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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#241

Post by defatigable »

_dwt wrote: post #103
D-Machine wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a couple of the comments in this very thread above, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49467695 and https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=slibhb are quite relevant to your case. Thinking this is just semantics is a strong indicator you are likely highly aphantasic. It is highly unlikely to just be semantics, because when it comes to visualizing complex objects as a non-aphantasic, the specific details s…

I am reasonably confident I am not aphantasiac in the sense described here. My apple is red with some nice green mottling, dust, etc etc. I can see my wife and children in detail in my "mind's eye". As a child people told me I had a "photographic memory", which I also think is sort of "fake" or semantic, but nonetheless: I can remember images I have seen with visual detail and I can imagine hypothetical objects "visu…

Ironically your comment has strengthened my belief that aphantasia is real and that I have it. :-)

The possibility of visualizing an apple with any of the details you describe is completely alien to me. Like, not "I can conceptualize something like that in my head but it's not SEEING", but "it is impossible for me to conceptualize that".

If you asked me to conceptualize an apple and asked me to add details like the color of it, whether it had a stem, etc. I would just be generating a mental checklist in my head. Vaguely like a running narrative, "I said it was a red apple. I said it had a stem. I said it had a bruise near the top."

But there's no sense in which I'm constructing a model in my head that I can consult, it's just a list of facts.

Every so often I've had discussions with people who do have a mind's eye and they've said something that just caught me off guard with its alienness. In your case the idea that when you imagine an apple it comes to you formed with a bunch of visual detail. I could only fill in details like that if explicitly asked (by myself or someone else). Or a friend saying casually "oh yeah I'm imagining her sitting over there to the left on that chair" - it had never occurred to me that people could visualize something with an actual location in space, or interacting with a real world object.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#242

Post by smokel »

Would it make sense to guess that humans have something analogous to the latent representations or embeddings found in LLMs or VLMS, with different neural circuitry to experience them?

Some of us may lack the physical systems to experience memories visually. Perhaps for some it's trainable, suggesting the varying levels of vividness, but perhaps some just simply don't have the capacity at all.

I don't buy that over 10%+ of HN has proper aphantasia, though. I wouldn't trust my own mind at self-reporting anything.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#245

Post by kstrauser »

xerox13ster wrote: post #225
kstrauser wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I honestly can't imagine this concretely at all.

Tell me to imagine a spinning cow. My experience is a lot like evaluating the mental version of:

  class Cow:
      spinning = True
What does a spinning cow look like to me? A lot like that program looks like as it's running (which I can visualize in a way; keep reading).

OK, so I don't know if other people actually visualize arithmetic or not. I don't think so, but I also wouldn't think that people literally imagined an apple, either, and yet here we are. But let's assume that people don't usually literally imagine pictures of the numbers in their mind when they add them.

Take 12. Add 7 do it. Now you have 19, right?

My mental imagery of adding 12 + 7 = 19 is nearly identical to that of picturing a spinning cow. Take a cow. Spin it. Now you have a spinning cow, right?

In both cases, those are just facts. Now, higher math does look like something to me, as does writing code. Those do have geometric shapes for me, kinds of blobby things with curved edges but not colors, except maybe rainbowy shimmers on those curves. I can feel the shapes moving and bending, and that moving and bending makes them makes sense to me. "OK, so I'm trying to do a binary search of this set... Alright, so if I push this shape into there... Oh! That'd work! Alright." But in no case do those shape-like things resemble anything I've ever seen in the real world.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#247

Post by D-Machine »

smokel wrote: post #242

Would it make sense to guess that humans have something analogous to the latent representations or embeddings found in LLMs or VLMS, with different neural circuitry to experience them? Some of us may lack the physical systems to experience memories visually. Perhaps for some it's trainable, suggesting the varying levels of vividness, but perhaps some just simply don't have the capacity at all. I don't buy that over 1…

Almost certainly there is also a "latent" representation that isn't just based on sensory imagery (i.e. some kinds of logical relations).

But it is also not likely that an absence of sensory imagery is without impact, i.e. that only the latent representations matter. You can see this in studies where aphantasics can't be subconsciously primed by images as easily [1], have skin conductance responses to visual stimuli less to imagery compared to normal people [2], and miss more visual details when attempting to redraw complex images from memory [3]. I.e. the visualizations are likely important in some cases, with the latent (non-visual) representations alone being deficient in some very particular cases, at least.

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29175093/

[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33715433/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33383478/

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#248

Post by mohamedkoubaa »

tpoacher wrote: post #9
Artgor wrote: post #2

You know, I have learnt that I have aphantasia several years ago and it opened my eyes to many things. I have thought that people say a lot of things metaphorically. - Imagine a beach when meditating - If you are nervous about giving a presentation, imaging that the audience is naked - Count sheep in order to fall asleep fast - Undressing someone with your eyes - Visualising what is happening in the book you are read…

Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have. And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46. The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost b…

I didn't realize they were correlated. I have total visual and auditory aphantasia and can count childhood memories on one hand. But I have great semantic memory and could probably win a game of jeapordy.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#249

Post by thirdtruck »

Jtsummers wrote: post #218
lefrenchy wrote: post #213

I struggle with this. I think i'm Aphantic, but then again I can imagine a red apple in my mind. But if i have my eyes closed, it's not like I see it in the black of my closed eyes. I just imagine it, with some detail but also limited detail? I guess that puts me slightly on the aphantasia side of the scale, but it feels very hard to understand my own subjective experience in contrast to the written version.

> But if i have my eyes closed, it's not like I see it in the black of my closed eyes. Only the excessively literal think that this is what people mean when they say they "see" an image in their mind. Everyone else understands what you describe (imagining an object and conjuring up an image in your mind ) as what the metaphorical "seeing" in "seeing in your mind" means. What you describe, about imagining an apple, th…

Isn't this contracted by comments in this very thread? e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469205

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#250

Post by jawns »

antonvs wrote: post #222
jawns wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Right now, while staring at a blank wall, I visualized a red, 3D apple with a cartoonish worm emerging from it and then taking out a cleaver and chopping up the apple. It was similar in detail to what I'd see in a cartoon, but (like I said above) in another mental plane.

So no, I don't think I have aphantasia.

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