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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

#231

Post by snaeker58 »

I really hate these aphantasia questions. It feels too subjective.

I can visualize in a sense, but I would never talk of an image. In fact closing my eyes makes it harder for me to imagine anything.

I can recall my dream from last night for example, I can describe it quite well. If you now would ask me to in my mind modify for example the color of the floor, I couldn’t. Because in “dream reality” I very much remember it wasn’t.

I can daydream, I can imagine vividly. But the moment anyone tells me, “modify what you’re imagining like this”, it all falls apart.

Also what is interesting is the quality of detail between me describing the imaginary situation and reconstructing it in real life. A lot of aspects are lost under a haze when describing it, but when reconstructing it I can tell you if an aspect is right or wrong, not what it should be.

That’s of course my personal experience. Just I feel like Aphantasia is this buzzfeed like diagnosis illness, where you really have a lot of interpretation.

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

#232

Post by lll-o-lll »

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.

No! You can fight back! The thing I have realised about SDAM is that although you don’t get that emotional/movie/visual experience, you also remember what you remember.

My wife (and particularly my daughter), have vivid imaginations that can make memories up at times. If I’ve “fact-committed” a memory, it’s not wrong.

Granted, this only helps in the 0.1% of cases when you have done the fact memory committal and can thus have any argument at all. For the rest it’s “I don’t remember that, and your memory is unreliable, so…”. Ahh the comforting couch, I should just take my pillow there now ;-)

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

#233

Post by trifurcate »

jart wrote: post #87
e38383 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, like images it's just the concept of the sound. As I can identify images (also people or faces), I can identify sounds, but I can't imagine them. Instead of a picture of a forest and some cracking of wood, I just have these words in my head and not the real picture/sound. Same for every other sense.

How fast do you read? I can visualize just about anything I've ever seen. I can dream of new visual experiences I've never had. I can even rotate shapes in my head. But I dislike words and I read very slowly (only for English though, with programming I'm a speed reader of code). If you're the opposite of me, then I bet you're able to absorb intelligent high-quality information independent of experience very very quic…

I read very fast (English and code, and my native language), and I have a very vivid visual (as well as auditory) imagination. Wonder what I traded off in this setup.

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

#234

Post by rectang »

zie wrote: post #121
mysterydip wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say you think in words, does that mean like you see printed words like a page of text? Or just audible words?

Not the person you asked, but for me: "audible". i.e. my thoughts are an inner voice.

I don’t have aphantasia, but I do think in an audible stream of words.

This has led to an odd quirk in my experience as a software developer: I hate keywords or variable names that don’t have an obvious pronunciation, like “fn”. They interrupt the stream and make me stumble in a way that doesn’t seem to afflict people who appear to experience written words as grouped glyphs without hearing them.

(I’ve chosen to read “fn” as “effin” as a puerile expression of resentment.)

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

#235

Post by true_djf »

_dain_ wrote: post #218
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 necessa…

Thanks. I guess I was confused about the difference between remembering something vs seeing it in your mind.

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

#236

Post by solumunus »

gnz11 wrote: post #53
e38383 wrote: post #25

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 am also the same as the person in the article. Pure speculation on my part, but I am convinced that it’s the people who can fully visualize things that are the outliers and not the other way around.

How do you navigate via memory without some degree of mental visualisation? I’m convinced many aphantasia folk are just heavily overrating what other people are describing as visualisation, as if it’s some kind of minority report style interface that appears before you and is perceived by the eye. It’s simply being able to reconstruct physical entities as mental models. Again, without being able to do that it just seems impossible that you could navigate from memory, unless every destination is recorded in your mind as a series of “left, right, left, left, right at church” instructions that you’ve managed to memorise, but surely you’re not doing that? You must be about to walk through the steps of a journey in your mind? I struggle to believe people are getting through life without this ability, it seems so essential to me in all sorts of scenarios.

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

#237

Post by tgdude »

ossacip wrote: post #209

What about sexual fantasies? Can people with aphantasia imagine the other person in any manner? In the article, the writer claims she can’t even imagine her ex-boyfriend. I can imagine anyone, anywhere, without even closing my eyes. In many situations, I know I shouldn’t do it, but I’ve had this ability since early childhood. It has not made me a sex-craving maniac, though; I’m quite stable.

I cannot. It's easier to imagine the sensations of being with the person than it is to visualize the person themselves.

I can't visualize the faces of any of my exes but I can vividly "feel" the memory how we felt being next to each other, sometimes if I focus this starts to include smells and sounds as well but no visuals.

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

#238

Post by snaeker58 »

Jordan-117 wrote: post #216
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 overest…

I disagree. Asking someone to name shapes that resemble for example the Sydney Opera house seems to me just a test of creativity, not ability to “visualize” something in your head.

I don’t think we’ll ever get a test, because the entire concept of visualization and imagination is so unquantifiable and abstract. We’re all black boxes in a way to each other, with no real way of describing or showing each other how our version of this “visualization” or “image” or … looks or even feels.

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

#239

Post by eysgshsvsvsv »

isoprophlex wrote: post #196
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…

That sounds incredibly sad and frustrating. I can't imagine what it's like to suddenly lose that ability, being so dependent on it. Indeed many of my childhood memories are mostly sequences of pictures, the emotional content kind of "floats" on the imagery. It must be very frustrating, being forced to reinvent how you experience your inner life and memories. Edit, after reading some more comments: are you musically i…

Well maybe it's a good thing. You live in the present instead of an imaginary past. The past is gone no matter how much your mind tries to come up with images. The memories no longer have any existential significance apart from causing you trauma, generating false sense of pride, etc. Helps you to do and try new things instead of relying on a past you once lived and no longer exists.

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

#240

Post by snaeker58 »

The biggest problem with these questions is that they in my opinion don’t actually measure anything.

“Imagine a ball falling of the table.”

Asking questions of what was under the table or the color of the ball is useless (imo). Let me explain: Recall a dream of yours. What is out there in the dream world? Can you tell me what the retail tax is in that dream world? What house number the door of your dream world neighbor has? No? For me the answer is no. Because I only create answers to these questions if they are relevant to the dream or asked.

I forgot the study, but it claimed that people often retrospectively imagine detail based on the question asked. (Citation needed)

I like to believe that dreams and imagination share aspects. And one aspect I see in both of them is that, similarly to video games, any detail is kept to the necessary minimum.

It doesn’t matter what is under the table, it is about a ball falling off the table. Its color doesn’t matter, the color has no effect on the story.

If you retrospectively ask me those questions, you’re just testing if I’m going to make one up in the spot, make one up on the spot and tell myself I didn’t or not make one up on the spot.

I think of my imagination as an abstract realm I can control, that is limited by my ability to comprehend. It’s less vivid than a dream, but a dream gives me no control. Anything I imagine is a feeling, there is no incoming physical aspect.

And the reason why it’s so hard to measure or quantify is because it is best described as a feeling.

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