Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yay, I'm one of "these people" now. Aphants can still have inner monologues, and most do. I do.
Do you dream?
Yes, and I can visualize in dreams too.
Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
271–280 of 476 posts
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#272I want to know if aphantasia is associated with any other mental models. For example, driving, map reading, spatial awareness. I have a theory that Aphantasia is the symptom of something else, and this other thing relates to how the brain of such individuals stores information. I think it's stored in a more "compressed" state. As an example, I find myself remembering where info is and not what the info acrually was.…
> I want to know if aphantasia is associated with any other mental models. For example, driving, map reading, spatial awareness.
Aphantasia is usually associated with spatial memory difficulties [1].
Anecdotal, but I am aphantasic (almost zero visualisation) and also have low spatial awareness (can't navigate without a map or GPS). I have no issues with driving or map reading, though.
In contrast, someone I know can almost perfectly visualise things mentally, but they struggle with reading maps. They can also navigate perfectly without requiring assistance.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002839322...
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#273I know someone with aphantasia. It's absolutely wild to me that he can't see things in his head. Totally alien from my perspective, since I'm at the opposite end of the spectrum. I see what's in my head so vividly that I often won't see things in real life which are right in front of me.
But what's even more wild to me is the people leaving comments refusing to believe that different people are actually different. Refusing to believe aphantasia or hyperphantasia exists. Refusing to believe that other people are telling the truth when they describe their experiences. Insisting that everyone is the same, actually, and anyone who thinks differences are real must be confused or misunderstanding something.
I guess these are both types of cognitive disability... but I know what aphantasia is called. Not sure what the other thing is called, but I'd imagine it's something which sounds pretty unflattering.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#274It 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…
As a kid, I had vivid mental images. That completely changed after a head injury in my early twenties. Now I can’t picture anything in my mind.
I believe the same injury also left me with anendophasia, meaning I don’t have an inner monologue.
Neither has negatively affected my work or daily life. I’ve just become what I’d call a 'generative thinker': I figure things out by doing. Ideas take shape as I speak, write, build, or work through them. Over time I've gotten increasingly better/faster at this. In some instances I believe it even makes me more productive..I don't overthink.
Here’s a helpful overview of anendophasia:
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/anendophasia
And a few active communities for anyone interested:
Aphantasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/
Anendophasia: https://www.reddit.com/r/Anendophasia/ https://www.reddit.com/r/silentminds/
I’ve lived with and without both mental imagery and an inner monologue, so for me, there’s no question that these differences are real.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
They absolutely exist. I have a VERY strong minds eye and can invent and watch movies if I want to. Once I was driving while my friend described a post-apocalyptic landscape. I was seeing that landscape and not the road. Suddenly (some part of my brain was still paying attention, thankfully) the road rushed back to me and I saw that the cars in front of me had stopped. I had to slam on the brakes to avoid an accident…
Right away the story is impossible to verify. What does "I was seeing that landscape and not the road" actually mean? You can't answer that, and neither can I. I will never, ever, know what you mean by that. I can guess, and I definitely have already done so.
Well, I can't imagine myself in this situation. Under no circumstances I would use the expression "I see landscape and not the road" because well, I can only see the road. I can't imagine seeing something that I don't see. If I close my eyes and try to imagine a landscape (or a car, or an apple) I don't see anything. Asking me "what was the color of the apple that you imagined" is meaningless, because the apple had no color.
I don't claim I have aphantasia, but it's pretty obvious that I don't experience "visual imagination" the same way some other people do.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#276One thing I'd like to learn is how to effectively meditate as someone with aphantasia. I took a course in college and all of the exercises involved some variation of tuning out your internal monologue going to your happy place in your minds eye. I'd love to get the benefits of meditation, but I can't visualize anything so none of the meditation tools that are taught in these kinds of courses work for me at all.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#277I 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 s…
> Why do people ask about dreams? This has no connection with visualization.
What you can "see" when your eyes are closed has no connection with visualisation either. There are no photons hitting your retina. So aphantasia and dreams can be related.
> Dreams are of course, heavy with all senses
Why "of course"? It looks like it's a spectrum, too. I have total aphantasia like you do, and my dreams are also greyscale, foggy and vignetted (only the centre is somewhat visible).
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#278I always get this eerie feeling that if someone has aphantasia, they are possibly also a P-Zombie.
If you cannot visualize things in your mind, and seeing is just transforming light into visual imagery, how do you know you're actually "seeing" anything? The data goes to your brain but you just process the image without actively observing visuals, you just know what's there in front of you, but as data. If you can't see visuals, what else can't you see? Conscious processes?
The analogy to use would be like an LLM's way of "seeing" an image: it describes it into words and then recognizes what it is. A human brain would just do this much faster. Aphantasiac brains.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#279It 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 feel like there would be much more obvious practical differences if it was a real thing. The spectrum as described seems so different from one end to the other that we seemingly have people who can switch reality into a movie of their choosing on one side and people who can’t imagine like what a square is on the other. It seems like communication would necessarily have to be very different, books would be different depending on the authors phantasia, UI/UX would be different - it’s hard to believe everything is so homogenous if it’s really serving people with such different visual capacity.
Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide
#280One thing I'd like to learn is how to effectively meditate as someone with aphantasia. I took a course in college and all of the exercises involved some variation of tuning out your internal monologue going to your happy place in your minds eye. I'd love to get the benefits of meditation, but I can't visualize anything so none of the meditation tools that are taught in these kinds of courses work for me at all.
Read the book Mind Illuminated. Visualisation isn't really necessary for meditation