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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

#161

Post by margalabargala »

Daub wrote: post #112
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 along…

What part of the world do you live in?

Areas of the American west, with mountains above treeline and meadows, can have exactly this topography.

Example: https://www.google.com/maps/@44.051055,-121.796685,3a,75y,30...

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

#162

Post by prng2021 »

SaidinWoT wrote: post #106
prng2021 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based on the article and the comments here, it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. I'm speculating here because I just saw a movie today at a theater and I can playback scenes in my mind. I can certainly describe a scene with words but that's clearly very limiting. At the very least, I don't have words to map to all the colors my eyes can detect. Do you think that's accurate? Tha…

> it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. > Do you think that's accurate? I don't think someone with aphantasia (of which I am one!) is really capable of assessing this - which details our memories have routinely omitted is an unknown unknown until we're explicitly made conscious of the gap. With regard to your example of a movie, I think you may be overweighting the importance of…

Thanks, those are great points. After more thought, I somewhat agree I was overweighing the value of visualizing things in my mind. I don't know if there are people out there that can actually conjure tastes of food as part of remembering something. I only remember food tastes through language descriptions like sweet, salty etc. So maybe that's analogous to aphantasia. It's just that we're talking about the sense of sight versus taste. From a practical standpoint, there isn't much value even if I could taste something as part of a memory. It would make the memory even stronger and more vivid though.

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

#163

Post by jandrewrogers »

constantcrying wrote: post #15
shafyy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is real. My partner has it. Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. For example, when she walks through an apartment she can instantly draw a blueprint. Or when we move in multi-story building, she knows exactly where we are conceptually (I always get lost). So, these two things don't seem to be connected.

>Interestingly, she is really good it visualizing 3D concepts in her mind, but not images. I don't understand what that is supposed to mean. How can you understand the blueprint of a building without seeing a representation of that building in your head?

This is spatial reasoning, no visualization required. I have always had exceptional spatial reasoning, and while I can visualize it quite well, it is entirely unnecessary for function. My brain contains a detailed model of the topology of space that is quite separate from what the space actually looks like and can reason about it intuitively without visualizing it. This makes things like navigation easy even in places I have never seen before and therefore can’t visualize — I don’t need to know where I am to not be lost.

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

#164

Post by TeaBrain »

khazhoux wrote: post #120
menotyou wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think this hits closer to the mark. For any given description, if a person is able to visualize anything at all, then they don't have the condition. If they do have the condition, then they apparently can't visualize anything.

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

#165

Post by noduerme »

saghm wrote: post #142
lurking_swe wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

correct - it’s like playing an extremely low resolution “replay” of that moment in time.sometimes the frames skip but it’s still visible to me.

Huh, when reading the parent comment I didn't think it applied to me because I felt like I remember stuff that happened in enough detail to walk through the sequences of events that happened, but reading this makes me think that maybe I don't actually have it because it's nothing I'd describe as being able to "watch" it as much as just recall the details. I could potentially imagine a visualization of the vents I rem…

idk. I can watch my memories but I often see myself slightly in the third person in them, as if from over my own shoulder, which imples they're not really what I experienced but more like a reconstruction from place and dialog.

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

#166

Post by bleakenthusiasm »

This makes so many moments of my life make so much more sense.

I don't have full blown aphantasia I think but mental images are always very hazy and dark to me and calling them up takes immense effort. Seems like I'm a 4 on the VVIQ scale.

On the other hand, imaginations in psychotherapy, be it for exposure it for revisiting childhood places and moments, still work for me. They are just not very visual. They contain emotions and haptic aspects, sometimes sounds and smells, but the visual is kind of like really old polaroid pictures. They frizzle out at the edges really quickly, they never move, the colors are muted and sometimes off.

At least now I know that people who claim that books evoke vibrant mental images in them are not bullshitting me. And I can stop sitting there with Lord of the Rings in hand, staring at a wall for 10 minutes and wondering why I still don't manage to "see" what Moria looks like.

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

#167

Post by bleakenthusiasm »

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…

Thank you from the bottom of my heart. I always feel like a complete tool when people talk about events in their adolescent years or even if we talk about the movie we watched at the theater yesterday. I remember what the movie was about and I'm probably able to recall one or two scenes that had the most impact on me, but then someone roles up and starts a discussion on "all the scenes where Rebecca and Lydia felt lost and how they were set in similar places" and I'm just lost myself. I'd be able to recall they were lost but not what scenes there were to transport that idea to me.

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

#169

Post by listenallyall »

auggierose wrote: post #138
listenallyall wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back before GPS, people used to give each other driving directions based on landmarks... go straight 2 miles, turn left at the red brick schoolhouse. Now, that sounds like the condition you describe - you know red, you know brick, you know what schoolhouses generally look like, but since you've never been to this specific place there is zero mental picture. When you finally get there, it's a surprise, you've found th…

The woman in the article describes that she has no problem identifying faces she has seen before, in fact, she is better at that than average. It is just that she doesn't see these faces as a picture in her head. So clearly, there is some encoding process going on here, and the comparison is done on the basis of this encoding. This can be much more efficient than comparing the actual thing. Think of it has taking the…

It sounds like people simply have different definitions of "a picture in her head." Her mental processing sounds entirely normal on all counts.

I guess I must have the condition. I closed my eyes and tried to see a red apple, which the article uses as the diagnostic test. Nope, all I saw was black. Could I think of what a red apple looks like? Of course. If the test is to actually, truly see an apple while your eyes are closed, my guess is everyone would fail.

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

#170

Post by listenallyall »

SaidinWoT wrote: post #136
listenallyall wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back before GPS, people used to give each other driving directions based on landmarks... go straight 2 miles, turn left at the red brick schoolhouse. Now, that sounds like the condition you describe - you know red, you know brick, you know what schoolhouses generally look like, but since you've never been to this specific place there is zero mental picture. When you finally get there, it's a surprise, you've found th…

I can only tell you that I do not have mental imagery and am not constantly surprised by my surroundings. Object permanence has absolutely no dependency on visualization; it is completely unsurprising to me that the stop sign near my house looks the same each time I encounter it. I totally get that you, having lived a life where mental imagery is such an integral part of your baseline experience, assume that many of…

In another comment you wrote "stop sign is a red octagon (with a white boundary) with the word "STOP" in the center. I could draw you a plausible picture of one without issue". The fact that you knew all of that without having to actually find a stop sign and look at it, that's mental imagery. It may be a skill some people are very good at (i.e. they can remember lots of small details) and others are not, but it's not that you don't have this skill at all.
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