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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

#111

Post by Daub »

mmh0000 wrote: post #105
neongreen wrote: post #88

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…

You’ve just made me realize that my brain is (more) broken than I thought it was. This explains why I lose every argument with my wife about things that happened in the past.

Perhaps you just think you are loosing.

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

#112

Post by Daub »

majiy wrote: post #31

If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain". The image I see in my mind is basically an empty paper, with an arrow pointing to the left labeled "mountain", an arrow to the right labeled "wood", and an arrow to the middle labeled "path". Maybe, maybe the mountain is represented with two lines /\ and the path is a winding line ~~~ but that…

> If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain".

As someone who paints landscapes, I have a huge amount of trouble with this prompt. I am trying to construct something that is topographically feasible and artistically agreeable. I can imagine walking through a wood, but not alongside one. I know (of course) that it is possible to walk alongside a wood, but every time I try to picture it, my mind balks. Also, combining a wood with a mountain I find tough, other that a mountain covered by trees. I think it is because of their genealogical dissimilarity.

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

#113

Post by speedylight »

quantum2022 wrote: post #5

I wonder if this could be induced in people who suffer from hallucinations to reduce or eliminate their symptoms? Maybe their system is rigged into overdrive the other way. It says on wikipedia that there are 'cases reported of acquired aphantasia'.

I don’t think hallucinations and having a “minds eye” are the same thing. A minds eye is different in the sense that it’s entirely separate from the “visual feed” you get from your eyes, they’re not combined so you can’t really mistake them as a hallucination; hallucinations trick you into seeing things that are not really there such as when people with schizophrenia can see people who are not actually with them — I remember seeing this guy on Instagram with a proper schizophrenia diagnosis that showcased this very phenomenon in action and the way he dealt with it is by using his phones camera to check whether the person they are perceiving is real or not. You never have to do that if you have hyperphantasia (the opposite of aphantasia) because it’s very easy to tell whats real and what’s not, and more importantly, it takes mental effort to create and maintain these imaginations in your mind and you can have total control over them.

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

#114

Post by electrodank »

For those of you who do not suffer from dead-on aphantasia but simply have bad visualization/memory recall: you may find great industry in learning to draw, paint, sculpt and immersing yourself in perceptory recall to essentially, in an analogous manner of speaking, strengthen weak muscles. You may go so far as to find the book “ The training of the memory in art and the education of the artist” by B., L. Horace to be of interest. Do not skip on music and try to find ways to engage physically as best as possible. Perception works best in totality, and people who have strong visual recall often have other strong recall functions as well, disabilities notwithstanding.

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

#115

Post by SaidinWoT »

SirRoderic wrote: post #104
auggierose wrote: post #97

What frustrates me about things like that, there seem to be no proper tests for that. Shouldn't there be an easy test for Aphantasia, for example, that doesn't ask me things like "do you have a mind's eye" (what does that even mean?). Such a test should not ask the test subjects to self-diagnose themselves, but it should objectively test abilities and put them on a scale. Anything else really is not that helpful.

Speaking from experience as an aphantasic person, I think it is definitely possible to test objectively. For instance certain IQ tests will test the subject's ability to identify what a pictured object would look like if it were rotated in a certain way. I have taken just such a test where spatial rotations, IIRC including multi-step ones, were a component, and I scored close to 99th percentile on every section excep…

This is actually one of the things about aphantasia that has already had a (small) study[0], and the results are actually the opposite! The participants with aphantasia were more likely to both (a) take longer to answer and (b) be _correct_.

I personally have aphantasia and have quite good spatial reasoning, including with mentally rotating objects. I think it's fair to assume that visualization and spatial reasoning are mostly (but not entirely) orthogonal spectra, and it's completely possible for people to fall anywhere on either, just based on how their brain developed its internal strategies throughout normal life.

[0] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/26792259_Loss_of_im...

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

#116

Post by canjobear »

auggierose wrote: post #97

What frustrates me about things like that, there seem to be no proper tests for that. Shouldn't there be an easy test for Aphantasia, for example, that doesn't ask me things like "do you have a mind's eye" (what does that even mean?). Such a test should not ask the test subjects to self-diagnose themselves, but it should objectively test abilities and put them on a scale. Anything else really is not that helpful.

If you’re looking for objective measures, aphantasia correlates inversely with objective measures of visual memory.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/

But you can also imagine tests based on introspection which are better than just straight up asking how vivid your mental imagery is.

For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?

For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless. It has no color because it’s just an abstract concept. For me it is a white outline on a black background, very vividly.

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

#117

Post by auggierose »

SaidinWoT wrote: post #115
SirRoderic wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking from experience as an aphantasic person, I think it is definitely possible to test objectively. For instance certain IQ tests will test the subject's ability to identify what a pictured object would look like if it were rotated in a certain way. I have taken just such a test where spatial rotations, IIRC including multi-step ones, were a component, and I scored close to 99th percentile on every section excep…

This is actually one of the things about aphantasia that has already had a (small) study[0], and the results are actually the opposite! The participants with aphantasia were more likely to both (a) take longer to answer and (b) be _correct_. I personally have aphantasia and have quite good spatial reasoning, including with mentally rotating objects. I think it's fair to assume that visualization and spatial reasoning…

Yes, objective tests must somehow take into account the multitude of coping mechanisms that people with the condition have developed. "Spatial reasoning" for example is very close to logical reasoning, and I don't see why people with Aphantasia shouldn't be very good at that, albeit slower in "spatial" mode.

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

#118

Post by khazhoux »

perrygeo wrote: post #68

There seems to be a higher-than-average incidence of Aphantasia in tech folks, at least as self-reported. Our visual cortex is a huge part of our brain and in the absence of visual input can be "rewired" to other purposes. Theory: I have no evidence for this but its plausible that our obsession with solving hard, abstract logic puzzles all day (and night) somehow hijacks part of our visual cortex. Effectively reprogr…

> There seems to be a higher-than-average incidence of Aphantasia in tech folks, at least as self-reported.

But you're probably only reading about aphantasia in tech forums like this one.

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

#119

Post by khazhoux »

MoSattler wrote: post #20

I am curious: do people with aphantasia dream?

I just checked... yes, I dream with imagery.

But I cannot hold an image in my head. With concentration I can will an image into existence, but it does not hold still for even an instant. A shapeless tangle will interpolate into an apple and then back to a tangle.

But recently I realized I can visualize color, which was interesting.

And my audio/music recall is excellent.

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

#120

Post by khazhoux »

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…

Erm... here's a simpler test:

(1) picture a circle

(2) do you see a circle?

(3) do you still see a circle?

Even replace "circle" with "straight line." I think tests like above (balls, people, details) miss the point that in actual aphantasia you literally visualize nothing

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