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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

#211

Post by Zecc »

derefr wrote: post #94
mbrutsch wrote: post #20

I take it from the article that this would solve one of my biggest internal issues: songs getting stuck in my head. It's gotten so bad in recent years that I don't listen to music at all , because it may stimulate a "earwig" that will not stop.

AFAIK, we've long solved this one: a song gets stuck in your head from lack of "closure"—trying to complete a pattern. You likely heard the beginning of the song, and that set off your mind trying to remember the rest, but you can't remember the ending, so it just keeps spinning on it. The easy fix is the unintuitive one: listen to the song. Then, as soon as you've given your mind closure on the pattern, get your min…

> a song gets stuck in your head from lack of "closure".

I usually turn off my car's stereo only at the end of musical phrases for just this reason. This phenomenon happens a lot to me.

There is a song, stuck in my head since a little over a decade ago, which ends with a fade out, not providing any closure at all.

It still pops up occasionally, but fortunately I can usually override it by recalling any of a number of favorite other song loops I have collected through the years and haven't gotten tired of yet.

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

#212

Post by ddmf »

kazagistar wrote: post #128
Orthanc wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This describes issues I have to a tee. I know a few basic words in multiple languages, mostly I use English, but I have noticed I tend to get worse after a long coding session - it's like my English cart gets taken out and replaced with something else.

What is quite scary is that my colleagues now understand from tone and context exactly which "thingy" I am referring to...

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

#214

Post by LinkDJ »

monkbroc wrote: post #182
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 I heard the story of the Exeter research on NPR while driving back from the airport at night last year at it floored me! I never realized that other people could actually picture images in their minds. I also thought this was entirely metaphorical. I wrote to the researchers back then to be included in further research. I'm a computer engineer. Anyone know if there a community group of people with aphantasia?

So far I've found https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/ but it's not very large (yet).

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

#215

Post by rms »

blakeross wrote: post #11
blaze33 wrote: post #9

And now I wonder what someone with aphantasia would see using psychedelic drugs, or while meditating... Still nothing ? Could that help ?

Meditating has never done anything for me visually. I thought the idea of "visualizing" while you meditate was just a figure of speech. I haven't tried psychedelic drugs. Maybe I should start.

I would be surprised if you weren't capable of "seeing" the typical colorful geometric patterns of a DMT not-quite-breakthrough with your eyes closed, and the experience of having something pass through your mind's eye just once might trigger dormant pathways.

Anyway, as a quasi-professional, my advice if you were going to pick just one to try, would be vaporized freebase DMT.

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