Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 477 posts

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#201

Post by ozten »

soupfordummies wrote: post #181
ozten wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc. I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound. Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers…

can you draw a pretzel though? Like, if I handed you a pad and pen and said just draw one from memory?

If you look at proper drawing instruction books from the 1940s, they show you all of the 3D rendering techniques later adopted by our modern CGI pipelines. To draw a head, you follow a pattern: draw a cube, carve it up into parts of the head and neck, carve that up into eyes, nose, ears, etc, establish a 3-point lighting system, and render materials. It is very time-intensive and analytical, and required if you didn't shoot a reference photo back then. This is needed for folks who can't visualize, like myself.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#202

Post by mcmcmc »

nkrisc wrote: post #196
jawns wrote: post #111

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…

It does seem kind of misleading to ask someone to close their eyes to visualize something in their mind. It has nothing to do with your eyes. I can visualize my house in my mind while simultaneously seeing whatever is in front of me. Though the “mind’s eye” description is apt because it is like seeing with a totally separate set of eyes that has zero awareness of my real eyes and sight. It’s almost like remembering t…

Does it? For me shutting out other visual stimuli makes it easier to visualize in my head. I can still do it with my eyes open but it feels less real, like a hologram in my head rather than imagining I’m seeing it in front of me

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#203

Post by feoren »

jawns wrote: post #111

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…

I think it is a skill you can practice, but I also think you're under-estimating how "visual" these visualizations actually can be.

A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing something is not at all similar to the experience of seeing that thing. Except, sometimes, when I am focused on it, especially late at night. I'll lie in bed, willing myself to really conjure up an image, and occasionally I'll have an experience that is "almost visual" -- very similar to the experience of actually seeing something.

So I do believe some people can visualize in ways that are much more similar to seeing than others. I'm sure it comes naturally much more easily to some than others, but I'm also pretty sure anyone can practice it if they really try.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#204

Post by 0xfaded »

lampiaio wrote: post #199
jawns wrote: post #111

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…

One thing I've always wanted to ask the aphantasia crowd: think of the Mona Lisa (or the Eiffel Tower). What happens?

It exists as a concept, but there's no image of it.

Funnily, I'm quite strong at maths and can easily reason about things like dependency graphs in my head, but I don't need to close my eyes to see it. So I can think and type with my eyes open at the same time :p

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#205

Post by hondadriver »

vehemenz wrote: post #139
rappatic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The afterimage test was a major red flag for me. To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can someho…

It is a red flag to me too. If you have working vision, the brain is doing a ton of post-processing that you're unaware of. The eyes are part of the brain, after all. Closing them with your eyelids doesn't magically turn off those post-processing circuits that do most of the heavy lifting.

There is a full visual memory, just not any sense of an image or sound nor smell in my case. I am very sure there is a difference after interrrogating multiple people about it.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#206

Post by D-Machine »

andrewla wrote: post #193
D-Machine wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. [...] The visualization is akin to seeing, but obviously I am not seeing them. [...] a lot of people like you are saying "well, I can 'see' but I can't 'see-see' I most definitely am not accusing you of this, and your other comments I think make clear you have considered this, but I would be wary of collapsing a continuum to a binary here. Most of th…

I'm with you -- human experience is complicated, and language is a poor approximation to our inner lives. But there are lots of people on this thread who are saying "well, of course you can't *see* the apple, it's just a helpful metaphor", but there are a lot of people (including yourself) who say that you can. I want to see if I can pick out that difference. I almost wish the survey instead said "No, of course I can…

Cool, I was really worried I might be sounding dismissive. This has been an obsession of mine since long before it got popular, and I've been enjoying your comments particularly in this thread.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#207

Post by feoren »

mucha wrote: post #64

For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this: "We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization." (edited to add) Also, Aphants lack pupil response when asked to imagine dark/bright scenes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...

Here's my problem with this: take an fMRI of a bunch of professional jugglers while they imagine juggling. Now take an fMRI of a bunch of non-jugglers while they imagine juggling. I promise you they will be strikingly different, with the professionals having all sorts of real-life coordination areas lighting up.

Conclusion: some people are a-juggular and are wholly incapable of imaging juggling. Poll: are you a-juggular or not!?

I hope this illustrates how we're missing a very sensible third option here: visualizing is a skill that some people are better at than others, but (almost) anyone can learn.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#208

Post by y1n0 »

feoren wrote: post #203
jawns wrote: post #111

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…

I think it is a skill you can practice, but I also think you're under-estimating how "visual" these visualizations actually can be. A question I find useful in these discussions is: how similar for you is the experience of visualizing to the experience of seeing ? Because for me, the experience of playing a song in my head is very similar to the experience of hearing that song, but the experience of visualizing somet…

This is interesting and I think the analogy to playing a song in your head is a good one.

With regard to how visual the minds eye is, I have this anecdata:

For me, when I’m visualizing mentally, usually with a memory, replaying something, I stop registering what my eyes are presently seeing. No visual memories form of what my eyes were seeing while I was absorbed with reliving the memory or visualizing some idea.

I have to be careful about this when I get bored while driving.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#209

Post by numeri »

andrewla wrote: post #120

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…

Quoting myself from a thread on aphantasia several months ago:

… there are plenty of scientific experiments that show actual differences between people who report aphantasia and those who don't, including different stress responses to frightening non-visual descriptions, different susceptibility to something called image priming, lower "cortical excitability in the primary visual cortex", and more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

So we know that at least the people who claim to see nothing act differently. Could it just be that people who act differently describe the sensation differently, you might ask?

No, because there are actual cases of acquired aphantasia after neurological damage. These people used to belong to the group that claimed to be able to imagine visual images, got sick, then sought medical help when they could no longer visualize. For me, at least, that's pretty cut and dry evidence that it's not just differing descriptions of the same (or similar) sensations.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#210

Post by numeri »

mucha wrote: post #64

For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this: "We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization." (edited to add) Also, Aphants lack pupil response when asked to imagine dark/bright scenes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...

there are also people who have become aphantasiac after neurological damage, which seems like pretty cut and dry evidence against the qualia argument.
Post reply on HN