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Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

theguardian.com

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Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#81

Post by e38383 »

lambdaba wrote: post #56
lesuorac wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not op, but sleeping and shortly after waking (like seconds not minutes) are it for images. I dunno how often you guys dream but a standard night for me is it's dark out and then it's light out without a dream in between.

Ever had a lucid dream?

Yes, it's still the same memory as everything else. It's more like a book or description.

It's still not the norm. I have normal dreams without being wake in them or waking up from them. According to my "research" (asking friends and family) I dream a little bit less often than other people - maybe one dream per week or two.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#82

Post by cstrahan »

constantcrying wrote: post #54
FeistySkink wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? A DB schema is not visual: it's something that lives inside a DBMS. Boxes with arrows is a way to represent it. Text is another one.

>A DB schema is not visual How is it not visual? >Boxes with arrows is a way to represent it. Text is another one. Boxes with arrows are clearly visual. The text, at least, for me just is a representation of those arrows and boxes.

> How is it not visual?

Perhaps it is. But then you should be able to answer: where is that visualization on disk? And I don't mean the encoding thereof, I mean the actual 2D picture you could glance at and immediately recognize. Not rendered with some image viewing program, but literally looking at the disk/SSD (perhaps under a microscope, if necessary) -- that should be doable, because you're claiming that schemas are inherently visual, and certainly that schema exists on disk somewhere, which in turn implies that those boxes and arrows should be visible on the storage medium.

> Boxes with arrows are clearly visual.

You've changed the topic -- no one is saying that boxes and arrows are not clearly visual. Where are those boxes and arrows sketched into an SSD or in memory? Or, would you assert that a database is schema-less until someone draws up a diagram?

The boxes and arrows image representation of a schema is not the schema itself. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Map%E2%80%93territory_relation

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#83

Post by memkit »

menotyou wrote: post #70
tjpnz wrote: post #29

How do you know if you have it?

Quick test: Try to imagine the following and then answer the questions beneath. Imagine a table with a ball on it. A person is approaching the table, pushes the ball gently, and the balls starts to roll. Questions: (1) What color has the ball? (2) Is the person male or female? (3) What material is the table made of? (4) When you answered questions (1)-(3), did you know the answer beforehand, or did you think about wh…

I've found this to be the most reliable test.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#84

Post by xnickb »

devbent wrote: post #77
xnickb wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's the other way around. I was always good at abstract sciences, like math and theoretical physics. Partially because I could operate in my mind with my very own abstractions. But I'm for example very bad at chess and tetris, because I can't visualize. This has been true for me at least since I was 5.

I can own at Tetris but I am miserable at chess. The types of visualization are completely different IMHO.

Well I'm bad compared to top 10% who play at crazy speed. I can't plan top far ahead though which makes me slower. And I'm too old I guess

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#85

Post by neongreen »

madaxe_again wrote: post #41
e38383 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do dream, but most of the time not with a visual representation. It’s more like reading a book. There are very few occasions when I wake up and really have the memory of an image. But this fades so fast that I’m not able to really describe the image. I retain the memory of having a picture in my head. And it’s boring most of the time, because it happens in the middle of a dream and it’s basically just the last fram…

> It’s more like reading a book. This analogy may be less communicative than you think, as for me, reading a book is like watching a movie - I don’t see the words on the page, I see what’s happening in the book.

When I was a kid, I was asked “how do you read so fast?” often and I would always proudly report than I can scan paragraphs and filter out the useless ones without reading them.

For example, I was reading some Pratchett and noticed that I had no idea how the protagonist ended up on a cliff (?). And then realized that I had automatically skipped the paragraph that talked about the cliff ascent, because it was “just a scenery description” and therefore useless.

I also remember having a long argument with my ex-girlfriend about the style of journalism where articles start like “I entered a small, dimly-lit room and Mr Brown, age 53, stood up from his massive oak desk and [blah blah blah]”. Like, this is all just fluff, I want to know what Mr Brown says and thinks and that’s all. I didn’t realize people might actually imagine the scene and enjoy it.

Going back to books — I think I care about how the book sounds more than I care about the plot or the vibe. I loved Lolita solely because the narrator was constantly playing with words, for example.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#86

Post by SamPatt »

BoardsOfCanada wrote: post #37
tambre wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me: yes. Dreaming is the only experience that kinda matches the descriptions of others' mind's eye. Day to day? Just blackness, only the light that comes through the skin of the eyelids.

I think that sounds normal. The mind's eye is more like evoking the sense of seeing something without actually seeing it.

This seems like a major point of confusion on the subject.

I agree with your interpretation, but there are those charts which show varying degrees of clarity of mental images (using an apple), I don't understand how to square that with just invoking the sense instead of actually seeing it.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#87

Post by jart »

e38383 wrote: post #80
boricj wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you hear or imagine sounds in your head?

No, like images it's just the concept of the sound. As I can identify images (also people or faces), I can identify sounds, but I can't imagine them. Instead of a picture of a forest and some cracking of wood, I just have these words in my head and not the real picture/sound. Same for every other sense.

How fast do you read? I can visualize just about anything I've ever seen. I can dream of new visual experiences I've never had. I can even rotate shapes in my head. But I dislike words and I read very slowly (only for English though, with programming I'm a speed reader of code). If you're the opposite of me, then I bet you're able to absorb intelligent high-quality information independent of experience very very quickly. I've heard that people like you make great scholars for that reason.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#88

Post by neongreen »

Alert: if you were happy to learn about aphantasia, you might also be happy to learn about SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory), which I think is correlated with aphantasia.

SDAM is when you know facts about your life, but can’t walk through any or almost any episodes.

Apparently normal people can actually re-live episodes from their past, step by step or.. idk. Somehow. And I don’t know what I had for breakfast today ಠ_ಠ

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#89

Post by ownagefool »

bemmu wrote: post #60
e38383 wrote: post #25

Every time I’m reading about Aphantasia, I’m confused again that people really see stuff in their head. I have basically the same as the person in the article. So, if you want to know anything, AMA. I’m also trying to respond to a few questions which are already asked.

I personally find it hard to believe that people would really experience things so differently. Seems simpler to attribute it to differences in how people describe their internal representations in words. Even for myself it's a little bit unclear and changing how I'm really representing things. One day I might say oh I don't see anything, it's all just concepts (oh no it's aphantasia). On another it would be like ok…

I can't see things in my minds eye. It's not a thing for me

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#90

Post by SuperNinKenDo »

One of the times aphantasia has been brought up here somebody posted a guide to training your brain to see more vivid imagery from someone who alleges they started out aphantasic and trained themselves to not be.

Does anybody have the link, I've been searching for it for like a year since I forgot to backup my bookmarks before a resinstall.

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