Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 477 posts

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#341

Post by inigyou »

adverbly wrote: post #136
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…

> Of course, this is not possible. I keep hearing conflicting answers on this and its a debate I've had with several people. I have aphantasia based on the description here because I don't see jack. Some people I talk to though say that they can visualize at the same fidelity as they dream at. When I dream, I do "see" things in a way that is much more "real" than when I "imagine" them - to the point where I would bas…

I think when I dream it feels real, but upon closer analysis, it's about as unstable as when I imagine things. It's just overlaid with the additional semantic vector of "yes this is the real world and everything is normal" or something.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#342

Post by inigyou »

zug_zug wrote: post #172
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'm going to second you for a different reason: I guess one thing I don't really get or perhaps don't by about phantasia is that the way our whole visual field works in a big illusion: we can really only see a tiny fraction at the center of our vision with any meaningful detail and we don't even realize each eye has a blindspot. Thus we can very easily believe we "see" something that we clearly do not see. To make th…

That's how it went for me. I thought of the correct shape of a bicycle frame (I think I've seen this art thing before) but didn't "pull up" the little pieces like gears and seats until you actually mentioned them.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#343

Post by inigyou »

andrewla wrote: post #134
D-Machine wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Yes, this is utterly trivial for me, but then I am hyperphantasic by any measure or definition. It is also common to read people telling others to explicitly do this kind of superimposition (or "projection") in e…

I mean, I can look at a blank wall, and if you say "superimpose a red circle in the middle of the wall" I can very easily imagine that wall with a red circle on it. But I can't "see" it in the sense that you can see the afterimage of the apple on the blank screen. Are you saying you can see in a way indistinguishable from normal vision an imagined object in your field of vision?

Same here (I don't actually see the circle)

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#344

Post by inigyou »

D-Machine wrote: post #144
andrewla wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I can look at a blank wall, and if you say "superimpose a red circle in the middle of the wall" I can very easily imagine that wall with a red circle on it. But I can't "see" it in the sense that you can see the afterimage of the apple on the blank screen. Are you saying you can see in a way indistinguishable from normal vision an imagined object in your field of vision?

The projected image is not typically indistinguishable from normal vision, namely in that there will be an "ephemerality" to the image. Some examples of this ephemerality: - the projected image usually has a translucency, i.e. it doesn't also block what is behind where it would be physically if it were really there - the projected image requires sustained concentration and mental effort to maintain detail, and if you…

Now I'm wondering if the mental focus that a trained mage requires to sustain an underworld portal, or any other spell, is the same feeling as an ordinary person in real life uses to hold a visualisation.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#345

Post by inigyou »

jibal wrote: post #305
andrewla wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually agree with you about the "is my red the same as your red" -- I do not believe that aphantasia is real but simply that people are talking past each other and getting hung up on semantics. I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That is what seeing is. I cannot see with my ears, I cannot see with my fingers.…

> I see things with my eyes, experience has taught me that when I cover my eyes I cannot see things, when I close my eyes I cannot see things. That's your experience. Other people have different experiences. > That is what seeing is. What an incredible leap of petitio principii . Yet there are people who can't see despite their eyes being open and the optical machinery working correctly, and there are people who see…

No, based on the description they are normally phantasic and are just quibbling semantics.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#346

Post by BobbyTables2 »

Cerium wrote: post #327
case540 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you solve geometry problems. For lots of them I visualize / rotate things im my head.

Visualizing for me has always been like touching something with my eyes closed. I can't "see" the object, but I have a feeling for all the shapes and contours. You can feel which way a key is in your hand and where each ridge is without having to see it. I solve geometry problems the same way. I can't see the whole thing at once, but I can move my sense of feeling across arbitrary scenes.

That’s exactly how it is for me.

I can somewhat imagine a simple square or triangle but only more like feeling it in the dark without fully “seeing” it. Anything more complex, like a pretzel is out of the question, just disappears/instantly-forgotten.

My dreams can be very vivid, except for some where an object disappears if I focus directly on it.

Always wondered whether this is normal, aphantasia, or something else…

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#347

Post by inigyou »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #91
mucha wrote: post #64

For folks that are thinking this is just semantics or qualia, the site mentions this: "We can also see activation in the visual cortex during fMRI studies, the area in the brain that processes images from the eyes, further suggesting actual visualization." (edited to add) Also, Aphants lack pupil response when asked to imagine dark/bright scenes: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220420092150.h...

On the other hand, when asked to visualize a doctor I can't! And that's why I'm not sexist (lol), when asked gotcha questions all imagined doctors are sexless lines on an unwritten page that exists in the soupy pre-semantic peircean firstness of my brain.

A boy and his mother are in a serious car accident. The mother dies on scene and the boy is rushed to the hospital where he needs urgent life-saving surgery. But the male surgeon says "I can't operate on this boy - he's my son!" How is this possible?

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#348

Post by iamhamm »

techgnosis wrote: post #292
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…

I'm one of the naysayers denying aphantasia in the comments. Why would we default to believing people, though? I get your point. Believe people when they tell you their experience. Sure, that seems like a reasonable thing to do. But in this case, when there is zero evidence besides a self-reported experience, why do we default to believing that there are suddenly two types of people, instead of assuming that semantic…

Here’s some evidence for you: when I close my eye, I see black. That’s it. No amount of effort conjures an image. That’s not what most people I talk to about it report, so I am going to assume there’s a functional difference between me and people with functioning visualization.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#349

Post by inigyou »

mortenjorck wrote: post #326
inigyou wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like a low-quality offscreen framebuffer, and if you can see things in a dream, it's like that.

Ha, I was going to describe it the same way. The image is there in the buffer, you have full bit-level access to it; the only difference is that there's a firewall preventing it from being rendered to the primary display. Dreaming allows rendering it to a virtual display which is temporarily considered canonical. I think the resolution and bit depth of that buffer is the aphantasia spectrum. Some people are working f…

I don't know if everyone is like this, but low-res is not to be deemphasized. When another comment had a test about bicycles, I can see the shape of a bicycle frame, but I definitely can't see how many gears it has unless I zoom in on the gears (and I don't know how many gears a bicycle is supposed to have, but I can imagine any number up to about 5.)

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#350

Post by LoganDark »

t-3 wrote: post #137
bryanrasmussen wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen claims that the dreams are less visually complex. However the other parts still stand, is a a controlled dream really an involuntary process? Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".

I don't know how visually complex phantasic dreams are, but my dreams as an aphantasic person are sensually just like real life.

Half the time my dreams are just weird perversions of childhood homes or schools or so on. Hybrids of different places and times. Not particularly complex, just familiar. Apparently it's pretty common.
Post reply on HN