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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#331

Post by inigyou »

foobarchu wrote: post #264
feoren wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If someone is born without a sense of smell, they don't have people question if they really can't smell anything or if it's a skill issue. You're talking about something that affects 1 in 10,000 people and is very easily tested for. Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia, and nobody can agree on the definitions of any of the words we use to evaluate it. The situations are not at all similar…

> Whereas seemingly half of all people claim they have aphantasia Citation needed. People who experience something will be louder when that condition is brought up or relevant. That's a known phenomenon, it's why conservatives think trans people are everywhere. Most statistics I've seen are more like 2-4% of the population, but it's not a very good measure because the vast majority of people do not know aphantasia is…

Why do conservatives think trans people are everywhere?

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#332

Post by inigyou »

jstanley wrote: post #153
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…

I think broadly the same thing, I just think that people who say they don't have aphantasia are sloppy with wording. When you "see" something in your mind's "eye", that's a different type of experience to seeing something with your real eyes. If it weren't that way then beginner artists would not have such trouble drawing accurate proportions from memory because they would already "see" the correct proportions.

It is definitely different from seeing something. I'd guess it activates a subset of the semantic level neurons that activate when you see a thing. There are no actual pixels. I also guess that something similar happens in dreaming.

When I commented earlier that when I visualize an apple it's one with that vertical stripy pattern some varieties have, that means I get the semantic vector of the stripes. It's not a stable image that I can draw - if I draw it, I'm recreating the pixels based on the semantic content. I think.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#333

Post by inigyou »

1135813fib wrote: post #211
lampiaio wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One thing I've always wanted to ask the aphantasia crowd: think of the Mona Lisa (or the Eiffel Tower). What happens?

i've always used this image [1] as an example; it's there, but there's no "seeing" attached, just the conceptual understanding. [1] https://preview.redd.it/visualize-an-elephant-v0-p0bwbtow4pq...

Can you post a second source for those of us whom Reddit blocks?

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#334

Post by inigyou »

D-Machine wrote: post #117
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…

This is interesting and I wonder if it might explain some apparent cases of aphantasia. Also seems relevant to some aphantasics experiencing mental imagery when using psychedelics.

When I took psychedelics they were still in effect when I went to sleep and I experienced unusually vivid and strange mental imagery. They call it closed-eye hallucinations, as opposed to mis-seeing the world around you while your eyes are open, which I also experienced.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#335

Post by inigyou »

nkrisc wrote: post #224
mcmcmc wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think for me it reduces distraction but otherwise has nothing to do with it.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#336

Post by D-Machine »

zeofig wrote: post #320
estearum wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I don't consider self-reported nonsense to be empirical confirmation. There can be correlations between different self-reports, that doesn't mean that our idea of why those correlations exist is correct.

There are plenty of examples multiple times in this thread that show that what is self-reported is demonstrated in non-self-reported phenomena, so those self-reports are clearly not nonsense, basically by definition.

The aphantasia theory is clear and parsimoniously makes sense of all this, but your "it's all just semantics" does not, and additionally requires rather other extreme acrobatics with regards to much of the entirety of human experience and discourse. Scholarly research also basically says this.

Your mind is clearly closed and you do not have any serious interest in understanding anything here.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#337

Post by inigyou »

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…

No, it's definitely akin to imagining a song for me. It is not confusable with actually seeing things.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#338

Post by D-Machine »

xlii wrote: post #212

I have aphantasia in both visual and audio forms. And I can tell you audio aphantasia is wild. I cannot hear a song in my head if my life depended on it but then there are triggers that extract it music it. Examples: "who let the dogs out" (I remember rhythm but not the music). I play piano for almost 2 years but I have no idea what's the each sound is. It gets even better. Even though I play and record [0] I can't r…

Very cool

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#339

Post by inigyou »

estearum wrote: post #291
andrewla wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you're right, but there are people on this thread claiming that they can actually see things in their field of vision, not "akin to seeing things" but see-see them. I can't do this and I don't think I have aphantasia; I am interested in people who say that they can do this. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365

Do the apple test (closed eye imagination and then pick the most-similar image on the scale). It's a validated test. And yes, apparently some people actually see an apple (not me, as a total aphantasic). Whether that means in their eyes or in their brain is pretty irrelevant. The people who claim to see an apple have physically observable differences in reactions to other mental imagery tests.

After reading your comment I went to see the test. The scale shows the same picture in four different opacities, which isn't useful. The textual descriptions were more useful.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#340

Post by inigyou »

D-Machine wrote: post #129
rappatic wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. The afterimage test was a major red flag for me. To see something in your “mind’s eye” has nothing to do with physical vision, yet the afterimage works by exhausting some of the eye’s physical cones. It’s a confusing non sequitur and totally unrelated to the subject at hand. I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can someho…

> I have always suspected that people with “aphantasia” simply misunderstand the idea of a “mind’s eye,” believing that others can somehow visualize something in their actual field of vision at will. Many people can do precisely this, though the projected image is not usually 100% clear in some form, i.e. it may have a translucence or impermanence, and it can indeed take some practice to develop this skill. But it is…

Tell me you can still tell it's two separate layers though. You aren't actually getting visual feedback, you are combining the actual visual feedback from your eyeballs with the pseudo-visual feedback from your imagination.

I would say when I do this, it's more like underlaying my imagination with reality, than overlaying reality with imagination - the combination is still clearly imaginative. Right? (I think I'm a 3 or a fraction higher, on the apple test scale)

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