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Aphantasia: How It Feels to Be Blind in Your Mind

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

#121

Post by amagumori »

vanderZwan wrote: post #109
Grambo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Could that also be why untrained artists are better at drawing faces if they view and draw them upside down?

In "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" the upside down drawing exercise is suggested and i think the reasoning is that people draw facial features as "symbols", resorting to their own idea of what a nose looks like / how to draw a nose rather than drawing what they see. Drawing upside down stops this. Maybe this is related.

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

#122

Post by poink »

blakeross wrote: post #29

I would be curious to see how the HN community scores on this aphantasia survey embedded in the BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054 . Perhaps there's a connection between programmers and this condition. Will you take it and report your score? The survey is oversimplified, obviously, but it was devised by the Exeter neurologists who are studying this. I got the lowest score (8/40) since none of the qu…

8/40. Reading this has been a, "Hey! That's me!" moment. I've tried to discuss the whole, "You can't really see things in your mind, right?" thing with people before, but nobody believed me when I said I couldn't.

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

#123

Post by Fargren »

blakeross wrote: post #29

I would be curious to see how the HN community scores on this aphantasia survey embedded in the BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054 . Perhaps there's a connection between programmers and this condition. Will you take it and report your score? The survey is oversimplified, obviously, but it was devised by the Exeter neurologists who are studying this. I got the lowest score (8/40) since none of the qu…

I got 30/40. I can imagine static images with almost unbounded detail visually, but movement is hard, other senses are a lot harder and imagining transitions(like a blue sky becoming stormy) is almost impossible.

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

#124

Post by kazagistar »

blakeross wrote: post #29

I would be curious to see how the HN community scores on this aphantasia survey embedded in the BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-34039054 . Perhaps there's a connection between programmers and this condition. Will you take it and report your score? The survey is oversimplified, obviously, but it was devised by the Exeter neurologists who are studying this. I got the lowest score (8/40) since none of the qu…

24/40

Poses, colors, and movements of people is very shaky, but I can do landscapes OK. But something about the structure of the questions bothers me... It seems like they are implying that I am observing the image, rather then generating it. Like, "how clearly can you see ____?" means I focus a bit and add it to the image, until I can see it better, but very little of the details asked about pop up unless I think about them, take the information asked for, and intentionally integrate it into the image.

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

#125

Post by Orthanc »

kazagistar wrote: post #120

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.…

I can imagine an image in my head (sort of) but I can't not think in words. It's hard for me to even understand what people mean when they say they are thinking but they don't have an internal monologue going on in their head. Brains are weird.

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

#126

Post by kazagistar »

miguelrochefort wrote: post #82

Wait, so people can actually see things in their head? Like the author, I was convinced this was a metaphor/figure of speech... Actually, I'm still a bit skeptical about whether any of this is true. I have a sense of how things are located spatially and can recall features of things I have verbally described to myself, but there is no way I can see anything that's not before my eyes. Not sure if that's related, but I…

How do artists design fantastical paintings? Often, they can see the entire thing in their minds eye in detail, and then they replicate it on canvas as closely as they can.

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

#127

Post by mattdeboard »

blakeross wrote: post #107
mattdeboard wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This makes no sense. I'm really skeptical of this "disorder." I think it mostly amounts to "semantics and variability in human abilities, not pathology."[1] Metacognition like this is super slippery and is really easy to draw whatever conclusion you want. I've just never been able to draw even mildly realistic anything ever, this doesn't mean I have a disease. [1] http://doc2doc.bmj.com/forums/open-clinical_psychiatr…

Whatever you want to believe about semantics (which I addressed in the article), the Exeter neurologists did see a difference in the man's MRI scans versus the control group. Sure, we can call that a "variability in human ability" rather than a "disorder". I never used the word "disorder" anyway.

Right, I don't doubt that some exceptional biological incident can trigger a change... I'm just skeptical of any kind of self-diagnosis that requires metacognitive analysis of one's self. Especially one that, if you're to judge even by the small number of comments on this thread, seems to be wildly prevalent.

And, I mean, you _did_ couch this as a disorder when you made the single-subject case study your proof.

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

#128

Post by kazagistar »

Orthanc wrote: post #125
kazagistar wrote: post #120

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.…

I can imagine an image in my head (sort of) but I can't not think in words. It's hard for me to even understand what people mean when they say they are thinking but they don't have an internal monologue going on in their head. Brains are weird.

Do you know more then one language? I grew up bilingual from a young age, and I suspect that has something to do with the disconnect between ideas and words.

The simplest proof I have for the fact that I don't think in words is that I quite often forget a word, and can't complete a sentence. I know exactly what I want to express and have thought it through in my mind, but I can't tell it to someone else because I don't remember the serialization of that idea, and am forced to try to work around it by describing the word and hoping someone fills it in for me.

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

#129

Post by taralx »

kazagistar wrote: post #120

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.…

Same here. Makes writing actually quite difficult -- I tell people it's like trying to put a whirlwind down the end of a pen.

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

#130

Post by _98fj »

kazagistar wrote: post #120

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.…

I'm not blind, but I think like you do. My thoughts aren't linear and I feel that words only appear when they are already leaving my mouth or the tips of my fingers.

I can formulate sentences in my mind, but it feels really slow and cumbersome.

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