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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#281

Post by malfist »

Georgelemental wrote: post #270
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…

I have hypophantasia, so it's very easy to convince me that both exist (because I'm right in the middle between the two)

Same here, I see details when I concentrate on seeing details, but otherwise don't really see anything. For the apple thing, I can see a vague concept of an apple but when I focus on say seeing the shape and color of the stem the rest of the apple just fades or blurs out.

I also read a lot of fiction and I almost always skip long winded descriptions of how things look because I won't remember them and they don't mean anything to me. Descriptions of things like smells, tastes and textures though are different.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#282

Post by D-Machine »

newswangerd wrote: post #276

One 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.

There are plenty of competent meditation approaches that don't really require visualization of any kind. Most Western "mindfulness" meditations don't require visualizations, nor does e.g. shi-ne / opening awareness, nor most forms of concentration meditations (e.g. transcendental where you focus on a sound like "ohm", meditations that have you focus on your breath, etc).

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#283

Post by mercutio2 »

jumploops wrote: post #229

Both 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 co…

I have a strong sense of the geometry of things, which helps a lot with navigating in buildings.

So when people describe a flattened dodecahedron wrapping into its regular form, I have no trouble conceptualizing (I was going to say visualizing, but it's frankly not at all visual; I got nothing, when it comes to visualizing anything but what's in front of my eyes). But if you ask me to think about alternating solid colors on the dodecahedron, I can't do it.

Clearly there are many different variations on the theme, not just one modal experience! But it's nice to know we're not alone.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#284

Post by D-Machine »

andy99 wrote: post #279
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…

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…

There are measurable practical differences, besides differences in fMRI responses and pupil dilations as mentioned in the thread, there are also the ones I mention here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49471908) that involve different skin conductance responses, less response to image priming, less ability to produce image visual details from memory, and etc.

They just aren't obvious practical differences, because cognition or neural plasticity seems so flexible that we can compensate pretty impressively for surprisingly different sensory experiences, overall.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#285

Post by D-Machine »

numeri wrote: post #209
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.wikiped…

Yup, sadly the absolute denialists saying "it is just semantic confusion" don't really have a tenable position, as a quick read through this whole thread would instantly reveal.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#286

Post by mercutio2 »

sixothree wrote: post #7
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…

> - Visualising what is happening in the book you are reading. This one is absolutely brutal. Even having a basic understanding of this condition could have changed my trajectory related to anything involving fiction during school. Having every character in a book visioned as a gray amorphous blog really does make it a difficult. And realizing only later that I was the only person in class experiencing this leaves me…

For me, just different, not harder. But maybe the problem is you got some gray blobs, and I got nothing? If anything, my sense is that the absence of imagery makes book reading much easier for me. At least for plot and abstractions.

I'll confess I always skip over the described imagery in most written works, though, so it's not like I'm missing zero.

I do read about 6x faster than my wife, with better recall for the (non-visual) details. Not sure how much of that is my wife reading slow, I have many non-aphantasiac friends who read as fast as I do.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#287

Post by D-Machine »

ToyKeeper wrote: post #273

I 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. Re…

To be polite, it is called "typical-mind fallacy". To be less polite, it is called "cope".

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#288

Post by selcuka »

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…

> that's what people mean when they talk about seeing something in their mind.

That's an oversimplification. I have a friend who says that they can visualise things mentally exactly like in real life, with their eyes closed or open, and that they can also make changes to those images, such as changing the colour of an apple from red to blue, or rearranging furniture in an imagined room.

Of course they might be lying, but if we ignore that possibility, it definitely doesn't sound like a figure of speech.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#290

Post by estearum »

D-Machine wrote: post #285
numeri wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.wikiped…

Yup, sadly the absolute denialists saying "it is just semantic confusion" don't really have a tenable position, as a quick read through this whole thread would instantly reveal.

Yeah, this is a valid critique of the whole internal monologue idea, but interestingly aphantasia has been quite empirically confirmed and the simple apple test has been validated!
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