121–130 of 416 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think entirely in words, no images. No sounds. Just concepts that are mapped to words. It blows my mind some people actually see images when they think
When you say you think in words, does that mean like you see printed words like a page of text? Or just audible words?
If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain". The image I see in my mind is basically an empty paper, with an arrow pointing to the left labeled "mountain", an arrow to the right labeled "wood", and an arrow to the middle labeled "path". Maybe, maybe the mountain is represented with two lines /\ and the path is a winding line ~~~ but that…
> If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain". As someone who paints landscapes, I have a huge amount of trouble with this prompt. I am trying to construct something that is topographically feasible and artistically agreeable. I can imagine walking through a wood, but not alongside one. I know (of course) that it is possible to walk along…
What frustrates me about things like that, there seem to be no proper tests for that. Shouldn't there be an easy test for Aphantasia, for example, that doesn't ask me things like "do you have a mind's eye" (what does that even mean?). Such a test should not ask the test subjects to self-diagnose themselves, but it should objectively test abilities and put them on a scale. Anything else really is not that helpful.
If you’re looking for objective measures, aphantasia correlates inversely with objective measures of visual memory. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7856239/ But you can also imagine tests based on introspection which are better than just straight up asking how vivid your mental imagery is. For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it? For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless. It has no c…
> For example: imagine a triangle. What color is it?
> For a true aphantasiac, this question is meaningless.
If you are not an aphantasiac, how do you know what meaning this question has for one? I am pretty sure aphantasiacs can "imagine" a triangle with some color in it. It is just that this imagine manifests differently than it does for you, but how can we measure that objectively?
To elaborate, even for an aphantasiac, a triangle or a color is not something abstract. You can draw it on a paper, and it is right there. If you close your eyes, you can remember what you have drawn on the paper, aphantasiac or not. So how exactly do you distinguish the quality of memories here? Certainly not with vague internet questionnaires. Research like that makes me really angry.
Every time I’m reading about Aphantasia, I’m confused again that people really see stuff in their head. I have basically the same as the person in the article. So, if you want to know anything, AMA. I’m also trying to respond to a few questions which are already asked.
Based on the article and the comments here, it sounds like the way you remember things must be missing a lot of details. I'm speculating here because I just saw a movie today at a theater and I can playback scenes in my mind. I can certainly describe a scene with words but that's clearly very limiting. At the very least, I don't have words to map to all the colors my eyes can detect. Do you think that's accurate? Tha…
> "People with tetrachromacy have a fourth cone in their retinas, called a tetrachromat, that allows them to see up to 100 million colors, compared to the average person's 1 million. This extra cone gives them access to new color ranges within the yellow and green spectrum, which can create millions of new color variations. "
I can only imagine how much more vibrant the world looks to them in terms of sunrise and sunset, walking in a forest, etc.
If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain". The image I see in my mind is basically an empty paper, with an arrow pointing to the left labeled "mountain", an arrow to the right labeled "wood", and an arrow to the middle labeled "path". Maybe, maybe the mountain is represented with two lines /\ and the path is a winding line ~~~ but that…
> If somebody told me "image you are walking a winding path. To your right there is a wood, to your left there is a mountain". As someone who paints landscapes, I have a huge amount of trouble with this prompt. I am trying to construct something that is topographically feasible and artistically agreeable. I can imagine walking through a wood, but not alongside one. I know (of course) that it is possible to walk along…
Far to the left, you can see more mountains, but trees and hill block your view on the right. It's really common to see while hiking, though usually you turn to the downhill side to take a picture
There seems to be a higher-than-average incidence of Aphantasia in tech folks, at least as self-reported. Our visual cortex is a huge part of our brain and in the absence of visual input can be "rewired" to other purposes. Theory: I have no evidence for this but its plausible that our obsession with solving hard, abstract logic puzzles all day (and night) somehow hijacks part of our visual cortex. Effectively reprogr…
For me it's the other way around. I was always good at abstract sciences, like math and theoretical physics. Partially because I could operate in my mind with my very own abstractions. But I'm for example very bad at chess and tetris, because I can't visualize. This has been true for me at least since I was 5.
There seems to be a higher-than-average incidence of Aphantasia in tech folks, at least as self-reported. Our visual cortex is a huge part of our brain and in the absence of visual input can be "rewired" to other purposes. Theory: I have no evidence for this but its plausible that our obsession with solving hard, abstract logic puzzles all day (and night) somehow hijacks part of our visual cortex. Effectively reprogr…
I see functions I wrote hours ago, maybe not every line of code but pseudocode at least. There’s been plenty of times where I’ve solved bugs just visualizing code before falling asleep.
Every time I’m reading about Aphantasia, I’m confused again that people really see stuff in their head. I have basically the same as the person in the article. So, if you want to know anything, AMA. I’m also trying to respond to a few questions which are already asked.
I personally find it hard to believe that people would really experience things so differently. Seems simpler to attribute it to differences in how people describe their internal representations in words. Even for myself it's a little bit unclear and changing how I'm really representing things. One day I might say oh I don't see anything, it's all just concepts (oh no it's aphantasia). On another it would be like ok…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's real and I have it. I was astonished when I discovered other people see pictures in their head. It doesn't restrict my creative thinking but I am a spatial thinker. When I solve an imaginary logic problem such as advancing the hands on a clock I can't see the before and after states but I can infer their positions by the directions they must point and then read the new time from that.
Asked to think of the Mona Lisa, there's just... nothing?
The best example of this, and why I’m absolutely certain it’s real and there’s not just a miscommunication, is the joke “don’t think of a pink elephant”. Until I learned of aphantasia I always thought it was super dumb because you say the words pink elephant so of course you’re thinking of a pink elephant. But seemingly for a lot of people “thinking of a pink elephant” means “conjuring an image of a pink elephant”. Or something awful that people don’t want to imagine. I’ve never understood “I wish I could unsee that”.
Alert: if you were happy to learn about aphantasia, you might also be happy to learn about SDAM (severely deficient autobiographical memory), which I think is correlated with aphantasia. SDAM is when you know facts about your life, but can’t walk through any or almost any episodes . Apparently normal people can actually re-live episodes from their past, step by step or.. idk. Somehow. And I don’t know what I had for…
correct - it’s like playing an extremely low resolution “replay” of that moment in time.sometimes the frames skip but it’s still visible to me.