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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#71

Post by davidsojevic »

sixothree wrote: post #62
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way. All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (eve…

I think this is a better self-test. Visualize a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball? Now, answer these questions: - What color was the ball? - What gender was the person that pushed the ball? - What did they look like? - What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? - What about the table, what shape…

I could answer "the ball probably rolls off the table" and to everything else; I had no answer and would have to choose after the fact if pushed for an answer.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#73

Post by Jtsummers »

drakonka wrote: post #67
sixothree wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a better self-test. Visualize a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball? Now, answer these questions: - What color was the ball? - What gender was the person that pushed the ball? - What did they look like? - What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? - What about the table, what shape…

This is an interesting one and I just tried it. I could answer all the questions about the ball, but none about the person or the table other than them existing in a hand-wavy sense. But rather than informing any level of aphantasia, it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.

> it seems more likely that I simply did not prioritize visualizing those other things past their rough properties, focusing instead on the ball.

Right. Details come in, for me, based on:

- Familiarity with the subject. "Imagine your sibling playing ping pong". I can get a vivid image of my sister, the table, the movement of the ball during a game.

- Letting my mind wander, daydreaming style. More details will fill in as I imagine the scene for a longer period of time.

- Prompting. Once prompted to think about the person, details were added but the previous image (just a generic person and generic table) did not lead me to imagine anyone in particular or any details that could suggest a gender or other specifics.

And I don't know why anyone would expect differently. Not all imagined things are vividly imagined even if you possess the ability to do so, that shouldn't be a surprise.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#74

Post by inigyou »

drakonka wrote: post #15

When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visual…

I think I must have below average phantasia. I can recall the rough shapes and colors of things, even things that don't exist, in a way that is like a real image. If I imagine a red apple it has those vertical stripes that some apple varieties have, and a green apple doesn't, and it has a short stem and a supermarket sticker on it. But I can't really imagine an entire scene at once - just one little piece at a time. Which is also how your eyes work, actually.

There is absolutely no chance I would confuse something held in my imagination with real sensory inputs from my eyeballs.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#75

Post by inigyou »

Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #45
christophilus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.

Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way. All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (eve…

It's like a low-quality offscreen framebuffer, and if you can see things in a dream, it's like that.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#76

Post by drakonka »

inigyou wrote: post #75
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way. All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (eve…

It's like a low-quality offscreen framebuffer, and if you can see things in a dream, it's like that.

In a dream I actually am fully immersed and can see the entire world as if it was real. In a normal dream I assume the dream is the real world, and in a lucid dream it is vivid enough to feel, look, and sound like a real physical experience though I know it's not. But in a dream there is no real visual still being processed to compete with the dream visual, so surely it can't be exactly the same? If it's really like dreaming then TIL I may have aphantasia..

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#77

Post by card_zero »

sixothree wrote: post #62
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way. All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (eve…

I think this is a better self-test. Visualize a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball? Now, answer these questions: - What color was the ball? - What gender was the person that pushed the ball? - What did they look like? - What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? - What about the table, what shape…

That's a test of how interested you are in random people, or indeed in visualizing things at all when not actually necessary.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#79

Post by card_zero »

davidsojevic wrote: post #71
sixothree wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a better self-test. Visualize a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball? Now, answer these questions: - What color was the ball? - What gender was the person that pushed the ball? - What did they look like? - What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else? - What about the table, what shape…

I could answer "the ball probably rolls off the table" and to everything else; I had no answer and would have to choose after the fact if pushed for an answer.

But say you're overexcited and drunk, maybe then you think about all these extraneous matters, for fun and because you're not focused on the main question, and then you do have answers.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#80

Post by inigyou »

drakonka wrote: post #76
inigyou wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like a low-quality offscreen framebuffer, and if you can see things in a dream, it's like that.

In a dream I actually am fully immersed and can see the entire world as if it was real. In a normal dream I assume the dream is the real world, and in a lucid dream it is vivid enough to feel, look, and sound like a real physical experience though I know it's not. But in a dream there is no real visual still being processed to compete with the dream visual, so surely it can't be exactly the same? If it's really like…

In a dream I think I can see a whole world, but I actually can't. Upon closer inspection, only the relevant characteristics of the thing I'm "looking" at are actually "rendered" or "simulated", and the rest is filled in by a vague feeling of "yeah yeah trust me bro there's a world there"

It's basically like AI Minecraft. You know, that project where someone trained a stable diffusion model to predict the next video frame based on the previous frame and the player inputs. Then people started speedrunning it, like by looking down into a lava pool and back up, now they're in the Nether (underground lava dimension). That's how I think dreams are, except you don't even get a full video frame, just one object of focus.

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