411–420 of 476 posts
when I am trying to visualize something I dont know about or know very little about I have to draw it in my mind instead of instantly visualize it .
example - like pretzel , I saw this for the first or second time in my life, so I have to draw it out. not like a house or horse or..
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Right now, while staring at a blank wall, I visualized a red, 3D apple with a cartoonish worm emerging from it and then taking out a cleaver and chopping up the apple. It was similar in detail to what I'd see in a cartoon, but (like I said above) in another mental plane. So no, I don't think I have aphantasia.
That's phantasia, but it's not hyperphantasia. It's a spectrum. How does that falsify anything that is under discussion here? Is it so hard to believe that other people have abilities you lack? I don't have perfect pitch but I believe people can have it, because they can demonstrate it.
Why is the notion that some cognitive ability needs to be developed to acheive full potential controversial for you?
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…
https://photographyinsider.info/image-streaming-for-photogra...
Severe stress and emotional trauma is also known to result in acquired aphantasia. It suggests that it maybe “software” not “hardware”.
I also learned recently that for most people there is a strong connection between mental visualization and emotional response. People with aphantasia may struggle with goal setting because they don’t get the emotional amplification that visualizing a future state provides. Another subset of people have normal visualization but have no emotional amplification. Visualizing a lost, cute puppy caught in the rain doesn’t elicit any emotional response even though their reaction to seeing an actual lost, cute caught in the rain would elicit an emotional response.
I would love to know what that is called.
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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.
Sigh! I am so far from having this ability. Reminds me of the scene in The Shawshank Redemption where Andy talks about having an easy time in the hole because he could listen to music in his head. It's interesting to think each person is somewhere different on multiple spectrums: - Hyperphantasia - Aphantasia - Being able to imagine music/voices (are these linked?) - Inner monologue (is this the same as being able to…
All these variances have profound impacts on everything from being able to imagine how novel flavor combinations will play out, to “feeling” how your body would move through a dance maneuver to knowing which future accomplishment would most excite you.
If everyone lands somewhere in a bell curve for each of these traits it is likely that everyone has one area outside the bell curve. There is no normal.
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In my own personal experience -- which I presented immediately after the sentence you quoted -- I didn't originally understand how to visualize, and then later discovered more about how to actually visualize. So clearly it's not like the case where a person is born without a sense of smell, because in that case nobody's going to present an "at first I didn't know how to smell, but now I do" story. I'm not saying that…
Sounds like you have aphantasia but you’ve convinced yourself that you don’t. Here’s a simple question: how close are your waking visualizations to images you see in vivid dreams? From what you’ve said, assuming you do experience vivid dreams sometimes, it sounds like the answer is “not very”. Many people without aphantasia report waking imagery quite close or at least comparable to what they experience in dreams. If…
It’s very difficult to tell how different what others report of their mind’s eye (or lack thereof) really is from my own experience, both on the alleged aphantasia side and on the “I see it as if it’s real” side. It’s conceivable to me that people’s interpretation of their capabilities is much more varied than the actual capabilities.
In any case, it should be pretty clear that it’s not black and white, but a spectrum.
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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!
The self-report objection has been tested, though. Aphantasics show no imagery priming in binocular rivalry, no pupil constriction when asked to imagine bright shapes, and flat skin conductance to frightening text while responding normally to frightening pictures. A questionnaire that predicts autonomic responses nobody can fake is doing more than semantics.
I'm saying there are a number of physical tests like the ones you describe, and those line up with the much simpler apple imagery self-report test.
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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 correlations to non self-reported phenomena. This comment names a few (despite being dead for some reason?): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49475441
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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.
I am on the other end, high five inverse brother. When I see an apple in my mind, I can take it, rotate it, pull the stem off, look at the blossom scar on the bottom, cut it open, count the seeds, and peel the skin off, crush it into a cup and have juice. I can see the blemishes, if there are any, which side faced the sun, and how shaded it was, and I can tell you what the worm had for breakfast (it was apple. that p…
Interestingly, a lot of aphantasics are pretty good at spatial reasoning. It seems surprisingly non-visual.
In retrospect, the earliest sign that my cognition was different was in being asked to recall some event. I can virtually never remember being at a moment in the past. People ask me if I remembered doing some very-important-thing and the honest answer is consistently: No, but I remember the fact that it happened and the fact that I was there.
But there's literally no first-personness to any of my memories.
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I agree, of course nobody can actually do this (barring mind-altering drugs or brain trauma, and even then, not voluntarily). But there are people on this thread an on the attached survey ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49469365 ) who say that they can. Maybe it turns out that I have aphantasia after all and this is just an ability that I'm missing. I am curious to see how many people say that they can do this…
>they imagine that they see something and lack the language to convey the imagined unperceived object, the notion of phantasia or aphantasia is merely a by-product of the term "picture it in your mind's eye" or the like, leading many ignorant people to believe that something is literally rendered within the individual's head. I think by any reasonable definition everyone has aphantasia, which is why it's a nothing bu…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49473050
Intellectually lazy, to be honest.
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> Nobody hallucinates or "sees" the object Prove it. > If you quiz someone long enough you can get them to acknowledge they don't see anything "in their head" whatever that means. This is simply false, as numerous people here have demonstrated. > irrationally annoyed Yes, irrationality and emotive reaction is evident. > I suspect because it's unfalsifiable attention seeking You suspect a lot of things based on no evi…
aaw, touched a nerve have I because I'm suggesting you're not special? >Prove it. Precisely, unfalsifiable nonsense. >You can't keep track of your own argument MY argument is this: people don't actually see things or even have imagery inside their head, which is normal, and self-proclaimed aphantasiacs are attention seekers who think they have a disability or special characteristic...there is no logical inconsistency…
Agreed no logical inconsistency, just very strange laziness and prickishness.