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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#231

Post by teunispeters »

I have total aphantasia. Can't do pictures. I'm still unsure what I'm missing with sounds.

Anyway, it was an article like this that made me realize others could do this "visulization" thing, and it wasn't just pure metaphor. So weird.

Next, people say they have "inner voices". That can't be real! (/s) (again, like aphantasia, I found out that others have inner voices, and that explains some more things that made no sense to me!)

... I keep running into people that "cannot imagine this". That is so weird, I can't imagine people HAVING "pictures in their head" and "inner voices". I can comprehend it as an idea, but it just does not seem real.

Side note : this is not related to dreams. Dreams are of course, heavy with all senses and complex stories, and almost never related to anything in one's daily life. Why do people ask about dreams? This has no connection with visualization.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#232

Post by saltcured »

y1n0 wrote: post #208
feoren wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

I'm aphantasic, but I can relate to almost going blind with inattention. Not like I now have a black visual field, but just losing awareness of what is actually in it, like it is some sort of matte painting put up during intermission. But there remains some lower-level processing, because I may reflexively kick back into full seeing due to some unexpected change.

For my "mind's ear", imagining sound is not quite as rich as hearing, but quite similar. I can even "feel" aspects like bass thumping my chest or my ears tightening up due to an imagined or remembered loud noise. I can nearly feel dampness on my skin if I remember the roar of a waterfall.

Still, it's a bit more hollow than real hearing. Also, it is nearly a second channel of sound processing. I can have music playing on speakers and then think about a different song. The one going in my mind's ear does not mute out the real signal from my ears, nor do they really blend together. If the real audio is loud or catchy enough, it will derail my effort to sustain the secondary imagined program.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#233

Post by t-3 »

jacobsimon wrote: post #149
jawns wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like this analogy. I have an internal voice, but "hearing" this voice is very different from hearing a voice spoken out loud and registered with my ears. Likewise, when I'm visualizing a pretzel, the way I am "seeing" it is more of an internal, mental process than when I see things by processing the light hitting my eyes.

Yet other people claim to not have an internal monologue (including my wife and brother) and say they don’t hear anything when they think to themselves, and don’t really even “think” in words for that matter. So this comparison is also tricky because not everyone agrees on either of them. I have a weak visualization ability and strong internal monologue, I’m not sure if they’re correlated in some way or not.

No visualization, no monologue or other auditory thinking ability. My thinking process is more like reading and writing than speaking and hearing. The concepts flow at the speed at of thought when active, much faster than I could comprehend spoken language or images, but completely still otherwise. When I have to think in words, I'm quite slow (it took around 20 minutes to write this post).

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#235

Post by srcreigh »

Do any other aphantasia folks have the experience of like, that one time they saw a very vivid image, but it only ever happened once for a short time?

That happened to me a few years ago. It was a very interesting experience.

It’s surefire subjective proof that aphantasia is real - the image I saw was so vivid and colorful, even animated. I can say for sure that I almost never have that experience.

At the same time, my one experience was surely in many ways much more limited than some others normal visual thoughts.

The mind is an interesting place.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#236

Post by pstuart »

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?

I can "see" them but can't visualize them. It's like I know what they look like but if I closed my eyes and trying to visualize the Mona Lisa on a wall I'd just see the variations of darkness that are there.

Interestingly enough, doing ketamine therapy can induce visuals but it's like bad AI where I can see flickers and flashes of things but nothing like, say, the penguin scene in Fight Club.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#237

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

srcreigh wrote: post #235

Do any other aphantasia folks have the experience of like, that one time they saw a very vivid image, but it only ever happened once for a short time? That happened to me a few years ago. It was a very interesting experience. It’s surefire subjective proof that aphantasia is real - the image I saw was so vivid and colorful, even animated. I can say for sure that I almost never have that experience. At the same time,…

Sometimes in the first few minutes after waking up I experience images though I wouldn't call them vivid

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#238

Post by dooglius »

perrygeo wrote: post #219
dooglius wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the point of counting sheep was to do something boring and repetitive that puts your brain into a relaxed state

Visualizing a sheep is not something I can even do once. Let alone repetitively until it gets boring. Being asked to visualize is quite frustrating and confusing - especially to a little kid not sure exactly what he's supposed to be "seeing". Hardly relaxing.

I don't think you actually had to visualize the sheep for it to work, I never thought of that as being explicitly required

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#240

Post by pdonis »

feoren wrote: post #217
pdonis wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Learning to juggle involves easily observed objective activities that other people can check, and which can be learned that way--you can watch someone else juggling, read book that describes the tossing of the balls, etc. How do you do any of that with visualizing? If I'm trying to learn to juggle, I can watch someone else juggling and say, I want to do that . How do I watch someone else visualizing and see what to d…

Yes, it's harder to evaluate whether someone can visualize well, but that does nothing to invalidate my point. Have you actually dedicated significant time to trying to learn how to visualize? I suspect that if you did, you'd realize: oh, wow, maybe I can actually get better at this. If most people who give it a serious effort also come to that conclusion, I feel like we've pretty much settled the question. So it is…

> Have you actually dedicated significant time to trying to learn how to visualize?

I haven't had to. I don't have aphantasia. Visualizing doesn't feel like a learned skill to me. It feels like something I've always known how to do. Of course if I pay more attention to what I'm doing, I can visualize in more detail than if I just do it casually. But I've never had the feeling that, oh, if I practice this and learn I can get better at it, the way, for example, that I can get better at playing the piano by practicing.

Where I'm stuck is, if someone else who couldn't visualize asked me to teach them how, I wouldn't know what to do. Whereas, if they asked me to teach them how to play the piano, I'd at least have some idea.

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