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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#351

Post by inigyou »

card_zero wrote: post #70
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way. All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (eve…

Those tests could also depend on some third thing, such as not believing that you're visualizing a bright light. I can't see their methodology. "Here, we show that the imagery pupillary light response correlates with objective measures of sensory imagery strength." Really, objective measures of how bright an imaginary light is, how on earth do they think they can measure that!? Was it like "we gave them a sheet of pa…

If the concept of the mind's eye seems like a giant troll to you, you're either aphantasic or haven't connected the right dots. Can you remember a song? If so, can you do something similar with a picture?

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#352

Post by BobbyTables2 »

axegon_ wrote: post #188
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…

So, I have this strange habit: whenever I can't fall asleep, I'll open up wikipedia on my phone and hit "random article" until something barely interesting shows up. I'll start reading and a few minutes into it, I'll be dead asleep. So about a month ago or so the Aphantasia article popped up on my screen and... I was in the second half of my 30's when I learned that people can REALLY picture images in their heads. I…

I’ve always wondered if some people can “draw on a whiteboard” in their mind.

I certainly never could…

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#353

Post by inigyou »

dyauspitr wrote: post #87
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think I have aphantasia as I definitely don't see anything, but after reading a lot about it I still haven't totally ruled out that it's simply a big semantic misunderstanding with people that describe things in a different way. All the easily accessible aphantasia tests (such as the one in this link) seem to rely on subjectively deciding whether you "see" or not. But this "seeing" seems to be a metaphor (eve…

> I have seen people mentioning difficulty on problems where you need to mentally rotate a cube, but I can do that just fine - it's just that I don't "see" or "picture" the cube, but I still have the concept in my mind of the cube being in a certain orientation and that suffices to solve the task. As someone with probably some form of aphantasia, a cube is fine because it’s a simple shape with well defined simple mat…

note that many autistic people (overrepresented on HN) have face blindness which is (probably) a separate thing. They don't develop the specific specialized circuits for recognizing facial features.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#354

Post by iamhamm »

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…

You just broke my mind. I have visual aphantasia but until I just read your comment about audio aphantasia it never even dawned on me that hearing a song or sound in my head was a possibility. I just did your “who let the dogs out” test and I could remember the tune but as soon as I stopped thinking about it, it went away. That’s a wild personal discovery to have from an HN comment. Thanks!

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#355

Post by LoganDark »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #56
LoganDark wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? I heard it's not that uncommon for people with aphantasia to still have visual dreams, even if they cannot visualize while awake. I don't think I've seen claims of the inverse.

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".

> Is the visualization process when you close your eyes and before you go to sleep "involuntary" in the same ways dreams are "involuntary".

It's called hypnagogia, and is indeed involuntary.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#356

Post by Suppafly »

iamhamm wrote: post #348
techgnosis wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Here’s some evidence for you: when I close my eye, I see black.

This, I can imagine things, but it's like the idea of something, not a picture of it. Blows my mind when people tell me their imagination is like watching a movie.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#357

Post by inigyou »

kwarcode wrote: post #82
inigyou wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I must have below average phantasia. I can recall the rough shapes and colors of things, even things that don't exist, in a way that is like a real image. If I imagine a red apple it has those vertical stripes that some apple varieties have, and a green apple doesn't, and it has a short stem and a supermarket sticker on it. But I can't really imagine an entire scene at once - just one little piece at a time.…

Can you imagine peeling the stripes off?

Oddly, it keeps shifting to cutting a slice out of the apple instead. But with a bit more focus, yes. Even with the specific peeler I have in the kitchen, which has a blue handle. Maybe I'm not actually below average.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#358

Post by iamhamm »

Suppafly wrote: post #356
iamhamm wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>Here’s some evidence for you: when I close my eye, I see black. This, I can imagine things, but it's like the idea of something, not a picture of it. Blows my mind when people tell me their imagination is like watching a movie.

Same! My wife is at the opposite end and can visualize these wild scenes and describe them in detail and I’m like “I can tell you roughly where the parts of a cat go”.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#359

Post by inigyou »

weezing wrote: post #123
drakonka wrote: post #15

When people talk about seeing something in your mind's eye, do they mean a virtual image actually appears _as if_ you are seeing it in place of the real world or the blackness of your eyelids? Like do they somehow replace the picture from the eyes to the brain with whatever they are trying to visualize in a sort of hallucination? Or do they still 'see' the blacks of their eyelids or the world around them while visual…

It's hard to explain but the image just appears "in my brain". A third eye I guess. I can visualise anything, any object, faces of kids from my childhood school, a map etc. I am curious how people with aphantasia navigate without being able to visualise the road beforehand.

I don't navigate by visualizing the road ahead, I mostly navigate by recalling what I saw on Google Maps. Yes, always with north at the top and if I rotate the map 90 degrees it'll be completely unfamiliar - I have tried that - I think that's fairly normal though.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#360

Post by inigyou »

sixothree wrote: post #60
boutell wrote: post #46

On the one hand: we are all great classifiers, great recognizers. To the point where we mistakenly think we can also reproduce things. But we usually can't reproduce them verbatim, visually or verbally. Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Something more direct…

> Yes, drawing itself requires expertise. But if you truly have a great capacity for visualization, you should be able to produce at least a really dodgy drawing of the thing without looking at it. Art was a required class in my high school. And many of the drawing exercises went about as well as you expect - mid to poorly. One day we were tasked with drawing things present in the studio and my results that day were…

Yep. I remember doing an exercise where we would take a photo of something, divide it into 1cm squares (that's 0.4 freedom units) and then draw the same grid on a block of wood and copy it by chiseling one square at a time. The result was impressively accurate (obviously), not at all what you'd get by drawing freehand.
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