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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#81

Post by drakonka »

inigyou wrote: post #80
drakonka wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

That makes sense and there are some philosophical questions about whether our own world may be rendered similarly to a video game - do the things not within our senses actually render? Or do they only 'load in' when we observe them?

For me the real surprise is the fidelity of the visual I _do_ get. Sounds, sight, and touch feel just like real life (in lucid dreams especially now that I think of it). If the quality of our waking visualization is really meant to be the same as it is in our dreams, for me it is nowhere close.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#82

Post by kwarcode »

inigyou wrote: post #74
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.…

Can you imagine peeling the stripes off?

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#83

Post by jtbayly »

_dwt wrote: post #30
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.

I'm very convinced this is what's going on. Qualia are super hard to convey with language! If I had to guess these self-reported instruments are also measuring, indirectly, conscientiousness (do I _really_ see it? it'd be wrong to lie on a survey!) as well as neuroticism (oh God what does that mean? do I _really_ see it? do other people _really_ see it? am I broken?).

It’s very hard to prove, yes. But you need to deal with the association with SDAM, and the differences in outcomes on the https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#84

Post by jareklupinski »

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…

wild attempt: try to put your hand behind your back: are you aware of "where" your hand is, even though you cant see it?

now if someone taps on one of those fingers on that hand behind your back, could you put that same finger down (curl it) without seeing which finger was tapped?

lastly, could you open your hand, put it back in front of you, and put down the same finger that was tapped when they were behind your back?

it's the same way with my mental images; i'm aware the object exists and ive seen it before, so i can "see" them again in the same headspace to do things like analyze angles between molecular bonds, in the same way i can "feel" things that i'm recalling (i was tapped on this finger, i am putting this finger down (i dont think "right index finger" or anything...consciously? i just remember how the touch impulse felt and 'replay' it))

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#85

Post by cassianoleal »

card_zero wrote: post #79
davidsojevic wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah so you probably have between what TFA describes as hypophantasia and phantasia.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#86

Post by throw4747283858 »

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…

[dead]

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#87

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

> I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task.

As someone with probably some form of aphantasia, a cube is fine because it’s a simple shape with well defined simple mathematical rules that is easy to abstract and rotate. It gets more complicated with complex objects and that’s where visualizing things really matters. Here’s a question, can you accurately visualize a loved one’s face, see it in your mind and describe all the features if you were for instance talking to a police sketch artist. I couldn’t even do that for my daughter or my wife.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#88

Post by fellowniusmonk »

christophilus wrote: post #16
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 don’t see anything, but I also wonder if this is semantics, and we are all describing the same phenomena with different language.

I developed full aphantasia at 16 after being put under for a heart procedure.

My minds eye was somewhat diminished after a procedure at 11 when they put me in a twilight instead of fully under.

I have a sister younger who is 6 years younger, we used to play imaginary games all the time, few years ago she asked why we just stopped playing games and it was because I couldn't see the characters anymore.

I eventually recovered like, idk, a faint outline of my parents faces from before the surgery that I can kind of conjur.

It's not semantics.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#89

Post by NoGravitas »

feverzsj wrote: post #34
graeme wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what people report some can see a full picture.

Photographic memory is very rare.

There is a fairly wide spectrum short of photographic memory, though. I can see a fair bit of detail in mental imagery, but only if I trade off other things like the size of the area I'm imagining, or how long I can hold it in my mind.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#90

Post by corecoder »

OK, but what about visualizing numbers, words, formulas, graphs etc? Do they count? They have no color, no characteristics other than the text/logic content, yet I visualize words and numbers all the time.
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