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People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

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Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#71

Post by polytely »

Also an Aphantasiac, the quote

> “we experience these as an awareness of a set of spatial facts.”

really resonates with me, as to how it feels inside my brain. I'm also really good at shape rotation and spatial reasoning despite not being able to literally picture the environment.

my pet theory is that there are just different places in the stream of consciousness your attention can rest and mine cannot be pointed at the 'mental machinery' that actually produces the images but instead rests at a higher level of abstraction after the visual signal is integrated into the representation of the 3d world that gets used for tasks like shape rotation.

I also don't have an internal monologue most of the time, but I can consciously will myself to do it, and then it is hard to get out of that mode, analogous to the 'you are now breathing manually' meme. I can do it but it feels annoying and slows down my reading and thinking.

Now that we have agentic systems the analogy of the internal monologue being a subagent is probably a good way to describe it, yeah i could read the thinking trace word for word, but most of the time it feels like existing at the level where the data that gets extracted from the stream of thought gets integrated.

Honesty it's so interesting to me how many different ways of experiencing the use of your brain we exist. Sort of reminds me of how there is no single method of crawling a baby learns, there are a bunch of different ways to do it and children just discover one and go with it. Walking seems to be different in that there basically is one good way to do it. I guess there are a lot of degrees of freedom in how the process of being can run on the brain.

Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#72

Post by suddenlybananas »

fwlr wrote: post #33
suddenlybananas wrote: post #4

I still think this is fundamentally about how difficult it is to describe qualia.

Aphantasiacs seem to be able to describe visual qualia as adequately as anyone else when the visual stimuli are currently present. But we do see descriptions differ between aphantasia and baseline in two cases: when the visual stimuli is recalled from memory, and when the visual stimuli is imagined. If it was about the difficulty of describing qualia, I don’t think we would see a difference between “visual stimuli pr…

I'm not denying there's a difference between the two groups, I'm denying that the difference is in phenomenal experience. If one group has a different way of describing their experience to others in general (e.g. perhaps because they interpret things much more literally than others), then they would likely describe specific things differently.

Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#73

Post by _ink_ »

chaps wrote: post #47
misthop wrote: post #3

Aphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions

When you close your eyes, can you make any visualization whatsoever? Not the press-fingers-into-eyes stuff nor from-memory visualization, but just anything. When I close mine, I can let my brain wander with little intention/feedback and my mind will create giant megastructures that I kinda sorta fly through. It's fully continuous almost like I'm zooming into a fractal.

Not GP, but fully aphant. No I can't do that. When I close my eyes, I see the inner of my eye lids (red / brownish). That's it. Nothing comes up, even if I try to remember the face of my mother.

Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#74

Post by Akronymus »

_ink_ wrote: post #59
pohl wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s it like to dream while you’re sleeping? Do you ever “see” anything then?

Not GP, but also fully aphant: yes, I have visual dreams. I is very hard for me, to tell whether I also hear things in my dreams, but I think yes. For other senses, I am quite sure that I don't experience them while dreaming.

that made me realize I never once thought of whether I was hearing stuff in my dreams.

Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#75

Post by degamad »

Akronymus wrote: post #44
_ink_ wrote: post #38

The article is only about the absence of mental images, but the same is true for all other senses as well. People might be able to recall or imagine images, sounds, smells, tastes, feels while being awake or not. And it can be in all permutations, tho, vision affected seems to be quite common.

the only internal sense I have is my own voice. I cant even "imagine" music but rather hum it in my own voice at best. Same with others' voices

Ditto! I tend to hear my internal voice beat-boxing music rather than humming it, though...

Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#76

Post by Rohansi »

smusamashah wrote: post #35
misthop wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

She's 5 ft tall, sharp features, curly white hair. i can remember imagery facts, but have not visual memory

But if you only remember facts, can someone else pretend to be that person you remember with those facts?

No, memory is not limited to facts. There's just no visualization to go along with the recollection of faces etc. You can absolutely still recognize people correctly when looking at them.

Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#77

Post by ppalata »

logicallee wrote: post #30
misthop wrote: post #3

Aphantasiac here, happy to discuss or answer any questions

Can you complete tasks like answering the question "a square shaped piece of paper is folded once diagonally so two previously opposite corners are now on top of each other. Does the distance between the other two corners change during this fold?" I think most people would answer this by just imagining it, but I'd think the way I've described it is pretty hard to follow if you can't picture it. If you can answer the…

I can't visualise things either and this is a task that my brain just solves for me analytically somehow. In this case I had to re-read it a few times and then knew the answer. I struggle with visual navigation but my brain compensates this with intuition (or whatever we want to call it) so I never really got lost but I'm unable to guide other people because that usually requires visual imagination (map, landmarks etc.)

Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#78

Post by Akronymus »

misthop wrote: post #58
boothby wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly but not perfectly aphantaiac (I dream without images; I can see briefest flashes of people's faces if I've known them for years). The discussion is often flattened to "can't picture anything" but I also have some cool inner-mind tricks: namely, I have rich access to my inner senses of touch and hearing. To a lesser extent, I can imagine flavors well -- well enough that it helps me in the kitchen at the lea…

I have an inner monologue, that is the extent of my inner senses.

do you have inner music or just your voice serving as the instrument like me?

Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#79

Post by wongarsu »

dataviz1000 wrote: post #57

A couple weeks ago, Neil deGrasse Tyson had neuroscientist David Eagleman as his guest on Star Talk. David discussed his friend and co-founder of Pixar, Ed Catmull, has aphantasia and that Catmull tested the directors and animators at Pixar, discovering that many of its top artists are also aphantasic! [0] They have a theory that artists who have to struggle more during the training and developing of being able to ex…

Or maybe seeing things in front of your mind's eye is not an essential quality for animating or computer graphics

Personally I do have aphantasia, but I am great at reasoning about how things relate to each other in 3d and over time. From the little research that exists there are some hints that people with aphantasia might on average be better at this than people without it, and those seem like much more important qualities to me than being able to see a rabbit on some imaginary 2d display

Re: People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination

#80

Post by vidarh »

suddenlybananas wrote: post #4

I still think this is fundamentally about how difficult it is to describe qualia.

In my experience the people who most doubt aphantasia tends to be people who clearly have aphantasia.

I have aphantasia, but I have also during meditation had one experience where I could clearly see an imagined scene vividly, and the experience was nothing like when I "imagine" things and can't see them.

I know I wasn't sleeping because I was aware of the sounds in the room I was in for the duration.

But I also see images when I dream, but that one experience was far more vivid than any dream I've had.

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