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

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

dailyneuron.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 314 posts

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

#181

Post by jumploops »

sowbug wrote: post #167

I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed. The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediat…

I'm also aphantasic and dream normally, and I once got really into lucid dreaming for a ~semester in college.

My best successes would occur after drinking a cup of coffee and immediately taking a nap before a study session.

It was great, I "learned how to fly" and could "morph" my dream into whichever direction I wanted.

One thing stuck out though: whenever I would try and focus on something, I would see a black dot enter the center of my vision. The more I tried to focus, the larger it got. If I focused on an area attentively enough, such that the black circle became all encompassing, I would wake up.

After a few times of this, I could start to notice the focus, and then sort of relax out of it, and thus continue the dream.

It feels like the black dot is my real-life vision coming into focus, and "winning" over the visual aspects of the dream. It's always continuous from black dot to eyes opening.

I rarely lucid dream now, but I've noticed a similar thing happen whenever I try to read text - the black dot appears and I wake up.

Wish I still had unlimited time to go back to sleep!

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

#182

Post by D-Machine »

jerf wrote: post #178
D-Machine wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've also wondered whether this entire conversation is just all of us collectively talking past each other for the entire conversation and we all in fact have quite similar experiences This is fairly conclusively disproven by far more than just fMRI / brain-imaging studies. E.g. aphantasics have problem with visual memory recall, visual priming, pupil dilatory and skin conductance responses when imagining light and…

It's possible, but "aphantasia is fairly rare" and "aphastastics abound on HN, even moreso than is apparent if there's a number of people like jerf who are aphantastic and still unaware despite even posting on stories about it" is a bit of an odd combination that I'm struggling with. Yes, I am well aware of the bias that only certain people post, as well as the distinct possibility that there are underlying correlati…

> Yes, I am well aware of the bias that only certain people post, as well as the distinct possibility that there are underlying correlations that could lead to our industry abounding in them. Though prior to this I would have thought quite the opposite given the association between visual processing and success in STEM and engineering.

I agree this is an annoying confound, and also that it feels highly intuitive that being able to consciously visualize ought to correlate with better visuospatial (and thus much mathematical) cognitive ability.

I think the solution is recognizing that the reason cognitive deficits are mostly unobserved (visual memory recall studies aside) is recognizing that aphantasia is almost certainly a conscious access problem, i.e. most aphantasics are still using imagery too, just unawares. Last I checked, this is the leading hypothesis / explanation.

Also, plasticity and the ingenuity of the brain is clearly such that an aphantasic can also find other ways (e.g. other sensory modality imagery, pure logical relations, etc) of representing the problems that seem like they should rely on visualization. It seems obvious to me that these other ways can be both advantageous/disadvantageous, depending on the situation / phenomenon.

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

#183

Post by cgio »

slibhb wrote: post #169
sowbug wrote: post #167

I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed. The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediat…

"Wake back to bed" works for me. I don't do it intentionally, I often wake up between 3 and 5, use the bathroom, go back to bed. It only triggers a lucid dream maybe 5% of the time but I've never had one without that.

I am in the quarter of aphantasics that report no imagined sensations of any kind, no inner sound, smell, taste or touch. I do have some very basic imagery occasionally while dreaming, a bit like Dali’s drawings. Never faces. I am also remarkably bad in remembering faces (or names) but recognise them just fine when recent. I don’t think in words, shapes, or relations. I think in words that are on the tip of my tongue and make sentences in their “rhyming”.

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

#184

Post by bryanrasmussen »

sowbug wrote: post #167

I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed. The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediat…

My lucid dreaming has always been when I'm in danger, like this description of a Sadako dream

https://medium.com/luminasticity/beating-up-sadako-82c5fb3f0...

So I've never been able to trigger a Lucid dream in any particular method but often when I am being attacked it's like the adrenaline makes me think wait a second this is a dream. Some times if I get scared enough and wake up from a dream I can then make myself go back to that dream to confront the thing that scared me (but knowing it's a dream so I have the upper hand)

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

#185

Post by sgc »

vidarh wrote: post #132
cyclopeanutopia wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I can do that, but I think it is the same thing on a spectrum, just like the visual imagination.

Hearing your own voice Vs high fidelity musical instruments and other people's voices seems like a very wide spectrum. And indeed, it is wider as some people don't hear anything at all, including no inner monologue (I know someone like that - she's a good writer, and it freaks people out to realise the she can't 'hear' the words before she writes them, which is weird, because my vocalisation of words I wrote noticeab…

This entire conversation is new and fascinating to me. I used to be much more visual but I would say that my primary mode of thinking now is monologic. However I would never think to describe it as hearing. It is more like an imaginary 'voice' that is not the one I use with other people (it is absent timbre etc and just a much simpler more efficient voice abstracted from physical constraints). I use it to write out my thoughts in my mind. I quasi-visualize the chain of words just in a very abstract, largely amorphous way using this 'voice' and play them through my mind while 'speaking'/'hearing' them. In this sense I pretty literally get 'lost in my train of thought' when thinking about something interesting.

I don't know how much this style of thought came about because I really didn't enjoy constantly visualizing things and consistently fought against it; mainly due to the constant intrusive visual sequences of various types, of which I still have far too many for my taste. I use schematic and visual imaginations all the time, but I guess I feel safer using the monologue and so it has become the bulk of my thought. At the same time the fact that I have learned several languages and have had to consciously focus on language over the years undoubtedly plays a big part. I wonder how many polyglots who learned languages later in life use a similar monologic imagination style?

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

#186

Post by D-Machine »

nevinera wrote: post #97
wongarsu wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 q…

I am also a member of this club, and I think it's _very likely_ that aphantasics as a class have better 'spatial' skills/memory than typical, simply because we are forced to exercise that capability constantly. Spatial mappings are essentially how I express memories that others seem to hold as mental images of some kind, many of those _essential to function_, like "how do I drive from A to B", "how do I accomplish th…

There is some truth in this, but evidence sometimes suggests worse visuospatial memory, at least under some very specific operationalizations. E.g. less detail can be remembered overall, even though crucial details remembered are the same: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10598423/

More likely than not there are tradeoffs to using strictly visual vs. visual+ vs. strictly non-visual mental models in all domains, and there is no universally optimal strategy (and that teams of mixed cognitive styles are best overall). You know, no free lunch.

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

#188

Post by D-Machine »

pohl wrote: post #140
vidarh wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same here. The fact that I see things in my dreams is one of the reasons I feel I can know for certain I don't see things when I "imagine" things.

I'm still not sure the real difference isn't just where people draw the line in generalizing what it means to "see" and "hear" things. My dreams are more vivid than when I imagine an apple, but I still call it "seeing something in my head"—even when I know that it isn't exactly like "seeing"—and the sensation is different enough that I wouldn't blame someone if they chose to avoid calling it "seeing" something. How c…

Your theory is fairly conclusively disproven, most damningly by acquired aphantasia.

See also my post below: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49707079

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

#189

Post by skipkey »

mirror_neuron wrote: post #22
JoshTriplett wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it apply to audio as well? If you think of a song you know well, do you feel like you "hear" the music in your head, as though playing back an audio file? If you think of a movie scene you've seen, what is that like? Can you recount what was in it, even if you can't "picture" it? Or does this also prevent you from recalling the details of the scene?

As someone who is close to the aphantasic end of the spectrum: for me, it does not apply to audio. That difference is how I came to understand aphantasia better: I can very concretely hear sounds and music in my "mind's ear" in a way that I can't for vision.

I have no idea if I'm anywhere on the spectrum, but I really don't visualize images, but I can definitely hear sounds in my mind's ear. Not smells, tho. When I dream, it's almost no images. It's feelings, with a story associated. To the extent i do have images, they are very washed out, basically no color or detail.

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

#190

Post by analog8374 »

sowbug wrote: post #167

I'm aphantasic. I dream normally, seeing all sorts of imagery. I have accidentally had a couple lucid dreams in my lifetime, which got me interested in the methods to trigger them intentionally, all of which have failed. The Wake Back to Bed (WBTB) method has been especially frustrating, because I'll see my usual nothing when my eyes are closed, but then for the very briefest instant I see a dream image that immediat…

shikantaza (zen meditation, basically) has significantly improved my ability to visualize.
Post reply on HN