161–170 of 477 posts
Not that this needs treatment (or is even curable), but I wonder how many people misdiagnose themselves as having aphantasia because of differences in how imagination works. Red apple test just doesn’t seem to be thorough enough. There were spikes of lactose intolerance, gluten intolerance and all sorts of other self-diagnosed deviations from the norm that has no connection to reality, its some quirk of human psyche…
It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist. Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply. I can imagine a song, and…
I made a poll to see if anyone can (like D-Machine or jhedwards) actually see a superimposed image and not just "see" a superimposed image: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365
However, I have almost hyperphantasia for audio. I can hear near perfect recreations of the sound of something in my head, especially if it's music. This turned out to be extremely handy for voice modification training, as I could hear the target sound exactly in my head and then work to match it.
I've known about aphantasia for a long time, but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? When I was in second grade, our teacher asked us to close our eyes and imagine a pretzel. I closed my eyes and tried to will a pretzel to appear as an image, and I failed miserably. All I saw was darkness and faint squiggles. I didn't understand why so many of my classmates said they could "see" the pret…
Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive and annoying.
If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. They don't insist that the person actually can smell, but they just don't know _what smelling means_ or some other bizarro argument.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. Yes, this is utterly trivial for me, but then I am hyperphantasic by any measure or definition. It is also common to read people telling others to explicitly do this kind of superimposition (or "projection") in e…
I mean, I can look at a blank wall, and if you say "superimpose a red circle in the middle of the wall" I can very easily imagine that wall with a red circle on it. But I can't "see" it in the sense that you can see the afterimage of the apple on the blank screen. Are you saying you can see in a way indistinguishable from normal vision an imagined object in your field of vision?
I would not say that such a superimposed red circle is entirely indistinguishable from a real one, but the experience is very much akin to seeing. For one thing maintaining superimposed objects requires a degree of mental focus of which I am constantly aware, especially if the object is detailed and solid.
This feels a bit like "is my red the same as your red?". What do even mean when you say you can "imagine that wall with the red circle on it", but you can't "see" it? Is there no visual aspect to your experience whatsoever? Do you have a spatial sense of the red circle's size and position? Do you experience (hear?) verbal statements about the red circle's existence and properties, or is this some conceptual sense of the red circle that is both non-verbal and non-visual?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The projected image is not typically indistinguishable from normal vision, namely in that there will be an "ephemerality" to the image. Some examples of this ephemerality: - the projected image usually has a translucency, i.e. it doesn't also block what is behind where it would be physically if it were really there - the projected image requires sustained concentration and mental effort to maintain detail, and if you…
I created https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365 to see how many people perceive things this way. It is quite possible that this is drawing a line, as you say, between hyperphantashia and regular phantasia, though I'm not yet willing to give up on the idea that we are just giving subjective names to the same phenomenon. To wit, when I "hear" things with my "mind's ear" I can "hear" them very well in all the la…
Also, to be clear, my images usually are NOT spatially located, but I can choose to make them so if needed, and occasionally they just are spontaneously.
You might also find the work of Louis Sass ("Madness and Modernism", and other works) to be relevant, as he notes it is extremely common for schizophrenics to always be localizing (sensing) their thoughts have specific locations in space, or e.g. are "moving from the front of my head to the back", and other such extreme (and arguably unhelpful) spatialization of aspects of the mind's eye. He argues this might be part of why they are prone to hallucinations and delusion.
It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist. Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply. I can imagine a song, and…
For me, I can't. With the Apple example, I don't see (or imagine) anything. I know I am thinking of an Apple, and my thinking is also entirely verbal/monologue based so it's like a thought of "I am thinking of an Apple" there's no accompanying visualization, etc. When I'm really deep in thought I have subvocalizations too, slight movements of my mouth and tongue as if speaking the words of my internal monologue. To me the absence of language seems impossible to my mind.
It would take a lot to convince me that aphantasia or phantasia actually exist. Let's talk very specifically about the afterimage test here. Can anyone confirm that they have this ability, which specifically is to superimpose imagined objects inside your actual field of vision? If the answer to this is yes, then okay, I guess I have aphantasia. But none of the other criteria seems to apply. I can imagine a song, and…
I think I've read the article differently to you. It does not say that the afterimage is a test . In fact it calls it an illusion. > This afterimage illusion, while a product of perception, serves as a bridge to understanding visualization The way that illusion works is simple. You expose your eye to green light without moving your gaze (stare at the dot). The green receptors in your eye become tired in the receptor…
But you can see people on this very thread claiming that they in fact do perceive visualization that way, and can overlay it on their physical vision. So you, in the sense of the poll at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365, might be "No, but I don't have aphantasia", which is where I am as well.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For me the image in front of my eyes is not gone. I’m just not going to remember any details about it because my focus is inwards, on what my minds eye is showing me.
Right, but the question is - do you see actual images with this "mind's eye", or is it more of a sensation, a logical understanding of what you're imagining but with no real imagery?
Seeing mental images that are as good as a well done animation, on the other hand, is a lot easier and less draining to hold.
I have mild aphantasia, and I initially tried the approach of memorizing the shapes and/or associating the shapes with easy-to-remember pictures ( https://www.chineasy.com/ uses this approach). Some of my classmates could do that easily, but it didn't work for me.
Instead, I started memorizing the characters as a series of hand movements. Essentially "serializing" the picture into a series of strokes, and that I can remember easily. I can also "render" them in my mind's eye on demand.