Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

nautil.us

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 53 posts

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#31

Post by htss2013 »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #21
weinzierl wrote: post #19

"I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses. I know what a top hat is. I can describe its main characteristics. I can even draw an above-average impression of one on a piece of paper for you. But I can’t visualize it mentally. What’s wrong with me?" How can you draw a thing without visualizing it? Do the coordinates of the vertices appear in your head or instructions about…

This is an absolutely correct question to ask. It's also a good question to ask people who claim they can visualize things well, but can't draw. I think people vastly, vastly overstate how well they can actually visualize something in their mind. Most people can't visualize a circle of a solid color and change the color in their mind, let alone visualize a face or anything significant.

Humans seem optimized for detailed recognition of visuals, not reproduction of them. Makes evolutionary sense because you can easily see the utility of detailed recognition, but what justifies the additional burden of detailed reproduction?

People who can draw detailed reproductions are either oddballs with photographic memory, or they've perfected the skill of adjusting their drawings as they develop gradient descent style using detailed recognition as the judge of where to stop.

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#32

Post by perrygeo »

weinzierl wrote: post #19

"I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses. I know what a top hat is. I can describe its main characteristics. I can even draw an above-average impression of one on a piece of paper for you. But I can’t visualize it mentally. What’s wrong with me?" How can you draw a thing without visualizing it? Do the coordinates of the vertices appear in your head or instructions about…

> How can you draw a thing without visualizing it?

This is a great question. I have an inability to draw things from memory (despite being able to recognize them immediately and form strong narrative memories of them). This realization is what lead to me to think I have aphantasia.

A few years ago, I decided to draw a face everyday from memory (of someone I knew well visually) to see if I could train myself to get better. After 6 months of daily practice, my faces still looked like cartoons. My technique got better from rote memorization, but importantly I never got to the point where I could recognize my subject from my own drawing. They all just looked like random people poorly drawn. I can recognize the mistakes as soon as they're on paper but during the initial creation I feel like I'm guessing where the lines go based on some verbal/narrative structure ("I know she has long hair, how about this..."), then saying "hmm that's not right". I have no reference image in my mind to work off of.

But I can immediately pattern match against my drawing to see how far off I am, which means the visual information is encoded in my brain somewhere. Still no clue on how to voluntarily access that memory - it's as if my visual systems only fire when photons hit my eyeballs. Which only helps after I've made my shitty drawing, not while I'm drawing.

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#33

Post by htss2013 »

japostoles wrote: post #3

I'm struggling to figure out if my mind's eye "sees" anything, or if I'm just imagining the concept of the item I'm thinking about. If I'm comparing this vision to having a dream, say, it's certainly not visual. "...there is a simple and helpful test that can give you a clue into whether you may have it: Close your eyes and try to imagine an apple, seeing it mentally in your mind's eye. If you can see anything (anyth…

I think I see detailed renderings, eg, of a person's face. But if I try to focus on the face and really examine its details I can't. It's like that experience of trying to read a book in a dream but when you go to read the lines, they're blurry.

I suspect when we see what appear to be detailed renderings in our imagination, we are really seeing a compressed "essence" of the thing and our brains trick us into thinking we could focus on the details if we wanted to, when we really can't. It's basically a conservation of energy thing.

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#34

Post by jddj »

d-lisp wrote: post #18

When I decide to see things in my mind, if I don't focus enough to keep them still they never cease to become something else than they represent. If I imagine a luxurious green field with an apple tree, immediately if I don't control the scene mentally to conserve it, some apple will fall producing a noise, some mad cow will run into the fov, trying to hit the apple with its horn, yelling and distracting me or whatev…

This happens to me only if I'm particularly underslept.

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#35

Post by eplawless »

rogerclark wrote: post #26

"In my head, the way it happens is..." Okay, sure, man. Whatever you say. Decades of research have proven that people cannot be trusted to describe how their own minds work. We are unreliable narrators of our own experience even in the best conditions, and having a zeitgeisty, quirky trait like aphantasia to wear as a badge will obviously skew the results even further. Personally, I don't believe for a second that th…

Here's a recent study which provides physiological evidence of aphantasia: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#36

Post by circuit10 »

throw1234651234 wrote: post #21
weinzierl wrote: post #19

"I have what is called “aphantasia,” the absence of voluntary imagination of the senses. I know what a top hat is. I can describe its main characteristics. I can even draw an above-average impression of one on a piece of paper for you. But I can’t visualize it mentally. What’s wrong with me?" How can you draw a thing without visualizing it? Do the coordinates of the vertices appear in your head or instructions about…

This is an absolutely correct question to ask. It's also a good question to ask people who claim they can visualize things well, but can't draw. I think people vastly, vastly overstate how well they can actually visualize something in their mind. Most people can't visualize a circle of a solid color and change the color in their mind, let alone visualize a face or anything significant.

I can definitely visualise those things in a way that sort of feels like seeing it but when I do that my brain really works with abstract concepts where if you focus on something in particular you make up the finer detail on the fly

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#37

Post by circuit10 »

htss2013 wrote: post #33
japostoles wrote: post #3

I'm struggling to figure out if my mind's eye "sees" anything, or if I'm just imagining the concept of the item I'm thinking about. If I'm comparing this vision to having a dream, say, it's certainly not visual. "...there is a simple and helpful test that can give you a clue into whether you may have it: Close your eyes and try to imagine an apple, seeing it mentally in your mind's eye. If you can see anything (anyth…

I think I see detailed renderings, eg, of a person's face. But if I try to focus on the face and really examine its details I can't. It's like that experience of trying to read a book in a dream but when you go to read the lines, they're blurry. I suspect when we see what appear to be detailed renderings in our imagination, we are really seeing a compressed "essence" of the thing and our brains trick us into thinking…

Or you make up the details on the fly as you focus in

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#38

Post by karmakaze »

japostoles wrote: post #3

I'm struggling to figure out if my mind's eye "sees" anything, or if I'm just imagining the concept of the item I'm thinking about. If I'm comparing this vision to having a dream, say, it's certainly not visual. "...there is a simple and helpful test that can give you a clue into whether you may have it: Close your eyes and try to imagine an apple, seeing it mentally in your mind's eye. If you can see anything (anyth…

I took the https://aphantasia.com/vviq test which said that I'm a Hypophantasic:

> A thinking style that relies less on visualization and more on other sense modalities or other imaginative processes to perceive and understand the world.

I agree with this assessment. I had no idea that I was near one end of this scale. I can only focus on characteristics of the imagined thing rather than its image--like conceptual fragments. I can focus on a specific thing, like a specific facial proportion and can conjure up an estimate but it's not much more than a couple blobs with relative size/spacing.

An interesting thing that I had noticed earlier in life is that I can often recognize things instantly from such a fragment, like the gait of a person off in the distance, or even the make/model of cars by the shape of headlamps at dusk.

An opposing/complementary thing is that I have on occasion experienced lucid dreaming where I had loose control of the scene.

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#39

Post by kagakuninja »

rogerclark wrote: post #26

"In my head, the way it happens is..." Okay, sure, man. Whatever you say. Decades of research have proven that people cannot be trusted to describe how their own minds work. We are unreliable narrators of our own experience even in the best conditions, and having a zeitgeisty, quirky trait like aphantasia to wear as a badge will obviously skew the results even further. Personally, I don't believe for a second that th…

Sorry, that is how it is. I am a meditator, and recently taking a class on tantra, I can't visualize for shit. Other people are seeing fucking Avalokiteshvara dressed in silk and jewels, I just see a fuzzy void.

I've also had lucid dreams where I am flying around in a gray void. Interestingly, I have had some hypnogogic states where I could see a page of writing, but I have no ability to summon any image at will.

Re: My Brain Doesn’t Picture Things

#40

Post by tymscar »

karmakaze wrote: post #38
japostoles wrote: post #3

I'm struggling to figure out if my mind's eye "sees" anything, or if I'm just imagining the concept of the item I'm thinking about. If I'm comparing this vision to having a dream, say, it's certainly not visual. "...there is a simple and helpful test that can give you a clue into whether you may have it: Close your eyes and try to imagine an apple, seeing it mentally in your mind's eye. If you can see anything (anyth…

I took the https://aphantasia.com/vviq test which said that I'm a Hypophantasic: > A thinking style that relies less on visualization and more on other sense modalities or other imaginative processes to perceive and understand the world. I agree with this assessment. I had no idea that I was near one end of this scale. I can only focus on characteristics of the imagined thing rather than its image--like conceptual fr…

I think I am very much like that myself. I notice it most when I think about a certain logo in my head for example and while I have the characteristics of it,i.e. that its heart shape and I can somewhat visualise that, when I check out the real logo I notice that the heart was lopsided. And from there on I always “see” it lopsided. So while it sure feels like I can see something, in practice maybe I don’t?
Post reply on HN