental imagery, arguably the paper that opened this topic up to scientific inquiry, was a statistical study of…

Regarding aphantasia, I've had a lot of anecdotal success with this image [1]. I'm personally about a 2, and I've found that this test tends to be quiet understandable and revealing to a variety of audiences.

Anecdotally, I gave this chart to my friends in my school's band (N=6), and none of them had aphantasia (excluding me), and two of them reported hyperphantasia, and intensely vivid audiovisual imagination. I also gave this chart to my friends in software engineering and cybersecurity (N=4), and two of them also had aphantasia.

I'm hesitant to draw conclusions, given a small sample size, but I'd hypothesize that there is a larger proportion of aphantasic individuals in STEM than in the arts.

[1] https://twitter.com/backus/status/1091203973246111744?s=20

Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#74

Post by kordlessagain »

WaffleIronMaker wrote: post #73
fwlr wrote: post #28

Research and discussion of mental imagery has always confused me. It seems like there is a perennial surprise at conditions like aphantasia, or of discoveries that some people have high fidelity mental imagery while others have low fidelity mental imagery. But one of the very first major published papers on mental imagery, arguably the paper that opened this topic up to scientific inquiry, was a statistical study of…

Regarding aphantasia, I've had a lot of anecdotal success with this image [1]. I'm personally about a 2, and I've found that this test tends to be quiet understandable and revealing to a variety of audiences. Anecdotally, I gave this chart to my friends in my school's band (N=6), and none of them had aphantasia (excluding me), and two of them reported hyperphantasia, and intensely vivid audiovisual imagination. I als…

One problem with this test is that some people can visualize things like faces better than arbitrary shapes. Or, they may be able to see real things they’ve recently viewed with eyes, in mind. Also, Aphantasia is typically defined as not seeing in mind with will, but some people never see anything in mind, ever.

Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#75

Post by kordlessagain »

IIAOPSW wrote: post #45

Mental images are like a movie set. They only build the parts that are going to be on screen, and even then accuracy and level of detail is only a concern for the parts that are relevant to the plot. Everything else is just shoddily constructed disposable background, often reused in multiple different movies as though filler detail is provided by a common prop manager. At least there's no product placement.

For some this may be true, but for many it won’t. It’s not like thumbs where most people have them and use them to pick things up. Mental imagery is as varied as art itself.

Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#76

Post by smokel »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #62
smokel wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am very skeptical about the concept of aphantasia. For one, I think that visual phantasy can be trained, or at least developed. Also, it is near impossible to report objectively about your inner processes in a useful way. As an example, many people believed for some time that dreams were in black and white, which is obviously not true for everyone. However, this does not imply that dreams are in color. It seems mor…

> It may well be that some people actually have some form of aphantasia, but all the self reporting of amazing visual powers or the lack thereof seems more indicative of peoples' egos than the actual differences in what they are capable of. I have it, and I struggle to understand your skepticism. What’s the ego here? I’m proud of not being able to do something? My assumption is that the visual processing layer is sti…

Thank you for your response, it is nice to hear from someone who considers themselves to have aphantasia.

With "ego" I meant to refer to people boasting about their abilities to visualize everything to the greatest amount of detail in their heads, which to me seems likely untrue except for very rare cases.

I think reported phantasia (as opposed to aphantasia, and if there is such a word) is in a way similar to clairvoyancy or having a sixth sense. Some people report having such a gift, but it is very hard to test if that really exists, and up to what level. The end result may be that a lot of people consider themselves aphantasic, because they lack an internal Unity engine.

As a simple proof that visual phantasy has its limits, consider artists who paint fantasy with oil paint and put in lighting and shadows. This is typically either very bad, or based on photographic reference images. Artists who are, by exception, fairly good at this, require insane amounts of training. There are always strange exceptions, but these seem to be one in a million. (Stephen Wiltshire and Kim Jung Gi come to mind, but even they do not perform accurate shading).

Obviously all misunderstanding is probably based on me not knowing a clear definition for aphantasia, and I should read more about it. Does it mean that a person is unable, even with a lot of training, to form any visual images in their heads? This would seem either unlikely, or related to memory problems, such as you describe. In the latter case, is aphantasia simply a symptom or result of the memory problem, or is it a phenomenon by itself?

Again, I am skeptical, I am not denying that it exists (but perhaps not as much as self-reported on HN and Reddit). And I most certainly would not want to hurt anyone's feelings if they suffer from it! My apologies if that is the case, and please point out if I'm continuing to do so.

(For reference: I am a trained visual artist and mathematician -- I can visualize and draw pretty decent images, and read and write code. I know there's a difference in working with these, but I doubt it's as big as some people make me want to believe.)

Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#77

Post by TechBro8615 »

fwlr wrote: post #28

Research and discussion of mental imagery has always confused me. It seems like there is a perennial surprise at conditions like aphantasia, or of discoveries that some people have high fidelity mental imagery while others have low fidelity mental imagery. But one of the very first major published papers on mental imagery, arguably the paper that opened this topic up to scientific inquiry, was a statistical study of…

I'd like to know what is complementary to high fidelity visualization, e.g. do people with aphantasia have a more developed internal monologue? Personally I can visualize images in high fidelity but I don't really have a monologue, so I wonder if the opposite is true as well.

Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#78

Post by ItsMonkk »

thegabriele wrote: post #50
racingmars wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am very skeptical about the concept of aphantasia. > Also, it is near impossible to report objectively about your inner processes in a useful way. I agree that discussing our mental/inner processes is difficult due to a lack of a common frame of reference on which to base descriptions. (I'm reminded of McCoy and Spock's conversation in Star Trek IV... "Are you telling me I'd have to die to discuss your experience…

What if i ask you to visualize the road from your residence to the first stop you usually make? Kinda like using google street, but in your mind...Do you visualize nothing of the streets, the buildings, the crossroads, trees and the like? Do you orient yourself just by "instructions"? Thanks

It might help as someone who believes they have aphantasia that the steps that I do in my head to list out the steps to go somewhere is identical to the steps I would list out to tell someone how to code something up. If you were to ask me for landmarks like stores that I would pass I would be able to do so, but I wouldn't be thinking of what they look like while listing them out just as I wouldn't be thinking of text while coding.

It's less instructions and more a full understanding of the structure at play.

Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#79

Post by mistermann »

robobro wrote: post #8

Something I find interesting about visualizing things in my mind's eye: I can't get a grasp on where, exactly, I'm seeing them. I'm not seeing them in front of me, to my left or right, above or below, behind me, inside me... they just seem to exist off somewhere completely different. When I imagine a scenario like the one the paper talks about, the person coming into the room and knocking a ball off a table, I feel l…

> Something I find interesting about visualizing things in my mind's eye: I can't get a grasp on where, exactly, I'm seeing them. I'm not seeing them in front of me, to my left or right, above or below, behind me, inside me... they just seem to exist off somewhere completely different.

Now consider what's going on under the covers when each individual contemplates "the (simulation of the) events of January 6" or various other culture war issues, without having any knowledge of the magic that's going on under the covers, a state of mind for which there seems to be no way out of, for most (including "standard" intellectuals).

To me, this is highly similar to cultural beliefs before and after the first enlightenment and rise of science, hopefully the second one gets here before we destroy ourselves with our delusions of understanding due to insufficient fundamentalist cognitive ideologies.

Re: Images in the mind’s eye are quick sketches that lack simple, real-world details

#80

Post by interroboink »

theobromananda wrote: post #70
lll-o-lll wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It may well be that some people actually have some form of aphantasia, but all the self reporting of amazing visual powers or the lack thereof seems more indicative of peoples' egos than the actual differences in what they are capable of. I have it, and I struggle to understand your skepticism. What’s the ego here? I’m proud of not being able to do something? My assumption is that the visual processing layer is sti…

I do not get the ego angle, but I am also skeptic of aphantasia. My own experience could be described by either 1 ("no image") or 5 ("perfectly vivid") in any questionaire concerning it - when I imagine anything, there is no image at all, yet I know I "see" something. E.g. I can think of a barn, and there is the mental impression of the shape, the color and so on, yet nothing at all is seen. I believe most of the dif…

I think another person in this thread pointed out a good example — reading a book, then being disappointed when seeing the movie because the characters didn't look onscreen how they imagined them when reading. Not w/regard to the textual descriptions, but w/regard to the other visual bits that their mind filled in.

This is a widespread phenomenon; no shortage of examples. It has happened to me, too.

There are some people in this thread who claim they haven't experienced that, and had a hard time understanding what that would even mean. These seem like pretty different mental/visual experiences, so it seems reasonable to have a word to describe it.

I agree it's hard to measure such internal things exactly, and it's full of self-reporting problems, but the core concept doesn't seem like purely a semantics issue.

----

Aside: I once had a conversation about thinking, and my friends were surprised at the idea of thinking without using words. But that is very much my experience! It is something I semi-trained myself to do (I felt that translating into words slowed me down), but I think it was a natural tendency, too. But it can be likewise difficult to convince someone it's a real thing without resorting to brain scans (:

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