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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

#251

Post by rhdunn »

khazhoux wrote: post #227

Let’s do a quick survey for aphantasics: 1. How’s your audio-lization? Can you hear music (accurately) in your head? Can you pick out instruments, pause, rewind, etc? 2. Can you visualize pure motion ? Maybe you can’t visualize a woman clearly, but can you visualize the motion of a woman doing, e.g., jumping jacks? (For me, I can see complex motion clearly without seeing any underlying shape, if that makes sense) 3.…

1. It's kind of like humming or singing, just internally.

2. Only via memory recall and even then its not stable and I don't "see it" with what my eyes are seeing/processing but more with the memory/recollection part of the brain. As such I can't visualize a unique image of that, but can construct one internally, often recalling different memories/images of the various parts of what I'm constructing.

3. No. I can't visualize (or really "see") colours on their own. When visualizing a colour I recall things that are that colour from memory (an apple, grass from a particular place, the Windows XP background, etc.). It's not that I don't know/remember that something is a specific colour, just that that part is not recalled/imagined visually. Or when I do recall colours of objects/pictures I can't hold onto that image.

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

#252

Post by vidarh »

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…

I don't think that it is that the industry abounds with us, but it is natural that those of us who have strong opinions on aphantasia and/or feel affected are far more likely to post on stories about it.

That a larger proportion of HN users are aware of their aphantasia is another matter - the renewed research over the last 10 years got a lot of attention.

It is very clear that there is a spectrum - hence why the typical test goes from seeing nothing at all via various degrees of seeing blurry or monochrome shapes to full colour vision. Going by Ed Catmull's survey of staff at Pixar, you will also find it extending further into hyperphantasia: People (and there's at least one in this thread too) who can "watch movies" in their head and can rewind and fast forward.

> Or the way we are describing it leads people in the "1-2 out of 5" category to declare themselves aphantastic on HN when they aren't really properly so.

People at the lowest end of the scale absolutely have aphantasia, but there's no "official threshold".

but also, if I could see even the vague outlines that'd place me one level up, it'd be very obviously different to my experience. I score the minimum possible 32 on the VVIQ2 test:

https://davidfmarks.net/vividness-of-visual-imagery-question...

And the minimum 16 on the older VVIQ test.

https://aphantasia.com/study/vviq

The median score on VVIQ2 is 79. The median for VVIQ is around 60, and the thresholds used for aphantasia on the VVIQ test is 24 or 33 depending on who you ask.

I can very occasionally possibly see brief flashes of vague imagery, and as I've mentioned elsewhere, I have had a single experience of what was probably at hyperphantasia levels, so I don't think there's some inherent physical limitation preventing me from seeing more. But it is also very clear to me especially because of that experience that I do in fact not see more.

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

#253

Post by vidarh »

neom wrote: post #159
vidarh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have aphantasia as well, but have had visuals once during meditation, much clearer than in dreams. I've never managed to repeat it. Does it happen regularly for you? Any tips? Like you my spatial reasoning is very good, but no image.

I've just spent the past 20 minutes thinking about how I do it, I can do both eyes closed and eyes open, at work, I mostly talk with my eyes closed actually because my thinking style is generally quite visual. I then spent 15 minutes trying to figure out how to explain it, and it sounds a bit nuts...for eyes open there are generally 2 things involved for me, one is what I could describe as "disassociating from my eye…

Appreciate it. I don't really miss it much (though it explains various things about my preferences, such as finding visual descriptions in books extremely boring unless the language used itself interests me), but that one experience did drive home that I am missing something, and so occasionally I do try to experiment to see if there's any way I can trigger that experience again.

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

#254

Post by etcetcetcetceta »

chiefgeek wrote: post #17

I’ve worked as a professional photographer for twenty years and I visualize absolutely zero with my eyes closed. It’s only recently that I learned of aphantasia. Even on most psychedelic journeys I don’t have closed eye visuals, NN-DMT being the consistent exception. Everything is more of just a “knowingness”.

>I don’t have closed eye visuals

Nobody does, this is all unfalsifiable nonsense, it's an artifact of the language used to describe imagination.

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

#256

Post by anentropic »

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 experience is similar.

I have dreamed visually, sometimes vividly, but not so common these days that I awake remembering a dream. Lucid dreams rarely - and almost exclusively as a flying dream, like at some point I just realise I can fly and then I'm in control for a while until I wake up. Fun when it happens but I have no idea or technique for making it happen.

When falling asleep I can have random visuals but I can't control them, and trying to do so tends to kill them off.

Yeah it does feel somewhat like the rational and external sensory processing parts of my brain are maybe suppressing the inner-generated imagery.

I feel like when asked to 'imagine an apple', some part of my brain is sort of visualising an apple, I just can't "see" it. In other threads about aphantasia, normies have wondered how we enjoy reading. But I have always loved reading fiction and, like with the apple, I get absorbed in the book and am imagining it in some sense, just not 'seeing' it.

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

#257

Post by nevertoolate »

izzydata wrote: post #15
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is cope to avoid the realization that some people are walking around with drastically different life experiences.

I think a lot of people that can "see" in their mind are over-estimating their ability and a lot of people who can't are under-estimated their ability. It's probably a spectrum like a lot of things are, except in this case it is exceptionally hard to to know where you fall on it. The gap may not be as wide as it sounds. Almost everyone is still a functioning thinking human afterall. If the gap were so wide it seems l…

I have aphantasia, figured out after a vivid dream which I’ve told my wife about so happily. She was not really amused. She sees these things ALL THE TIME. Like whenever she wants, or from time to time even when she doesn’t want to. She saw his father on the street one day. Two months after he had died.

We have a hard time communicating about things. She sometimes can’t express herself at all, she sees things she thinks I should be able to see. I have very good ability to remember schemata, maps. I move really quickly in pages and pages of text. I can summarize the pages and pages of llm output in less time than it is generated. She can easily put 8 grammatical mistakes in a 5 word sentence. We can communicate easily when i write the code quickly and she can checks the visual output in the browser, this is really fluid.

Want more examples ? :)

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

#258

Post by t-3 »

mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #221
suslik wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also aphantastic, and I don't even get to dream properly. I had a dream perhaps no more than 10 times throughout my life, and almost always due to some unusual circumstances (very rough hangover, grief, broken heart). Even experiences with rather high doses of psilocybin or LSD were profoundly non-visual for me, and I made several attempts to get there.

Interesting that you say you had no visuals from LSD. How high a dose? It's surprising to me, because as far as I understand it, psychedelic visuals aren't really akin to daydreams or internally generated imagery, but abnormal processing of external imagery. At least for relatively mild experiences. Something like a DMT breakthrough is a whole other story from what I hear, though I've never been there myself.

I'm also aphantasic, but I do dream, though rarely remember them unless I wake up and go back to sleep (probably due to being a deep sleeper rather than anything to do with aphantasia). At most I get some attraction to and diffusion of (not sure how to describe this experience) fractal patterns and vibrant colors on LSD. On shrooms I've gotten some color-shifting of lights, but no open or closed-eye visualization or hallucination. Strong opiates have given me closed-eye hallucination (uncontrollable visualization) though.

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

#259

Post by t-3 »

iinnPP wrote: post #231
Gamemaster1379 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you express you have aphantasia to someone, one of the most common questions is whether you can dream. As someone with it: Yes I can dream. They're so real they are lifelike. And not just visually. In my dreams, reality and history itself can be different and to me, history didn't change. It just is. I rememeber in one dream I was some sort of captain and I saw one of my closest friends. We'd been crewmates for…

That's fascinating. Do you gain access to facts or knowledge that are verifiable afterwards? Have you ever become fluent in a foreign language for a dream?

In my experience, it feels real but the feelings doesn't really hold up to scrutiny. It's more like the set of a play than a real world, where a thin facade evokes all the right cues in the audience but couldn't actually be used to trick someone into thinking it's real.

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

#260

Post by thom »

vidarh wrote: post #134
jibbit wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems ironic (and not at all trustworthy)! if you're right, you can't actually imagine what being able to do it would be like

The people who question this usually turn out to clearly have aphantasia. As I've mentioned elsewhere, I have achieved visualisation during meditation, once. I also can visualise while dreaming. I do not visualise while awake other than that one time. The difference is extremely stark and very obvious.

I really don't think this is the right definition. I don't think I have aphantasia: I picture things in my mind's eye, can manipulate those images, and I get the various stimulus responses described in some of the literature. But it's totally different than dreaming: it's an act of will, I can dismiss it at any time, and I would never be able to convince myself I was actually 'seeing' what I imagined.

But heck, if that's it then hail, brother.

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