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How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

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Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#231

Post by drcongo »

Fraterkes wrote: post #175
stevenhuang wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a voracious reader (sci-fi) and I would also put it best as processing what I read as facts. I've never been able to daydream or create worlds in my minds eye such that I get lost in them (which is something I hear people who daydream are able to do). I think part of this is why I've always found creative writing to be difficult. For example in grade school I was certain I was among the few that read the most, ye…

Out of curiosity, how do you keep track of the spaces the characters move in if you can't visualise anything?

(I'm aphantasic) one weird thing about aphantasia is that spatial awareness is often actually better in aphantasics. I have an extremely good internal mapping system but none of it is visualised - I just seem to know where I am in relation to other things around me.

Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#232

Post by HellDunkel »

hofstee wrote: post #220
HellDunkel wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can make really good drawings of the things? Like imagine a castle and draw it on a sheet of paper without any other references? I am very skeptical.

You’re practically describing Kim Jung Gi: https://youtu.be/MGbvhyTZXfs

Yes, its called a photographic memory and only very few people have it. It cannot be trained.

Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#233

Post by HellDunkel »

voxl wrote: post #216
HellDunkel wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you can make really good drawings of the things? Like imagine a castle and draw it on a sheet of paper without any other references? I am very skeptical.

No because I don't know how to draw. But I can program in my head and reproduce on a page.

Do you visually see the code in your mind? Do you remember it visually? Hoe does that even make sense?

Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#234

Post by bstnbstn »

fransje26 wrote: post #218
ergonaught wrote: post #182

As someone with aphantasia, most of the replies here prompt me to think ugly thoughts about humanity. Judgemental, hateful, repugnant species. There's really no hope for the primate line. With any luck, some thoughtless company will engineer a replacement. If only I could visualize that outcome.

Well, the author of the article is not trying to sell you anything, so why don't you let the haters be haters, and give it a try. The best that can happen is that it might help. The worse that can happen is that you are going to "waste" some time. He miss every shot you don't take.

For me, the worst would be to be able to visualise but find it distracting, annoying or traumatic. Or if I could only imagine dim and vague images: not helpful, but also impossible to turn off.

Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#235

Post by synecdoche »

smokel wrote: post #214
Jiocus wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I remember correctly, aphantasia is inability to visualise images, objects or memories in the mind, and this seems to be what the author actually refers to. The alternative, to actually perceive imagery with the eye that isn't there is usually called hallucination. The article doesn't get at this difference and seems to be based on Youtube videos about aphantasia. If you've ever had a dream with vivid first person…

From personal experience, I have some proof that dreams are not similar to plain eyesight, and are probably produced somewhere else in my brain. In a dream, I saw a friend. The images in the dream were very vivid, and I could have easily mistaken the dream for reality. However, when I woke up, I could not tell whether I had seen my friend from the front, or from the back. This suggests that the property "feels very r…

Just like image-generating AI can’t write anything coherent, it appears equally hard for me to read any text in my dreams.

Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#236

Post by BizarroLand »

CommieBobDole wrote: post #4

So, wait, are people normally actually seeing images, with their eyes, when they imagine what something looks like? Like, the brown-blackness of the back of your eyelids gets replaced with something you actually see, like it's projected there? I can imagine what something looks like, and I guess I sort of 'see' it, but closing my eyes doesn't make it any more real. It doesn't seem to involve the eyes or any part of t…

No. It's only rarely that vivid. It's more like the memory of an image, but one you may not have seen yet.

Like if you imagine a 1950's spaceship, yellow with red stripes and long curving fins resting on a cratered moonscape with astronauts in shiny puffy silver suits holding their glass helmets in their hands as if they can breathe in the vacuum of space smiling brightly with a sign above that reads, "buy astrogum! It's astrolicious!" in the coca-cola font.

You won't see that the same way you see the words on the page in front of you, but in that same way that you "see" the hazy memories of your childhood playing with friends, running around, parks and blue skies in the ever-lasting summer of your youth.

Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#237

Post by k9unit »

davidhunter wrote: post #8
CommieBobDole wrote: post #4

So, wait, are people normally actually seeing images, with their eyes, when they imagine what something looks like? Like, the brown-blackness of the back of your eyelids gets replaced with something you actually see, like it's projected there? I can imagine what something looks like, and I guess I sort of 'see' it, but closing my eyes doesn't make it any more real. It doesn't seem to involve the eyes or any part of t…

Yes. I am like you in that I cannot actually see anything visual in my minds eye but I can still 'visualise' it. For example, I can rotate a die in my minds eye without actually seeing it. It's hard to explain. It was a revelation when I found out that most people can actually see things visually in their minds eye. A friend of mine can actually place imagined objects into their field of view, like AR.

It feels like my brain is processing and feeling what it would look like if I truly saw it. I can see a dice, zoom in on it, and feel the indented bumps where the black dots go. But the actual image of a dice just barely escapes me. It's similar when visualizing math too.

Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#238

Post by geoelectric »

JshWright wrote: post #178
geoelectric wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm fairly sure I'm aphantasic. When I try to imagine something I don't get any visuals, even the visual processing equivalent of subvocalization. Sometimes I can get a flicker of an outline or something but I can't hold the concept and it'll dissolve inside a second. I used to be a pretty good artist working from photos, but I can't compose in my head. At all. But I do also know what familiar things look like more o…

Your experience sounds very similar to mine (even down to once visualizing a color (in my case green), which is what convinced me visualizing is really a thing and I really can't do it). I describe my "internal" sensory experience as being similar to proprioception. In the same way you can "feel" where your left hand is relative to the rest of your body, that's how my relates to most objects/spaces.

Yes, I've also used the proprioception explanation, terminology and all. It felt a little obscure here, so I spelled it out. We must have extremely similar experiences.

I'm curious: have you noticed any effect on your memory? My autobiographical memory is poor--I remember facts about what I've experienced, but I struggle to recall the experiences themselves. I can't "mentally time travel" back to a moment to recall what it was like to be there or note new details about those recollections. I only retain whatever I notice at the time, and in a disconnected fashion as if I were remembering an incident in a book or movie.

I've read that people with similar deficiencies (such as SDAM) frequently also report aphantasia. I've often wondered if the ability to visualize might play a major role in encoding and recalling our experiences.

Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#239

Post by justsid »

zestyping wrote: post #229
_dain_ wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it's not a figure of speech, there's LITERALLY another framebuffer (or whatever you want to call it) in my mind in addition to the ones from left eye and right eye. I don't need to close my eyes to do see it (but it helps). I can draw to it, with some effort . Daydreams get painted on it when my mind drifts. It's the stage on which I experience memories. Most people are like this, with variation in the degree of…

Yes, I have another framebuffer too. It's interesting to me that it seems to be located a little bit above and behind my head. Does it feel to you like your framebuffer is physically located at any particular place? One interesting effect of psychedelics that I've noticed is that they can cause the framebuffer behind my head and the framebuffer in front of my head (i.e. on the insides of my eyelids) merge into one fr…

Reading this is crazy talk to me. I can recall what things look like, like I know what an elephant looked like or my first apartment. But I just know what it was like, I can’t project it anywhere in my brain. It’s also just a very high level knowledge, there is 0 detail whatsoever because there is “nothing”.

It’s incredibly fascinating to learn about nuances between humans.

Re: How to see bright, vivid images in your mind’s eye (2016)

#240

Post by jakefromstatecs »

HellDunkel wrote: post #233
voxl wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because I don't know how to draw. But I can program in my head and reproduce on a page.

Do you visually see the code in your mind? Do you remember it visually? Hoe does that even make sense?

I program in my head, and yes, I often do see the code in my head. In some sense, it's like a spatial experience, where each file is a different "room", and those rooms have contents of the code.

When I imagine programming something, I make mental plans of what code goes in specific rooms (Files, or directories), and what that code will roughly look like - At first a rough shape, of a class with particular methods, and over time that resolves into more and more detail such as what the methods will do and how they will interact with other parts.

My memory is really bad though, so if I try to come back to this a week later I will have forgotten the whole thing unless I make very detailed notes.

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