To the people who have aphantasia, do you daydream?
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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
221–230 of 477 posts
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? 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 an…
In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize. So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story. I'm not saying that…
Sounds like you have aphantasia but you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t.
Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”.
Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If that’s not the case for you, that’s consistent with aphantasia.
The OP article does a decent job of describing it. I recommend reading it, if you haven’t already. What you’ve described matches how it describes aphantasia very closely.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#223It 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…
Not sure about phantasia, but aphantasia exists. I don't know why you say it doesn't?
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Easier to focus, perhaps, but for me it doesn’t really make any difference.
Perhaps I’m the odd one then. It’s certainly a difficult topic to discuss with other people.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
That wasn't a mental image, that was oversaturated photoreceptors in your eyes still sending an updating status of what they are detecting to your brain and your brain still processing it. It wasn't any more of a mental image than the color "olo" is. But yeah, when I close my eyes and imagine an apple, it hangs out in the black void all bright red like that.
That's so bizarre to me. I can "picture" an apple, but I'm not literally seeing something resembling an apple in my mind. It's closer to the classic object-oriented example of "Apple isa Fruit", except not in text but in vague geometric shapes that to me say "appleness".
I can mentally see and feel the little fuzzies around the top where the stem is. I can mentally fidget with the bottom where the flower was.
I can make it a granny smith, a pink lady, a Gala, a Cosmic Crisp and the shape and color striations change. I can see the tiny little pore circles when it's a green or yellow apple. I can conjure and catch my fingernail on a worm hole in the apple.
If I think about a wild green apple from apple trees I know about in Seattle, I can see myself standing there, seeing them both on the tree, and sitting on the ground rotting in several different states of decay and I can squish them and feel it crunching and squishing underfoot, with some parts just sinking into the soft spring soil at a tree on one side of town, or grinding into the gravel and asphalt on the other side of town. I could pinpoint these trees for you on a map.
I can put myself in the scene from Oppenheimer in the lab at Cambridge where he poisoned the apple in the movie, and I can pick up the apple and see the injection site. If I really try I can detect the faintest smell of almonds as I hold it up to my nose. I can do it as Bohr. I can grab the apple out of Bohr's hand as Oppenheimer and feel his adrenaline and the resistance of his confused hand as I do it. I can throw it against the wall instead, maybe shattering a glass window and hearing and seeing all of that, then cutting myself while cleaning it up and smelling and tasting the blood because I instinctively sucked on it.
Mind's eye is so much more than just visual, that the article and discussion of mental imagery in this thread is a bit flat.
Even the survey assumed that every aspect of someone's mind's eye is entirely visual, and it's just not the case.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#226I'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…
> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? 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 an…
No one denies that the congenital blind have aphantasia. The problem is that many people default to thinking that their experience is exceptional, when in reality it's completely typical. Once you get past that, there's no "there" there.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#227Earlier 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…
Have you ever seen a pretzel (or anything) in a dream?
I had vivid visual dreams as a child. Now my dreams are very abstract, but I think they sometimes include a visually striking element. I'm torn and not 100% sure. I don't remember my dreams as well as I did as a child.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#228I'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?
Think of Beethoven's ninth symphony or a foot massage. You probably don't have the sensation of hearing or of your feet being massaged, you just think about it. You can even do stuff like increase the tempo or decrease the pressure, just like aphantasiacs can turn the Eiffel Tower upside down. They just don't have the experience of seeing.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#229Both my brother and I have aphantasia, though neither of our parents have it, nor 3/4 grandparents.
What’s maybe most interesting, is that we both seem to have “spatial” perception.
To try and be a bit more specific, when I think about “things” I can organize them in my mind in relation to other “things.”
The most clear example is a path I’ve walked through a building, where the halls, rooms, and corridors are all connected. I easily know exactly where I am, not because I remember the literal steps I took, but because I have a spatial construction in my mind.
I cannot visualize the space, there’s no inherent right side up or preferred perspective. I can model the space with my hands, and create it physically, but am terrible at trying to transform it to 2d.
This doesn’t just work for physical “things” but works for purely abstract concepts like software, stories, and songs.
I’ve always rationalized aphantasia as something where my brain put “skill points” in one area rather than another, but maybe the neuroplasticity is long gone.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#230Earlier 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…
Have you ever seen a pretzel (or anything) in a dream?
Yes. Different people answer this differently: I'm 100% aphantasia while awake, but dream vividly as if it were real life. However, once I'm awake, I can recall the dream but can't visualize it, the same way I can't visualize a previous experience in real life.