Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind • Hacker News Board

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#111

Post by roywiggins » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:17 PM UTC

kaoD wrote: post #15

DanWaterworth wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm the same. I can recall a particular picture I've seen of someone's face, but I find it difficult to imagine someone's face without that cue.

Ah, it's funny because your comment made me very clearly imagine Angelina Jolie's face out of the blue. Some famous people are easier to visualize than others (two examples I just experimented: Albert Einstein is easy to picture, while my brain can't decide on Sarah Palin's features). I had to work hard to find the Sarah Palin example: it's been surprisingly easy to imagine celebrities. Picturing people close to me i…

I find it much easier to recall a particular picture of someone's face than their face "in general."

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#112

Post by _0w8t » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:17 PM UTC

UniZero wrote: post #34

codingdave wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That begs another question - if you are doing something althletic (or even soemthing simple like driving a car), do you develop "muscle memory" the same as other people, or do you need to actually think through each motion you perform?

There was a study done a while back that looked at whether people could improve at video games by imagining themselves playing. IIRC the participants who imagined practicing showed a comparable amount of improvement in contrast to those who actually played. Can't find the link unfortunately.

Similarly I read once that during recovery from a trauma that prevents to do a particular physical activity if one imagines doing that activity, then it shorten the recovery time and leads to less muscle dystrophy.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#113

Post by Hupriene » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:20 PM UTC

kaoD wrote: post #3

> If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. Yes, with great detail. > If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing. Yup (and it's spinning for some reason!) > And mom’s face? Of course. Not at all! I've always been intrigued about this. I have a very rich "mind's eye", but always struggle with drawing faces in my mind. My experience with imagining faces: I get th…

Try this:

Imagine an image split vertically down the middle. The left side of the image is solid black. The right side is the right half of your mom's face.

Does that make it easier? It does for me.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#114

Post by blakeross » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:25 PM UTC

aab0 wrote: post #85

The conclusion is a little confusing. If his mother Dorianne is also a member of 'Aphantasiacs Anonymous', why does he quote a chat log where she claims to see stuff all the time?

Hm I guess I didn't make that clear. Doriane is just another friend of mine, not my mother.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#115

Post by to3m » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:28 PM UTC

JohnBooty wrote: post #52

There are a lot of basic assumptions about thought that don't apply to everybody. My wife, for example, can't process "left" and "right" without great effort. She's intelligent and is a gifted artist in a variety of mediums, and is not dyslexic in the least. But if you tell her to "turn right" in a car it's very confusing for her to translate that into which direction she should take. Even more confusingly, she's a v…

I used to have this problem a bit, but over the years I seem to have worked it out somehow.

When driving I do seem to have internalized that left = off road and right = across traffic. I never really noticed this until I drove abroad... I quickly realised I had to be very careful not to think too hard about what I was doing, because if I verbalized any of it then I just became confused. I also found it rather taxing to follow directions.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#116

Post by marchenko » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:31 PM UTC

Grambo wrote: post #65

kaoD wrote: post #3

> If I tell you to imagine a beach, you can picture the golden sand and turquoise waves. Yes, with great detail. > If I ask for a red triangle, your mind gets to drawing. Yup (and it's spinning for some reason!) > And mom’s face? Of course. Not at all! I've always been intrigued about this. I have a very rich "mind's eye", but always struggle with drawing faces in my mind. My experience with imagining faces: I get th…

Actually I think there's a reason for this. I took a cognitive science class once where our professor said that many believe that the portion of the brain responsible for recognizing faces is separate from the portion that does all other visual recognition. Perhaps that's why people have a hard time remembering what a face looks like. It's also why some people can lose their ability to recognize faces but can still r…

there's a strange phenomenon that occurs in some pregnancies where extra bloodflow/pressure on a particular region of the brain causes women to over-identify faces (in electrical sockets, in crumpled laundry, etc.). other visual skills are unaffected.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#117

Post by JohnBooty » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:48 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #84

bane wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's uncommon. It gets even harder when trying to figure out relative left-right to other people. Here's a tip I learned once: hold your hands out, palms facing away from you and fingers up. Point your thumbs at each other and index fingers straight up. The left hand will form an "L" (for left) and the right hand will form a backwards "L".

I found this impossible throughout my childhood. One day it was suddenly easy. I think, between the two moments, I had started playing a lot of top-down 3/4-view RPG video games. There's something about having an avatar that has a directional "facing" on a fixed-orientation orthogonal grid (picture a chessboard, where the piece has a face)—and where commanding the avatar with a direction button both moves it and turn…

Very interesting!

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#118

Post by 8note » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:51 PM UTC

blakeross wrote: post #2

I'm the author of this post, happy to answer any questions. About me: I was formerly a director of product at FB and a founder of Firefox. My YC startup became FB's first acquisition. I'm focusing more on creative writing these days (wrote the Silicon Valley spec script and the Theranos parody that have come up on HN a few times.) Aphantasia was a pretty weird discovery for me given this new focus.

Thank you for clearing that up!

I've been unable to visualize anything except taste since the age of ~10. I figured that was something I had grown out of!

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#119

Post by snarfy » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 7:57 PM UTC

aab0 wrote: post #91

snarfy wrote: post #23

My wife has multiple sclerosis. Aphantasia is one of the complications she's experiencing. Without being able to visualize she's had to resort to using a notepad and paper to write everything down. She's always been creative and it's been very hard on her to come down with this.

Is it aphantasia or is it the general severe cognitive changes across many domains that usually accompanies MS?

We aren't sure. It took a long time before we associated a term to her issues. The tl;dr is she says she lost the picture in her mind. She cannot visualize anymore, which sounds like aphantasia.

Re: Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

#120

Post by kazagistar » Sat, Apr 23, 2016, 8:25 PM UTC

I'm... halfway. When I try, I can generate images, but I only do so occasionally. Most of the time, my thinking is exactly like the author describes. Facts, ideas, connections, hunches, intuitions, etc. The images are kinda like a serialization of this, no more: they have exactly the data I put into them, and not really any more "detail".

But what really blew my mind was when I realized that people think with words. Its always "have an idea, then attempt to serialize it into some approximation in the form of linear sentence or words". I mean, I can chose to speak a sentence in my head, but it is strange and artificial. But from what I hear from others, apparently people actually think about things with words, and which words they have both enable and limit their thinking. I still don't exactly know how that works, but apparently its common?