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Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

theguardian.com

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Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#211

Post by gilleain »

true_djf wrote: post #203

Hm. But if people really see things in their mind like that, how come so many apparently struggle to draw a bicycle, even though they've both seen and used one? If I ask one of those people to picture a bicycle in their mind, what exactly do they see? Do they see their own distorted version of a bike? When I "picture" something in my mind, I can't really see anything, it's more feelings and words and abstract ideas.…

Well I can say what happens with me, although as should be clear from this whole thread, other's experiences might be very different!

Visualising an image (of a memory, or an ideal) is a bit like tricking yourself into seeing something. There is no actual bike in your brain, just memories of what parts of a bike look like.

The trick is your brain putting those parts together and presenting that composite as 'a bike'. So i can understand how - some people - can 'see' what they think a bike looks like but then draw a mechanical mess.

Of course there are people with perfect recall, and others who design bikes for a living and so on. I'm really just describing how it could happen for some group of people.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#212

Post by ryanjshaw »

markers wrote: post #191

I got aphantasia from Covid, apparently it's an extremely rare side effect - so rare I've only found a handful of people on the entire internet who've experienced it. So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize, I used to be extremely good at visualizing. Most major impact (apart from the loss of ability to daydream) is that my memory is worse, as my memory was very much based…

> So I happen to know how it is to live both with and without the ability to visualize

True, but this is not the same as being born aphantasic.

I'm thinking that people like me who have never had the ability to draw pictures in their head have decades of dedicating brain power to alternative ways of thinking about the world that you wouldn't have in place.

You wouldn't be able to compare the experience in any real depth, but you might have more than typical insight.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#213

Post by nkmnz »

mmh0000 wrote: post #105
neongreen wrote: post #88

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…

You’ve just made me realize that my brain is (more) broken than I thought it was. This explains why I lose every argument with my wife about things that happened in the past.

Now wait until you have arguments about the future…

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#214

Post by gmokki »

floitsch wrote: post #16
FeistySkink wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was my biggest puzzle as a child: how do all those people in crime shows describe suspects? And was it just made up?

The other ones for me: - "go to your happy place", or "imagine you are on an island..." - counting sheep to fall asleep. I just couldn't visualize them.

When I tried counting sheep it was very hard work: like stop motion animation. First picture a sheep, move it one frame, then re-draw everything including the fence that vanished every frame. It could easily take many minutes to move on sheep over a fence and exhaust me.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#215

Post by true_djf »

gilleain wrote: post #211
true_djf wrote: post #203

Hm. But if people really see things in their mind like that, how come so many apparently struggle to draw a bicycle, even though they've both seen and used one? If I ask one of those people to picture a bicycle in their mind, what exactly do they see? Do they see their own distorted version of a bike? When I "picture" something in my mind, I can't really see anything, it's more feelings and words and abstract ideas.…

Well I can say what happens with me, although as should be clear from this whole thread, other's experiences might be very different! Visualising an image (of a memory, or an ideal) is a bit like tricking yourself into seeing something. There is no actual bike in your brain, just memories of what parts of a bike look like. The trick is your brain putting those parts together and presenting that composite as 'a bike'.…

That makes sense. So perhaps you could simplistically think of it like this then: the brain remembers things somehow, and when recalling, it runs that internal representation of that memory through some kind of a machinery that visually presents it to you? Only in some people that machinery actually doesn't produce visuals, but something else? (And I would seem to be one of those people).

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#216

Post by Jordan-117 »

auggierose wrote: post #97

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.

I feel similarly, though less about the lack of objective testing and more about the inability to even be sure we're talking about the same thing. Like I can visualize stuff fine, but not literally see it like some Hololens overlay -- it's in a sort of abstract internal space separate from what you see with your eyes. Sometimes I wonder whether some self-diagnosed aphantasiacs only think they are because they overestimate how potent "normal" visualization should be. (Or maybe these visual hallucinations are normal and I'm underdiagnosing myself!)

One method to possibly tell the difference is visual analogizing. Like, "picture" the Sydney Opera House, and then (without thinking in words) name some other objects it resembles. Someone with visual imagination should be able to rattle off stuff like sailboats or seashells or folded napkins, while a true aphantasiac should be lost without being able to look at a picture or derive an answer from a mental list of attributes.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#217

Post by coldblues »

I'm very interested in this topic, so I'll go ahead and describe my experience.

I can imagine anything with my eyes open. Any object on my desk, or a place, a drawing, abstract geometry or pretty much anything I have a reference to. If I were to visualize an apple in real life, with my eyes open, this is how the process would go: Imagine you're taking photos of the world 5 times a second. You then take those pictures into your mind and superimpose an apple onto them, like adding a layer in Photoshop, perhaps with 90% opacity or a bit of inconsistent flickering. That's probably the best way I could describe the experience. Those edits I create are on another visual layer, inside my mind, which requires an active effort to have a consistent visual experience, but of course sometimes it can passively activate and you're just daydreaming without any effort. Personally, I have a hard time imagining faces. They change, they melt, sometimes they become inhuman. I only have consistent faces in my dreams.

The places I know well, I can fully navigate inside my mind, just flying around a town, going down streets and such. I, of course, don't believe neither the scaling or the distance is accurate, but it's convincing and consistent enough for me at the level of abstract thought.

I fully get immersed in the books I'm reading or listening to. It's the best part of reading a book.

I can imagine smell, taste, sound, touch, sight and even other senses like balance and whatever else. Sound would be the most vivid part of my imagination. High consistency and fidelity. I also have an inner monologue which I use in second person communication, addressing myself from the perspective of another entity.

I have anxiety, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and problems with rumination. I experience memories with a lot of emotion. Whenever I look at art or listen to music, I also tend to have a deep and powerful emotional reaction.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#218

Post by _dain_ »

true_djf wrote: post #203

Hm. But if people really see things in their mind like that, how come so many apparently struggle to draw a bicycle, even though they've both seen and used one? If I ask one of those people to picture a bicycle in their mind, what exactly do they see? Do they see their own distorted version of a bike? When I "picture" something in my mind, I can't really see anything, it's more feelings and words and abstract ideas.…

> Do they see their own distorted version of a bike?

Yes. For most people it's more like a "schema" or a lossy compression. It can be placed in space, left or right or above or below other image-fragments, there can be colouring, shading, motion, sound. But it's not a faithful bike-image, although it's hard to notice that unless you try to draw it.

There are also other reasons why mental visualization doesn't necessarily mean one can draw it faithfully. For me, mental imagery has a kind of unstable three-dimensional quality, where I see the image from multiple overlapping, shifting perspectives, kinda like a Cubist painting. Different parts of the image have more or less detail over time; I can't hold fine detail about the whole thing simultaneously. If I wanted to draw it, I'd have to pin it to one perspective for long enough, and I can't make my mind do that.

This shouldn't be so surprising -- perspective and realistic representational art took a long time to develop in human history. It's a skill that has to be learned, and I haven't learned it.

Some people really can imagine a photorealistic picture of the bike though. They're usually either savants or trained artists.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#219

Post by coldblues »

true_djf wrote: post #203

Hm. But if people really see things in their mind like that, how come so many apparently struggle to draw a bicycle, even though they've both seen and used one? If I ask one of those people to picture a bicycle in their mind, what exactly do they see? Do they see their own distorted version of a bike? When I "picture" something in my mind, I can't really see anything, it's more feelings and words and abstract ideas.…

"Drawing from imagination" should not be taken literally. It's a blueprint, a thumbnail. By the time you're done, what you have on paper is significantly different, if not totally different from what you were imagining.

Re: Aphantasia: I can not picture things in my mind

#220

Post by andoando »

coldblues wrote: post #217

I'm very interested in this topic, so I'll go ahead and describe my experience. I can imagine anything with my eyes open. Any object on my desk, or a place, a drawing, abstract geometry or pretty much anything I have a reference to. If I were to visualize an apple in real life, with my eyes open, this is how the process would go: Imagine you're taking photos of the world 5 times a second. You then take those pictures…

That sounds heavenly to me.
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