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Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

aphantasia.com

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Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#401

Post by jaggederest »

toolslive wrote: post #389
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.

I have the same. I'm looking at my laptop's screen as I type this, and if I close my eyes while typing I cannot even visualise said screen. Now, I can blind-type, recognise faces, navigate aso without any problem. I can even play chess quite well (fide ~2050, 2200 blitz on chess.com), but I cannot visualise a chess board, nor can I visualise my moves or the moves of my opponent. However, I don't "see" (pun intended)…

If it makes you feel any better, I'm on the hyperphantasia end of the spectrum and it is honestly actively problematic sometimes. For me, it can be very difficult to work with things that I can't translate to visuals, mentally; and daydreaming, and memories can be so vivid they are distracting or disturbing. It's very much an asset in certain circumstances (like debugging code or fixing an engine), but there's a reason most people don't have that fidelity.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#402

Post by febusravenga »

ctxc wrote: post #375
tpoacher wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same. This, and also the fact that it is also very highly associated with SDAM (Severely Deficient Autobiographical Memory) -- which I also have. And also, reasonably associated with ADHD -- which I also have, but only recently realised and assessed for at the tender age of 46. The SDAM is particularly useful to be aware of, otherwise you go crazy trying to understand why you remember how much your local pizza cost b…

Thank you for your comment! It was useful. Found this that helped me look through the signs https://www.reddit.com/r/SDAM/comments/nkolwi/my_attempt_at_...

Now half of HN will self-report SDAM. /s

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#403

Post by jaggederest »

iamhamm wrote: post #358
Suppafly wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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”.

That's so funny, my wife and I have the opposite dynamic. She rolls her eyes at me when I insist "no the couch would definitely fit through that doorway if we rotate it like that, I don't need to measure", and after she gets a tape measure it's about an inch of room to spare.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#404

Post by cbeach »

I have aphantasia. When I learnt the “mind’s eye” was not a metaphor, it was a wild moment for me! I still find it hard to believe that others are able to visualise using their imagination.

I’m curious about a potential link between aphantasia and autism. I’m 37 on the Autism Spectrum Quotient scale (test link below if anyone’s interested in doing it). “Significant autistic traits.” It makes sense to me that my inability to visualise people’s faces might make me less empathetic with others. Aphantasia might explain why I imagine systems, concepts and ideas rather than people, things and events.

https://psychology-tools.com/test/autism-spectrum-quotient

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#405

Post by stackbutterflow »

lampiaio wrote: post #199
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…

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

I have another question I've always wanted to ask. How do you spell words if you can't picture them in your mind?

Have you memorized that "pyramid" is spelled p-y-r-a-m-i-d and that for every word? How does it work for Chinese characters?

To answer my own question from a non aphantasia perspective the best I can describe it is that I conjure the picture of the word in my mind then I read each letter aloud.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#406

Post by satvikpendem »

riffraff wrote: post #179
basscomm wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but there is one question I keep coming back to: Is it a skill issue? Every time the topic of aphantasia comes up, this question always gets asked. I get that it's apparently inconceivable that someone who doesn't have aphantasia just assumes that everyone who claims they do is just doing it wrong or misunderstanding what the mind's eye is or that the claimant's own experience is just flat wrong. It's dismissive an…

Fwiw, I can visualize things, I can hear noises in my head but I cannot, for the life of me, smell things in my head. So it's easy for me to imagine people who don't have other "mental senses", maybe that works to explain it to other people.

I can smell phantom smells through my nose directly it seems, like I feel the sensation of detecting some smell directly in the neurons connected to my nose. Not sure if that's the same for you or others. It's not in my mind per se, at least not initially.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#407

Post by satvikpendem »

brookst wrote: post #258
ozten wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can "hear" a song at will. I can "hear" it well enough to think about the instrumentation, etc. I can't "visualize" a pretzel. I go into an analytical mode and a gut-level physical mode, thinking about pretzels and their different aspects with momentary "pops" of "visualizing", but they aren't stable and continuous, the way I can imagine a song or any sound. Oddly, I started life as a visual artist before computers…

Greetings fellow music-hearer. My s/o will sometimes get irritated when I'm silent for a while on a car trip or at dinner. I'm not trying to be rude, I just get caught up in a song, just as if it were playing in the room. Vocals, drums, instrumentation and effects, the whole thing is just right there. I can visualize things, usually scenes and favorite places, but they are more abstract than the music is.

Interesting. Do people not have some sort of sound or inner monologue running at all times? Apparently a quarter of people have no inner monologue at all which is wild. As for music, I can listen to whatever music I want in my mind whenever and even make compositions purely in my head that I can then write down into notes verbatim.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#408

Post by satvikpendem »

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 should read the book Blindsight which your last paragraph reminds me of.

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#409

Post by tinkertrain »

inigyou wrote: post #333
1135813fib wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The article has a similar one (horse instead of elephant https://aphantasia.com/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.a...)

Re: Aphantasia Beginner's Guide

#410

Post by xerox13ster »

kstrauser wrote: post #245
xerox13ster wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can mentally see and feel the little fuzzies around the top where the stem is. I can mentally fidget with the bottom where the flower was. I can make it a granny smith, a pink lady, a Gala, a Cosmic Crisp and the shape and color striations change. I can see the tiny little pore circles when it's a green or yellow apple. I can conjure and catch my fingernail on a worm hole in the apple. If I think about a wild green…

I honestly can't imagine this concretely at all. Tell me to imagine a spinning cow. My experience is a lot like evaluating the mental version of: class Cow: spinning = True What does a spinning cow look like to me? A lot like that program looks like as it's running (which I can visualize in a way; keep reading). OK, so I don't know if other people actually visualize arithmetic or not. I don't think so, but I also wou…

My experience of mental math at the most common and basic is teasing apart the numbers into components and adding/multiplying/dividing their sums. Sometimes that's like the math confusion meme where it's "floating in front of my eyes" (mentally, internally) in the "void", sometimes I'm literally imagining in my minds eye doing the math at a desk on notebook paper with all the feedback that comes with it. Sometimes I use a mental TI-84/89 to do the math, or this one calculator I had when I was a kid. It's usually paper though. Many times I apply a synesthetic association to a number, be it textural, color, attitude, or "shape".

However, I also have the ability to mathematically evaluate an equation and graph it on a mental visualization of a graph. I've been able to do that in 2d and 3d for a range of quadratic, cubic, and quartic graphs since high school. Also asymptotes, hyperbolas, sinusoidal functions. You know those youtube videos where they do the CGI animations to show a rolling cylinder tracing out a sine wave? I've been able to do that in my mind since I was a teen.

In high school I would do calculus rate of change functions in my head with a visualization like a laser going from perpendicular to a wall to parallel with the wall, and how the speed of the point at the end of the beam on the wall approaches light speed as the beam approaches approaches parallel, or the shrinking surface area of a liquid in a vertical conical funnel.

The funnel i imagined is yellow with an equilateral cone and a long neck that tapers to a half inch and has a worn, wrinkled blue white and red sticker from being run through the dishwasher a few times. It's injection molded and not shaved/sanded. Excessive detail for a feature of a math problem, but it's there anyway.

For me a spinning cow can have horns or be a holstein heifer or an angus steer or a dairy calf, or a buffalo. Could be a chik fil a cow. Or the one from Barnyard...right, Barnyard? the Dreamworks movie...

I can go back and read pages of books and documents that I have already read in my mind, which means (with effort) I can retread any sheet music I've ever played, or redo the math that I did in calculus and chemistry and physics classes. For a long time it completely ruined re-reading books for me because I would know exactly what was coming and I didn't need to turn the page.

I used the sheet music thing to teach myself guitar based on what I learned on trumpet through recall of arpeggios and and scales. Notes are also synesthetic and I can make them dance off the page in my head.

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